Bitter Rivals

Emily joins an adult women's hockey league. Through her clashes with opponents on the ice, she grapples with the high emotions of sports rivalries. 

Tell us your argument stories! 

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[00:00:00] When We Disagree is a show about arguments. How we have them, why we have them, and their impact on our relationships and ourselves. Context matters for arguments. The same joke told by the same person might land very differently in a comedy club than at a chemistry convention, than in a classroom, than in a church.

500 years ago. Ceremonial, forensic, and deliberative. The ceremonial concerns the present. Who are we as a community? The deliberative concerns the future. What should we do as a community? Forensic occasions concern the past. Who did what? What happened to us as a community? Forensic occasions are often but not exclusively legal.

A court case is a perfect example. Did someone commit a crime? And how should we as a community respond? But any kind of community might have a forensic occasion to [00:01:00] discuss behavioral norms and expectations. How they define justice, freedom, and liberty. A friend group might have a semi formal forensic meeting to confront a member of their group who has been lying or cheating.

A college has an honor board to assess student conduct. A company might launch an internal investigation. or have a hearing about an individual who has run afoul of corporate culture. A nation might look to its leaders to interpret what happened after a tragedy. Franklin Roosevelt, to give a famously stirring example, struck a forensic tone when he spoke the day after Pearl Harbor.

Yesterday, he said, December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy in the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. I'm Michael Lee, Professor of Communication and Director of the Civility Initiative at the College of Charleston.

Today's guest on When We Disagree is Emily Sautter. She is a Professor of Critical Rhetoric at the [00:02:00] University of Nebraska Omaha and she studies identity and sports fandom. Emily, tell us an argument story. Thanks so much for having me. So I like to tell this story about, um, so I'm from Minnesota and we're a big hockey state, right?

And I was a big fan. I always watched, but I never really understood why people got so heated, especially on the ice. I'm like, it's a game. I don't get it. And then I started playing hockey. I picked it up in my thirties. Um, we have a great organization here called the Women's Hockey Association of Minnesota or WHAM and so I started playing and I got on the ice and all of a sudden I found myself getting real heated.

You know, I'm running into people, banging people around. They get close to my goalie and I'm just like, my blood's up. I'm just like, Hey, fuck you. Right. Like, and I'm, That's not who I am as a person. Like I'm a pretty mild mannered, Minnesota gal, right? We're not raised to be too, too, uh, upset about stuff, but, and it really [00:03:00] crystallized for me this moment of like, wow, sports rivalries are this really interesting moment of disagreement, um, that I hadn't really considered before, but it's something that I've been.

Paying a lot more attention to lately. Um, and how personal it is to our identities. So, uh, thinking about how rivalries in sports, right, are these sort of interesting disagreements that we get into on a personal level, but also, uh, sort of this cultural level. Um, and that. People engage in it from the moment their little kids were socialized into rivalries to, you know, on our deathbeds.

And some people get heated enough to kill for it. Uh, and that's a disagreement that I've been kind of watching develop over the last probably 10 years of my career. If I can characterize what I'm hearing about the kind of evolution of your understanding of rivalry. especially the physicality of rivalry.

You grow up in a hockey obsessed state, as far as I remember, [00:04:00] Minnesotans like to say it's a state of hockey. And so, then, but with a, with kind of a healthy suspicion of why do people really care so much about what's going on on the ice? Like, why is there such a big rivalry about this thing that's a game?

And then you start to make a career. In other words, you're getting a PhD, you're writing a dissertation about fandom, still with a critical eye towards, this is obviously a big deal to people that I don't really personally get on a fundamental level. Then you start playing hockey. And as you said, your blood gets up and you're going to check some folks and then you start getting it experientially.

Do I have that all right? Yeah, that's correct. And so is the disagreement, it's not just a disagreement that you're studying in the sense of I'm a huge Georgia football fan and so my dislike for the Florida Gators. Just really has no limit, right? Just none whatsoever. Yeah. Um, that is obviously a [00:05:00] disagreement about whether they're evil or not with me on one side of them on the other.

Yeah. But there is also a disagreement, if I'm hearing you correctly, within yourself about how you should relate to rivalry and you kind of surprising yourself by becoming a kind of fierce competitor on the ice when you've spent your life not doing that and being told culturally that you shouldn't be that.

