To respond to the charge “reflect on Gary Osmond's ideas and apply them to one specific smell and its relationship to sport,” I could entangle histories of Title IX, settler colonialism, or the marketing of a particular sport odor from my personal history: perhaps the smell of field hockey and lacrosse locker rooms; the seasonal fragrances of grass; bodies’ collective odor on the hot bus ride home, especially when we adolescents were all menstruating at the same time; the aroma of leather wrappings of my sticks; later, as a mother of athletes: scents of menthol-camphor of Biofreeze and Tiger Balm, vomit upon artificial turf, hair gel before a crucial match, or the particular stench of Nike running and basketball shoes. Instead, my essay regards “animalistic and irrational” aspects of smell, descriptors used when Osmond's groundbreaking essay cites Stephanie Weismann's seeming dismissal of older scholarship's interpretation of primary functions of smell.1 More precisely, when asked to participate in this forum, my experience of the smell of being charged by a grizzly bear while hiking, instantly resurfaced.It was 1979. On a rugged drive in a US government forest service truck, after coming to the end of the gravel road, my boyfriend Jim and I had taken to foot, hiking another few miles into the Yellowstone wilderness. We were living out of a tent that summer in Montana. Jim, a member of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study research team,2 had just returned from a twenty-one-day shift in Yellowstone National Park and Bob Marshall Wilderness remote backcountry where he tracked, trapped, and radio-monitored bears for a study on their habits and habitat. He had gotten word of a grizzly sighting in the area we drove to that day, so he needed to further investigate. We were twenty-three years old and felt invincible (although later, a research team member was killed by a grizzly in Lake Reid, Yukon).3It was strictly against policy, but when Jim had the idea to bring me along in the forest service vehicle, I was all in. He now advised me to wait in a small glen about ten feet in circumference while he would hike further alone to determine what was going on with the bear.Jim disappeared from my sight. All around me there was thick dark forest but the little opening where I stood streamed with rays of sunlight.I hadn't been standing in the light streams for long when I heard a sudden, thunderous “whoosh” and deep guttural “hurrh-rumph” sound. In an instant, from behind me, with no warning, a massive grizzly bear charged past me, its white-tipped fur brushing against my left side. The force knocked me to the ground; I was not afraid; it was too sudden for fear; I saw the bear already barreling away from me at a speed I never imagined possible.I was not hurt, just frozen. A grizzly bear had knocked me down! When I could again think, I guessed that my boyfriend was the galloping bear's target (a human can be badly injured or killed by the weight and speed alone of a grizzly) and that Jim was probably dead. Should I try to find him? Deciding against that, I found my way back to the truck. I did not know exactly how to drive a stick shift—I had only practiced once before—but got the vehicle started, figuring I would drive the precarious gravel trail back to Gardiner to get help. Suddenly, though, there was Jim, banging on the truck window, yelling. He hadn't seen the bear, returned to the clearing where he had left me, but I was gone so he too decided to return to the vehicle.I could write about how, aside from the birth of my children, being charged and brushed to the ground by a grizzly bear was one of the most significant events of my life. But for this essay's purposes, just as I did that day when Jim arrived at the truck, and continuing over the decades when I now and then tell of how a grizzly bear's massive form grazed my body, I first emphasize not the sound or feel of the bear (those descriptors came later as my narrative voice evolved), but the distinct scent of the bear—earthy? wild? thick? warm?—I have no vocabulary to describe the memory except to repeat as I did after my encounter “I was charged by a grizzly bear. I'll never forget the smell, I'll never forget the smell.” As Osmond notes, there are limits to language when smell is a primary source. Decades later, while I was staying in Alaska, a local informed me of their Tlingit lore—that my olfactory memory of the grizzly event signaled the profound timelessness of such an encounter.Osmond's treatise nicely details existing and future opportunities for historians to analyze the “consumption, representation, and meanings” of smell. Much of the scholarship that Osmond cites is rightly concerned with critiques of racialization and the limits of preserving and documenting historical aromas.4 All that Osmond explores with regard to smell substantiate sport as a human social construct that takes on dominant, and complexly, both affirmative and harmful ideologies such as sports’ historical links to agon/contest, masculinity, morality, fitness, normativity, peace and development, nationalistic betterment, and social justice functions. In line with these functions, for a century or more, sport historians have presumed or taken for granted historian Allen Guttmann and others’ theses that sport is an enlightenment/modern/industrial invention. Yet is there an origin/essence/nature/phenomenology from which cultural construction/selection/invention of sport begins? Can we remember sport as an originary universal? Perhaps this undertaking is beyond words, embedded in prehistoric, pre-Homo sapiens spaces, as is my inability to describe the bear-hiking experience's precise smell. Perhaps sport history's collaborations with cultural and physical anthropology, archaeology, and environmental humanities are helpful. If we take into consideration universalism and the materiality of sport, then neuroscience, paleo and genetic anthropology, primatology, and posthumanism lines of expertise can also be integral to what I label a “pentimento” of sport.In the context of painting, pentimento is defined as “a reappearance in a painting of an original drawn or painted