The Sport Marriage

Women Who Make It Work

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Pub Date 24 Aug 2020 | Archive Date 14 Jul 2020

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Description

Survival and sacrifice with the ultimate team players

In The Sport Marriage, Steven M. Ortiz draws on studies he conducted over nearly three decades that focus on the marital realities confronted by women married to male professional athletes. These women, who are usually portrayed in unflattering and/or unrealistic terms, face enormous challenges in their attempts to establish and maintain functional marital and family lives while the husband routinely puts his career first.

Ortiz defines the traditional sport marriage as a career-dominated marriage, illustrating how it encourages women to contribute to their own subordination through adherence to an unwritten rulebook and a repertoire of self-management strategies. He explains how they make invaluable contributions to their husbands’ careers while adjusting to public life and trying to maintain family privacy, managing power and control issues, and coping with pervasive groupies, overinvolved mothers, a culture of infidelity, and husbands who prioritize team loyalty. He gives these historically silent women a voice, offering readers perceptive and sensitive insight into what it means to be a woman in the male-dominated world of professional sports.


Steven M. Ortiz is an associate professor of sociology at Oregon State University.

Survival and sacrifice with the ultimate team players

In The Sport Marriage, Steven M. Ortiz draws on studies he conducted over nearly three decades that focus on the marital realities confronted by...


Advance Praise

"In this keenly observed, empathic, and insightful work, Steven Ortiz recounts the inner experience of wives married to both a man and his sports career. Ortiz observes the precise order in which wives sit on the bench in the stadium, how they respond to affair-seeking groupies, to more senior sports wives, news of a sudden cross-country trade, an intrusive mother-in-law, a lasting head-injury. He explores the complex art of managing a backstage role. This is the best book I know of on the sport marriage."--Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

"In this insightful book, Steven Ortiz unveils the heretofore hidden realities of the lives of women who marry male pro athletes. Beneath the veneer of public glory and fortune the general public may assume makes for a perfect life, Ortiz reveals the stresses and strains of women’s emotional and managerial labor as 'marriage workers' in a high-pressure, career-dominated marriage. Through sensitive interviewing and deft observation, Ortiz shows both the oppressive costs of these women’s subordination within the sport marriage, and their creative, and even sometimes resistant, strategies to assert and meet their own and their children’s needs."--Michael A. Messner, coeditor of No Slam Dunk: Gender, Sport, and the Unevenness of Social Change

"In this keenly observed, empathic, and insightful work, Steven Ortiz recounts the inner experience of wives married to both a man and his sports career. Ortiz observes the precise order in which...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9780252085031
PRICE $24.95 (USD)
PAGES 288

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Featured Reviews

A really interesting topic, as a sports widow it was a fascinating insight into the wives of professional sports people. I loved hearing about the dynamics and expectations in the relationships.

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This book was based on the conclusions of a study conducted by the author on the role of marriage in the lives of professional athletes. It's an interesting look at how women are treated and gender is constructed and gender roles enforced in these relationships, as well as the hierarchies amongst the spouses themselves within leagues and organizations; it's essentially an academic tag on WAGS. Very interesting and entertaining.

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This was such an interesting book on a topic I had never really thought about before nor considered. Very interesting and good for him he did all this research for so long. A surprisingly feminist read that reveals how much these women sacrifice for their relationships - without sufficient credit.

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This is a very insightful look about sport professional's wives lives and their day to day lives and struggles. I never thought about the subject and it becomes clear that there's a whole world going behind sports stars. And not always fairly contemplated.
Thank you Netgalley for the chance to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

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I requested this from NetGalley some months ago because the premise of the book is interesting. The wives and girlfriends (WAGs) of professional athletes aren't unknown in entertainment. They're featured in reality shows, fiction shows, and it's an entire genre of kissing book. In all of these arenas, the focus is on the entertainment value of their lives.

In Sport Marriage, Ortiz takes a more anthropological approach to the reality of WAG life. He interviews two cohorts of spouses across the more marquee US sports (football and baseball) about what it's like to be married and raise a family with a professional athlete. While I wasn't surprised by what he found there, I have to say the weight of having it all laid out in his text made me appalled on behalf of many of the women. Reading what athlete wives actually experience did take a little of the shine off my favorite sport-genre romances.

Ortiz is an empathetic narrator of what he hears from his subjects. One aspect of a sport marriage I had not considered previously is how difficult the spouse's position is. WAGs are bound by almost arbitrary rules due to their partners's occupation, and yet, are unpaid and possibly underappreciated. Being urged to keep the peace at home in order not to upset any upcoming games? We can make pointed barbs about a partner being like another child, but in these marriages, this seems to be an accepted matter of course. He cannot make his own travel arrangements or take out the garbage because his head must always be in the game. Couldn't be me. (Also, being unsubtly pressured by other WAGs to buy a new outfit for every home game as a football wife? Hard. Pass.)

One might argue that these women knew what they were getting into, but Ortiz is very clear that the depth of the sacrifices made by the wives is not widely understood. Ortiz makes much of describing the sport marriage as a "two-person career". He absolutely gives WAGs their flowers for the amount of work that they do.

<b>She attends his games, makes appearances at various civic events (with or without her husband), participates in community fundraisers and philanthropic activities on behalf of him and his employer, runs important errands for him when he's traveling, manages the relocation process with little support or completely on her own, [...]
'I would describe it as being very supportive in the marriage, but that's what you do when you have a growing business,' Nora said. 'You support that business to grow and do what it takes.... I really believed that it was a team effort. He was the product and I was selling it.'</b>

Ortiz doesn't shy away from the infidelity that is assumed to figure into many, if not most, sport marriages. He discusses the way the organizational cultures not only encourages infidelity, but also cover for them. The ways WAGs make peace with this, or don't, is difficult to read.

Ortiz has done beautiful work here. The criticisms I have for the book are mild: I would have liked to have seen more exploration of the male side of the partnership and also would have liked to have learned more about partnerships where the woman is the athlete. However, it's clear why those would have made the study much more challenging. In the former case, access would almost certainly be a concern. In the latter, the differences in pay between professional athletes of both genders might make it difficult to sketch a cohesive story.

Despite my general positive impression of the book, I don't know to whom I would recommend it. It's conversational, yet academic. I don't know that I think it's a casual read. But if you are curious about the reality of being involved with a professional athlete, you'd be hard-pressed to do better than this.

I was provided with a complimentary copy of this book via NetGalley in order to facilitate this review.

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