Yeah. Yeah. This was a, it was an interesting moment because, um, you know, I've been a fan of sports. Uh, Minnesota has a lot of professional sports teams. Um, And you know, but we don't have a ton of rivals and a lot of our rivals don't acknowledge us, right? So the Minnesota Vikings see the Packers as our rivals.

The Packers do not see the Vikings as rivals, right? They're fighting the Bears. And so, um, rivalries didn't make a lot of sense, you know? And I think particularly as a woman, socialized in the Midwest. Disagreements are not things we get into, especially these big bodily displays of aggression. Um, [00:06:00] but as I got into sports, it was like, this is a place where now I not only get it being a physically a part of that and understanding like what's going on when I see like fights break out.

Um, but I also am finding this as a space where in terms of my gender, I'm also allowed to be a bit more aggressive to engage in a bit of disagreement, right? That disagreement in the sports world. Um, and I think that, um, is a place where it is culturally acceptable to push back in a lot of ways, um, to be loud and proud about the teams that you support, to wear the gear, to paint your faces, to yell at other people, to heckle people.

Um, And that was, uh, sort of a, a bit of a lightning rod moment for me, um, where I started to sort of really become interested in how. Sports identities became these playful spaces for people to explore some different sides of their personalities. I'm struck as you talk because I'd never really considered sports as [00:07:00] disagreements in an explicit sense, obviously competitive, but there isn't a technical sense, I mean a disagreement between both You and your competitor about whether or not they should be allowed to score or get near your goalie soccer announcers in England are famous for this to talking about soccer as a conversation.

And if somebody is dribbling the ball through the midfield rather aggressively, they are pressing the argument, so to speak, or now they have entered the argument if they come back and score a goal and make it two to one instead of two to nil. In this case, though, I'm curious about as you're evolving. At a Midwesterner, as you're evolving gender and exploring aggression, exploring sports fandom, both professionally as a scholar, as well as a human, as a practitioner.

What made you want to start playing hockey? How old were you when you started playing hockey? So I started playing hockey when I was 31. What, what brought you to that decision? You know, I [00:08:00] actually, I just got my first job. I was out of grad school. I didn't know anybody in my new area. Uh, I didn't know a lot of people at my university and I was like, I need a hobby.

And my work is very sedentary. So I'd like a physical hobby. And I'd always been a hockey fan. I grew up. Going to my younger brother played a lot of hockey. I went to all of his tournaments and a lot of his games. And, um, you know, I was around when the Minnesota Wild were first created, right? We lost to the Dallas Stars.

Um, And so I was like, well, this seems an option. And this organization had a hockey one on one where they're literally like, here's how you put on the gear. Here is how you stop. And I really needed that to be like, how do I play? Um, and so it's just seemed sort of like a, a perfect opportunity to pick up something I'd love to try it in person.

And, uh, and people were there to sort of guide me along that path. Quickly. Did you take to being an aggressive. competitor on the ice and, and [00:09:00] as a follow up, how much cognitive dissonance, internal blowback did you have as you started to compete more aggressively? Yeah, it probably took me at least a year.

You know, the first year you're just trying not to fall over. Um, and a lot of the moves that happen on the ice are by accident. So if someone runs into me, it's not on purpose. They can't stop yet. Uh, but once you start to get a little bit better, um, It was surprising how quickly you kind of did get a little bit more aggressive.

Uh, and I had a, a lot of surprise dis dissonance is interesting. Um, because I didn't feel bad about it. I wasn't like, Oh no, I shouldn't do this. I was just like, wow, this is a facet of my personality. I'd never really seen come up before. I've, I've never been an overtly aggressive kind of person. I mean, I, I played some sports when I was in high school, but it was never that serious.

Like academics was always my focus. Um, and so it was just surprising for me. It is an expression of gender [00:10:00] identity and the way in which our culture can socialize young women to be more passive, to not be aggressive. Talk about the space, Women's Hockey League, Women's Hockey Team, and feeling aggressive, feeling a kind of natural blood boiling out there in a healthy way.

Do you feel liberated? Definitely. Yeah. Um, I definitely felt like this was a place where I got to experience anger physically in a way that I hadn't really before. Um, and I'm not, again, like I've said before, like I sort of have shied away from a lot of conflict. I consider myself, I think more of a mediator, I think as an academic, one of my roles is to step back and think more critically than be like personally involved in conflict.

