Sports classes more than fun and games

In Washington, Congress is weighing in on steroids.

In Hollywood, the Farrelly brothers are glorifying the Boston
Red Sox.

And at UCLA, the classroom is among those places where sports
get dissected so deeply that it seems as though “Fever
Pitch” was filmed in a library.

Three upper division courses taught on campus in the psychology,
classics and world arts and cultures departments study athletics
““ each in its own unique way.

These classes may not pick your brain quite like Shakespeare or
vector calculus, but they will make you ponder things a little more
the next time you’re applying body paint for a football
game.

Psychology 137F, the Introduction of Sport Psychology, is billed
as a primer to a vast field that examines issues such as
leadership, team dynamics and fan behavior. On Tuesday, Professor
Tara Scanlan lectured about the psychological core of personality
traits and anxiety levels caused by competition. I felt as though I
was picking up on this intuitive topic fairly easily until the guy
sitting next to me asked 20 minutes into the lecture whether I was
even in the class. Perhaps he just saw my reporter’s notebook
full of doodles.

I realized I was out of place from the outset when Scanlan
repeatedly mentioned at the beginning of class that students were
supposed to sit with their groups. She seemed to be hitting home on
the team dynamic idea, a concept I don’t see much of when
studying predatory pricing in economics courses. Students cited
this interactive setting as one of the course’s biggest
perks.

“(Scanlan) did a good job of making it difficult like any
class where you have to attend,” said gymnast Christie
Tedmon, who took the course a year ago. “But at the same
time, she realized that people are taking the class because they
think it’s easy and engaging.”

With John Wooden slated as a guest lecture for the course,
it’s little surprise that 210 students are enrolled and the
wait list is full.

Sport psychology may be the most popular of the three athletics
courses, but World Arts and Cultures 120 seems like quite a
fan-friendly course as well. This sports culture class, which would
perhaps be more appropriately titled Thinking Twice About Things
You Never Thought Once About, doesn’t quite gain as much
attention since it’s part of a smaller department.

Professor Patrick Polk, who is scheduled to offer the class this
summer, comes across as a teacher who could spend all day
enthusiastically talking about his class, making sure every aspect
of sports gets attached to some broader aspect of society.

I had always thought sports culture to just be simple things,
like UCLA students cheering for the Bruins because of
self-identity. Yet Polk threw all sorts of interesting tidbits my
way, from football’s link to sexuality (think of a certain
football position) to how the movie “Fight Club”
reflects on prize fighting, immigration and the bottom rungs of
society.

“What is it to be a Kobe-hater? As a college athlete, are
you being used?” Polk asked, and I momentarily thought about
answering, but he was already moving on to other issues discussed
in his class.

Classics 165: Ancient Athletics, is the third of such courses
offered but it may not hold as much fun and games for the
contemporary sports fan. Its enrollment count for this quarter is
less than half-filled, suggesting either that classics majors
prefer Plato to Nike or that athletes gravitated toward sports
psychology instead.

Nevertheless, Professor Steven Lattimore has reeled in some
high-profile athletes in the past ““ baseball player Eric
Karros and high-jumper Amy Acuff. If his goal is to make the class
as popular as possible, I’d recommend he keep assigning term
papers about gladiators like he did two years ago.

“It’s very gripping in a kinky and creepy sort of
way,” Lattimore said of the subject. “The way
it’s cruel and erotic, but is thought to be good for
people.”

It certainly turned out to be good for some Hollywood movie
executives a few years back. And if Russell Crowe someday finds his
way into the classroom, you’d be hard-pressed to find a
student complaining.

E-mail Finley at afinley@media.ucla.edu if you like
touchdowns and gladiators, but aren’t good at analyzing
them.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *