by Marjorie Garber
from Academic Instincts (Princeton University Press, 2001)
Excerpts:
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The apparent opposition of the terms “professional” and “amateur” is perhaps most familiar to us from the culture of sports, where until fairly recently “amateur” had a certain cachet and a certain association with the upper classes. The amateur was idealized as playing for “love”—love of the game, love of country, love of school. The professional, by contrast, played for advancement and for money.
In sport after sport, from football to boxing, the amateur/ professional distinction was once built in as part of the class structure of the sport. Amateurs were gentlemen; professionals were upstarts, class jumpers, and roughnecks. Aristocrats and gentry engaged in sporting events with the assistance of servants. Hunters had “gillies” or “beaters” to flush the game they shot, as well as gamekeepers to prevent poaching. Golfers were accompanied by “caddies,” paid attendants who carried their clubs.
Here are a few examples of how this divide has been negotiated:
Rugby associations at the end of the nineteenth century took steps to root out the “veiled professional,” by which was meant the working-class player. “The Rugby name, as its name implies, sprang from our public schools,” remarked one amateur rugby player and cricketer. “Why should we hand it over without a struggle to the hordes of working-men players who would quickly engulf all others?” Under pressure from amateurs, the sport split into two, with different rules and spirits: English Rugby Union, “the game of the public schools, the universities and the professions,” and Rugby League, “deeply embedded in its northern working-class communities,” and becoming “an important form of working-class self-expression.”
Grace Kelly’s father, John B. Kelly, was an outstanding oarsman who won an Olympic medal in 1920. But he was banned from the Henley regatta that same year because he was a bricklayer, not a gentleman. He was therefore not one who hoped to benefit financially from the regatta or competed for money was not an amateur—a definition that was ratified by a general meeting of rowing clubs in 1873. John Kelly, of course, earned a measure of revenge, since he made a fortune in the construction business and his daughter went on to become a princess. A road running along the Schuylkill River is now called “Kelly Drive.”
At the turn of the century tennis was a signature sport of wealth and leisure. Amateur tennis tournaments sponsored by organizations like the All-England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club date from 1877, when the first Wimbledon Championship was held. The U.S. National Lawn Tennis Association was founded in 1881, and Australian, French, and Canadian amateur associations all developed within the next decade. Professional tennis began in 1926, and by the late 1940s the leading amateur champions were turning pro. In point of fact, the best players, while playing as amateurs, were already making a living from the game, since lesser tournaments had begun to pay them to show up and attract the crowds. In December 1967 the British Lawn Tennis Association unilaterally abolished the distinction between professional and amateur. A few proudly “amateur” events continued, like the Davis Cup, and some players resisted turning pro in order to represent their countries in such events. But by 1997, after years in which top United States players declined to compete, the U.S. Tennis Association was offering $100,000 to those who would agree to join the team.
Popularized by the most celebrated “amateur” sports competition in the world, the Olympic Games, figure skating has become a major viewer draw, rivaling pro football for television ratings. It’s difficult even for competitors to keep the lines between professional and amateur straight. Olympic gold medalist Tara Lipinski appeared in a show called Skate, Rattle and Roll, and former world champion Michelle Kwan in the U.S. Pro Championship. Both made money for skating, but Lipinski is no longer allowed to compete in Olympic or national championship events, while Kwan is aiming for the 2002 Winter Olympics. As a sports reporter observed, “In the world of figure skating, it’s more correct to say Lipinski is more pro than Kwan, rather than to say Lipinski is a pro skater and Kwan is an amateur.” And skater Elvis Stojko’s coach said simply, “There doesn’t seem to be much of a difference between amateurs and pros these days You just about have to be a Philadelphia lawyer to understand it.”
The founder of the modern Olympic Games, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, insisted in 1894 that his international association develop the spirit of amateur sport throughout the world. New bylaws adopted in 1976, however, allowed athletes to receive compensation while retaining their amateur status. Permissible forms of compensation included personal sports equipment and clothing, travel money, hotel expenses, and payment for what was called “broken time”—that is, time that would otherwise have been spent earning a living.5 So a competitor can in fact work full-time at his or her sport, while retaining eligibility as an “amateur.” This is a good paradigm case of the “professional amateur.” It may be worth noting that the amateur nature of the original games was to a certain extent Coubertin’s fantasy. Athletes in ancient Greece received prizes for winning and substantial benefits from their home cities; they became full-time specialists, like their modern-day counterparts. The breakdown of the binary between amateur and professional was, that is to say, always (or even always already) present within the categories themselves.
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Unsurprisingly, nineteenth-century women accomplished in the arts were admired if they were amateurs, but the word professional carried with it the hint, and the taint, of immorality—just as pro today, in policeman’s slang, means “prostitute” (or, as we might translate it, “professional lover”).
The sequence offered by a dictionary of slang is symptomatic:
Pro. 1. A professional in any field, as distinct from an amateur, and mainly distinguished by superior and dependable performance. 2. A seasoned and dependable performer; expert; model of excellence (also old pro or real pro). 3. A prostitute. (As the dictionary speculates, the latter usage might come from “professional reinforced by prostitute, or vice versa.”23)
This doubleness—like the fact that in a number of languages “a public man” is a statesman while a “public woman” is a whore—tells us not only something about gender but also something about class, since it repeats, with some difference, the gentleman/amateur versus working-class/professional opposition we’ve seen in the history of sports.
It may be useful at this point to return to the specific terms of my topic, “The Amateur Professional and the Professional Amateur,” to explore how these confusing terms might be different, and what difference that difference might make. My title takes the rhetorical form of a chiasmus, but these two crossing terms may threaten to collapse into an identity. What is an amateur professional? And what is a professional amateur? How are they different from one another? And why should it matter?
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