The Role of Sports in the Formation of Personal Identities

It is appropriate to begin this brief introduction with an acknowledgement to Herbert Richardson of Edwin Mellen Press. The idea for the volume on ’Sport and Identity’ was Herbert’s, arising, as it did, during a pre-dinner conversation we had at the Film & History conference in Chicago in November 2008. I am sometimes wary about telling people that I am a professor within the relatively new academic domain of sport studies, as this usually leads to assumptions about a background in phsyiology (or a related scientific field) or, even when associated with the social sciences, pyschology. Given the subject matter of the conference that we were attending, such an assumption was not as likely as in other contexts, but I was nevertheless gratified by Herbert’s enthusiastic response to my declared professional interest in the social, cultural and historical study of sport. I cannot quite recall how the conversation developed, but do remember Herbert quickly putting forward the idea of a book on sport and identity; Herbert correctly recognising the topicality of identity as a theme within the social sciences and humanities and of sport as a subject matter to which considerations about identity are highly relevant