Right. Um, And so to get on the ice in this space that was not connected to my career, wasn't connected to who I was, like, sort of, as an academic, um, [00:11:00] it was liberating, but again, it also then peeped my academic curiosity. Why is this a space that is Why am I feeling this way in this space? Like what's going on here?

And how does this relate to broader questions of, of identity and sports fandom? This is kind of a pet theory of mine about academics, which is that many of us, and I'm very much an academic, many of us have chosen to get into this line of work. Maybe for reasons that we don't understand, but part of them are motivated by being able to be neutral observers, being able to be mediators, as you say, being able to look at a conflict and not have a stake in it and say, Well, what's really going on here, or what you really need to understand, or the history of this is, so on and so forth, and I don't mean that in a disparaging way, I do, I think that's really important work.

And also, it can allow us to step outside of conflict and be an avenue for conflict suppression and conflict [00:12:00] avoidance. And so sometimes when I have tried to engage academics in arguments about their research, I find them to be, Avoid it about that conflict, but not wanting necessarily to engage in it.

And so the question I have for you is, if you're kind of broadly agreeing with my, my stereotype, my characterization that some, some academics can be like this and not just academics, but many people, why was hockey then why was the ice such a healthy avenue for the expression of competition? of anger, of aggression, when your default career mode was more mediation?

I mean, that's an interesting question, right? Because it was a way of behaving and thinking that I'd never engaged in before. I mean, part of it is in sports, of course, you're socialized towards Disagreement. As you said, the fundamental disagreement is I think my team should score more goals than your team, right?

And so you start off in a place of disagreement. [00:13:00] Um, and, and as someone who is really interested in argumentation, persuasion, uh, in a lot of ways, I'm like, okay, here's a very different, uh, Way to go about it. It's not just words. It's also this physical behavior as well. Um, and again, like you're set up to start like, hey, we fundamentally disagree at the beginning.

Uh, and now instead of using words to argue it out, we're going to use our bodies to sort of make that argument. Um, and, and so I guess the question of why is the ice this place for getting out some of that behavior in a healthy way? in opposition to what I was doing at work is of course, that's what you're expected to do.

Like, can you imagine going to a conference and getting into a fistfight with someone? No, no, I cannot. No, thank God. I don't want to do that. Uh, but the ice and I have never been in a fistfight. I'm just going to put that out there. You know, it's a little pushing and shoving kind of thing. Good clarification.

But it's expected. That's the, that is the [00:14:00] The occasion yeah, it's the language of argument in this those spaces. Yeah, and it's not relationally risky Therefore because we all show up expecting to kind of duke it out so to speak on the ice Yeah, and not doing that. Nobody takes it personally, you know, a lot of us Um, you know, a lot of us end up playing on teams together, you know, throughout there are a lot of leagues in the Twin City.

So, you know, I might be a rival in, in one thing and then I'll go to a different game or a tournament and we're on the same team. Um, and so none of it's personal, you know, everybody's trying to win. Everybody's doing what they can and as long as you don't cross the line, right? There is, there's still a little bit of a line there.

Big question as we close. You study rivalry and identity as it relates to sports. And you also practice rivalry and competition in a sport. How does one [00:15:00] inform the other? How is your play informed by your teaching and your research? And how has your teaching and your research been informed by your play?

I think I think my teaching my research has been informed by my play and that I sort of get it now on a more visceral level on a physical level it. I lose some of that academic, um, objectivity because I'm like, Okay, I understand why fans get heated. I understand why players get physical in a way that I hadn't understood before.

And I think my academics inform my play in that. On a meta level, I'm starting to understand, like, why am I getting heated? Like, what is the point? How is it changing my behavior that I would, like, my normal off ice behavior? Um, so I get sort of a meta understanding from my academics and my play, but there's not a lot of thinking that happens on the ice.

You're busy. You got other stuff to do. [00:16:00] Emily, so much for being on When We Disagree. Thank you so much for having me. When We Disagree is recorded at the College of Charleston with creator and host Michael Lee. Recording and sound engineering by Jesse Kunz and Lance Laidlaw. Reach out to us at whenwedisagree at gmail.com.