Journal of Sport & Social Issues
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Suburban Icons/Communist Pasts
C. L. Cole
Journal of Sport and Social Issues 2002 26: 231
DOI: 10.1177/0193723502263001
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JOURNAL OFSPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / August
THE NATION RECONSIDERED 2002
ON ISSUE
SUBURBAN ICONS/
COMMUNIST PASTS1
C.L. Cole
s the myth goes into every generation a slayer is born. This sea-
son, fans of the fictional Sunnydale s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a
Acampy narrative of good versus evil, were treated to a McDonald s
advertisement that traded on its (McDonald s) sponsorship of the first girls
All American High School (AAHS) Basketball Game. Notably, the inaugural
th
game was played as part of the 25th anniversary of the boys AAHS Game.
During a break from the  chosen one , but in yet another suburban space, a
young girl clutching a doll marvels at the good fortune that follows from her
older sister s basketball skills. Not only does big sister score a McDonald s-
sponsored trip to the Big Apple, but she has access to as many burgers as she
can eat and all because she plays basketball. Little sister, desiring the
same, tosses her doll aside and picks up the Mcbasketball. The year is 2002,
and the visual of girls trading in their dolls,now almost 40 years old, still sig-
nals the revolution. During the break from the sponsors, our stereotypical
all-American girl, Buffy, defeats fantastic demons with her stunning and
unmatched physical skills. Both figures of revolution the new extreme
sport figure, Buffy, and the girl basketball player are inextricably linked
to narratives of progress: Title IX, girl power, and American democracy.
The powerful girl figure is an American post-cold war icon. But her bodily
habitus is born out of an earlier performance of U.S. democracy over and
against an imagined, gender-deviant Soviet athlete.
Like Sunnydale, sport makes for good theater. But unlike the satirical
suburban narrative, sport makes claims to serious tales of good vs. evil.
Among the sporting demons are America s favorite sporting Other, the com-
munist athlete. Portrayals fo grossly unfair competitions that featured the
Other s gender hybrids and America s feminine icon, made for dramatic
cold-war stagings of American innocence and victimization, the negotiation
of American shame and pride, and the mobilization of extraordinary states
of indignation and national fervor. For America,  tank-shaped Soviet
Tamara Press, among others, embodied communist threats. Although Press
quit competing by the mid-1960s, she found her way (and continues to find
her way) into America s awkward reflections upon U.S. girls and women in
sport. But as the myth goes into every generation a slayer is born.
On June 27, 1970, CBS aired an optimistic, even celebratory news clip
ostensibly devoted to women s liberation s intervention into girls sports. Yet
CBS s narrative actually takes its cue from an unacknowledged dynamic: a
Journal of Sport & Social Issues, Volume 26, No. 3, August 2002, pp. 231-234
© 2002 Sage Publications
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232 JOURNAL OFSPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / August 2002
strong, yet unstable sense of American masculinity. That instability was
narratively defined by a tension between white masculinity and women s
liberation, civil rights, and black and Soviet accomplishments in sport. Its
magical resolution is attributed to America s white suburban girl who suc-
cessfully negotiates a national burden: the gender-deviant communist ath-
lete. Oddly, a high/low culture divide established through the mundaneness
of corn flakes and the worldliness of pâté initiates the patronizing tone that
governs much, but significantly not all, of the narrative. In fact, the main
shift in tone is racially motivated.
A slightly out of focus still image of a white man with USA on his chest going
over a hurdle is shown under a voice-over: For years the image of track has been
of graceful, slender, and, of course, swift men. Whenever women competed they
rarely seemed quite feminine. Under the continuing commentary appears an
image of Soviet athlete Tamara Press, in an open and aggressive stance.
Voiceover: But as our society goes through the swirl of women s liberation, so
does the world of sport. And the revolution is beginning in the grade schools, as
Heywood Halebourne reports fromCalifornia.
The viewer s perspective is adjusted by Halebourne who appears not at an ele-
mentary school, but in the private space of a suburban home. Halebourne: This
looks like one of these TV families which speak of dry cereal as if it were pâté de
foie. But the subject of conversation is not the crispness of the flakes, but the com-
petitive prospects of the family s 9-year-old candidate for stardom. Voiceover:
Little girls used to set off for school with no thought other than speculation as to
which attractive boy would dip one s pigtails in the inkwell. Now, for 9-year-old
Jill Boyd there is the bracing prospect of medals and applause for feats of track
and field. The girls to whomthe recess yard was a place for experimenting with
social patterns are now absorbed in physical patterns, as Debbie Kind spins
[image of girls in dresses spinning, exposing petticoats] through the orbit, light
years away from the pantomime tea parties of old. A couple of medium size Los
Angeles suburbs have turned out these well-organized, smartly uniformed
Ontario-Montclair Cheetahs. And even the attendant matrons are pliable to dis-
cipline as visions of a medal for the mantel dance in their heads.
Footage of socializing white, suburban track moms, who populate the stands is
juxtaposed with that of the white male coach s fatherly, disciplining command:
 Quiet Please! The white suburban girl runners listen attentively as he pro-
vides directives for their run. Voiceover: Girls and women s track and field are
the most explosively expansive of all sports. And spiked shoe demographers
guess that upwards of 50,000 are running and jumping today as against a bare
couple of Italians who huffed and puffed a decade ago, before Wilma Rudolph
made running seem like it was right up there with being a movie star. With a
Spartan disdain for discomfort . . . they bear with a chilly wind and even learn to
discuss it with the joie de vivre of a condemned man refusing a blindfold. . . .The
image moves from a wiry, shivering giggling 6-year-old, white girl to two teen-
age black girls. Voiceover: Of course, as one grows older the world gets wider, as
Coach Bill Peterson has discovered.
Coach Bill Peterson: Uh, the critical stage in this is, oh, about 14...due to the fact
that maybe they were a big star in the 12 to 13 division, uh, and then they go into
14 to 17 age group and they re overwhelmed by the competition. Uh, it s very crit-
ical at this stage. They either become very interested, or maybe get a little boy
crazy and stray off.
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THE NATION RECONSIDERED 233
Newscaster: Those who persist think to run in the steps of such idols as Chi
Cheng, three times an Olympic competitor, once an Olympic medal winner who
runs anything up to 440 yards, flat out or over hurdles. Last year, a coach s poll
shows her as the supergirl of track. And as one who has competed through ten
years of geometric growth she has an historian s viewpoint. Chi Cheng: I came
here in 1963 and, at that time was just a few clubs around. But 7 years after, now
there are so many clubs around now. It s unbelievable.
Voiceover: Vince Reel, Chi Cheng s coach, feels like the erstwhile image of the
track girl as a weight-lifting wallflower has completely faded. Vince Reel: I
think women s track in the United States got off to a bad start when they brought
Tamara Press and her sister over here. Most of the girls are now finding out that
you have to have a good build to compete in this sport. Well, I think it s becoming
a fad, actually. Little girls begin and get their friends interested because they
can go on trips and get medals. And, there are hundreds of them, these little
characters out there running around, warming up, and putting on track shoes,
measuring their steps, and they go clear down to age 5. The meet directors are
finally waking up in this country to the fact that women s events are more attrac-
tive, shall we say, than men s events.
Halebourne: Here at the Mount Sac Games near Pomona the cognoscenti gather
to see Chi Cheng win still another. And they sat back to watch the largest, jolliest,
healthiest bunch of girls[all white]since Louisa May Alcott s little women gave a
picnic. And the chances are that any girl here could give Jo, Meg, and Amy half a
lap and half a mile. Of the Cheetahs, Jill, who looked the Dresden figurine at the
breakfast table, was a wire to wire winner in the 660 for 9-year-olds and under,
and Debbie, the jungle gymdervish, was a small but sturdy third in a dash for
the same age group. Trampled under all these spikes is the notion that girl ath-
letes come from Frankenstein s laboratory stamped  second and that a
pre-teen s best friend is her doll. You don t have to look like your brother, or
Tamara Press for that matter [close up of Tamara s face] to play his game.
