Like others, I heard Dick Vitale last week refer to the inmates running the asylum. This was not the first time I had heard this and while it has most recently been directed at basketball and the string of free agents who have either explicitly or implicitly directed themselves towards particular teams, I have also heard it used to describe players in the NFL whose salaries have set the market and baseball players who have made contract demands on deadlines.
For me, this brings up a couple of issues. First, the phrasing of the “inmates running the asylum” takes me immediately to Erving Goffman’s book, Asylum. In his book of essays, he talks about mental hospitals and what it means to be in a “total institution” and “live an enclosed, formally administered round of life” with “like-situated individuals.” It brought me to think about whether the characteristics of Goffman’s total institution can be applied to the business of sport and the lives of the players.
Additionally, there are the race issues. In most American sport industries, the players—the workers—are minorities (usually, African American although baseball has the unique distinction of being more Latino than African American) and the owners are not. Given this power structure, to refer to the athletes as inmates and to be offended or disgusted that they are gaining some power and “running the asylum” connects too closely with the idea of a slave revolt.
My ideas around these two issues are forming slowly and I hope to express them here over my next few posts
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