Male professional athletes captivate fans and profoundly influence today’s society as part of the $1.3 trillion global sport industry. Although these athletes’ lives and careers are widely reported, scholarly knowledge about the women who support them—their wives—is extremely limited. Because these women’s voices have historically been stifled, their marriages are shockingly misunderstood. Based on findings from the first and only longitudinal study on the sport marriage, this book corrects the abundance of misinformation reported by all forms of media, dispels undeserved stereotypes, and addresses inaccurate assumptions about the heteronormative sport marriage. It demonstrates how, despite major changes in society and sport since the end of the last century, the fundamental nature of the heteronormative sport marriage has not changed. Sport wives remain isolated and subordinate, even while they make significant contributions to their husbands’ careers. Identifying the sport marriage as a career-dominated marriage, the book allows us into these women’s public and private lives, including their need to conform to unwritten rules and codes, adapt to abundant power and control issues, cope with groupies from all walks of life, and find ways to deal with their oft-justified fears about their husbands’ infidelity. The book shares intimate stories about, and provides rare and unflinching insight into, what it is like to be married to these highly visible men, what it means to be a woman in the male-dominated world of professional sports, and why women remain in a sport marriage at great cost to themselves.
Gregory Bateson gets a mobile phone