Halebourne: Legend has it, Diana the Huntress raced as lightly and swiftly as
the moon beams that lit her path. For a time, her successors seemed to erase their
grace with fierce awkwardness. Today s girl runners are a credit to the moonlit
body with a bow.
Our point of entry, as Halebourne suggests, is immediately recogniz-
able, but not simply because of the TV family.Three national myths are sum-
marily invoked: the American way of life defined by the suburbs, Tamara
Press, and the melting pot. The space that opens our suburban excursion is
consistent with that popularized in family sitcoms like Leave it to Beaver
and immediately conjures up ideals about home, family, and the consumer
lifestyle.But while Beaver never seemed affected by the 1950 s Cold War,the
1970s suburban girl is both the stakes and the site of that struggle.
In a striking moment of astonishing incoherence we are told that the
monstrous Tamara Press occupies a defining place in an American genera-
tion s gendered psyche. It is, precisely, the young, white, suburban girl who
like Buffy, is victimized and must slay the nightmarish figure. National
forces and the complex political conditions that shaped girls relationships
to female masculinity are erased as the psychic life of Tamara Press is
invoked to explain the girls profound alienation from what is represented
as  playing track. We are asked, on one hand, to applaud the suburban girls
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234 JOURNAL OFSPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / August 2002
exorcism of the demon that led them to believe that they could not control
or would lose control of their muscularity (and that this could be disatrous)
and to imagine their track pursuits as a significant accomplishment not just
for girls, but given the gender- deviant communist athlete, for the nation. On
the other, we are assured that track is simply an expressive vehicle for fun, a
temporary, trivial pursuit that will no longer satisfy suburban girls upon
arriving at adolescence. Suburban girls, unlike Tamara Press, who has,
along with the Soviet state, forsaken her biological destiny, will follow their
natural (feminine) development, and thus their supposedly more compel-
ling interests. The narrative is, in the end, less about women s liberation and
a struggle waged on the behalf of American girls than it is about one waged
against women s liberation and on the behalf of America s suburban
future a future in which the related structures, values, and behaviors, of
white, heteronormative masculinity are projected indefinitely.
To a great extent, the narrative s multicultural dimension a dimen-
sion that enacts racialized corporeal norms is instrumental in securing
suburbia s future. Black and white girls may occasionally run alongside one
another in CBS s commentary, but the track culture represented is hardly
integrated. Black girls, visibly older, more competitive, and apparently unaf-
fected by Tamara Press, are represented in striking contrast to their dimin-
utive counterparts. They are neither treated equivalently nor are they
equivalent concerns. Statements of admiration are reserved for Asian immi-
grant,Chi Cheng. CBS s elevation of Cheng as the competent star,as a figure
of racialized productivity, and as a sign of American sporting success gains
its meaning in relation to black women. The CBS clip airs just 2 years after
the infamous Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympic Games in which
Tommie Smith and John Carlos used sport to draw attention to the material
lives of African Americans. The resulting public critique of their so-called
inappropriate militarism and related racial tensions in track and field were
still very much a part of the American imagination. And, Cheng s elevation
is not separable from America s civil rights ideology that positioned Chinese
Americans as model minorities, specifically over and against African Ameri-
cans. In sum, anxieties around white, male masculinity, most clearly intro-
duced through the opening juxtaposition of the American effete male athlete
with communist female masculinity, is negotiated through a eugenic logic
that returns everyone to the proper place, an imagined future in which a
racialized, heteronormative, surburbia is preserved.
NOTE
1. This is part of a larger paper I presented at the  Means of Reproduction confer-
ence sponsored by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (April
2002). I want to thank Suvir Kaul, Director of IPRH, and Siobhan Somerville for
their insightful questions, comments, and suggestions. I especially thank Shan-
non Cate for drawing my attention to the McDonald s commercial and for her
lively sharing of ideas. I discuss the ideas in this  On Issue in detail in chapters 2
and 3 of my book (in progress) on embodied deviance and national identity.
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