element which was eventually painted over by the artist.”5 Inspired by my gripping memory of the grizzly's odor, I focus not on the limits or futures of archiving smell, nor on how smell/odor/scent/aroma can be unjustly invented/selected to disparage and discriminate against groups and individuals (as Osmond documents), but on reinvigorating the “pentimento” of sport. Sport has an original timeless nature that continues to have an aftermath, to reappear throughout human history in its infinite forms even though its meaning and performance are changed and painted over.In The Meaning of Human Existence (2014), the eminent biologist and entomologist Edward O. Wilson argues, “To grasp the present human condition it is necessary to add the biological evolution of a species and the circumstances that led to its prehistory. This task of understanding humanity is too important and too daunting to leave exclusively to the humanities.”6 He contends: “The major features of the biological origins of Homo sapiens are coming into focus, and this clarification raises the potential of a more fruitful contact between science and the humanities. The convergence between these two great branches of learning will matter hugely when enough people have thought its potential through. On the science side, genetics as well as the brain sciences, evolutionary biology, and paleontology will each be seen in a different light. Students will be taught prehistory as well as conventional history.”7 That is, when considering sport, we need to move beyond the traditional disciplines we have used to understand it.Theoretical concepts developed by classicist David Sansone, linguist Jane Ellen Harrison, philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour, performance theorist Richard Schechner, anthropologist Victor Turner, historian Johan Huizinga, literary theorists C. L. R. James, Raymond Williams, Brian Boyd, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and religion scholars Adam Seligman Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennett Simon (among others listed in the endnotes) have recognized the magnitude of recognizing human actions as “restored behavior,” as having a “polytemporal,” “universal,” nature as Wilson advocates. In his foundational text on cricket, C. L. R. James writes: We respond to physical action or vivid representation of it, dead or alive, because we are made that way. For unknown centuries of survival . . . it is not a gift of high civilization. . . . It is exactly the opposite . . . elemental physical action is native to us, a part of the process by which we have become and remain human. . . . Developing civilization can surround us with circumstances and conditions in which our original faculties are debased or refined, made more simple or more complicated. They may seem to disappear altogether. They remain part of our human endowment.8James's ideas and other canonical works that approach the pentimento of sport can be restudied and meaningfully furthered.9Based on the co-mingling of Wilson, James, and other scholars’ ideas, I propose that sport and its myriad smells are residue of our primal selves, made into symbolic ritual, as David Sansone first argued in Greek Athletics and the Genesis of Sport (1988). Sansone's thesis is: “Sport is the ritual sacrifice of physical energy.”10 That sport has an original nature that continues to have an aftermath (ritual sacrifice of human physical energy) throughout history is a foundational thought for building a perception of sport. Sport's original essence/materiality is not associated with contest, character, masculinity, nationalism, fitness, peace, abstinence, diplomacy, goodwill, and so forth. Humans creatively entangled these logics into an important part of human life, the ritual symbolic sacrifice of physical energy that took the form of sport more than ten thousand years ago. Sansone's argument is that the very real expenditure of early peoples’ energy—for food gathering, hunting, and day-to-day survival, including the interests of children or elders who waited for hunters or gatherers to return, those who prepared food, spectators of ritualistic endeavors that anthropologists believe were created to ensure success in procuring nourishment and well-being—was so ingrained in early human life that when this intense expenditure dissipated with the advent of agriculture, trading, the division of labor, and the development of societal institutions, this energy did not disappear as a human imperative. The ritual sacrifice of energy evolved into sport, an invented, creative, and ongoing element of most human societies.11Sansone presents primary literary, art, and archaeological evidence that this symbolic ritualization of energy that appears to us as sport was already established in ancient Greece. Sansone's evidence is from his expertise, Greek antiquity, but he provides other evidence across societies and time periods to claim that his thesis is applicable to sport in all locales and forms. Sansone understands antiquity as already modern, a point with which I agree. For instance, ancient authors like Pindar and Pausanias wondered about the origin of their Olympic games and contests, which they sensed had an archaic past. Sansone answers that ten to twenty thousand years ago when humans ceased to depend upon day-to-day survival, the rituals, motifs, the energy to stay alive that saturated early community were “turned to a different purpose,” sport.12 He explains: “The patterns of behavior that developed over a period of more than one hundred thousand years have tended to persist precisely because those were the patterns of behavior that enabled man to develop successfully. Those patterns could not be eradicated in the relatively brief span of time since man has ceased depending upon hunting. Or, rather, there was no need for them to be abandoned, for they could be turned to a different purpose. . . . What was originally a pragmatic action and what was originally a ritual activity, persisted and was redirected.”13 He also stresses, “an action that originated for one purpose should continue to be performed for an apparently different purpose.”14 Seems reasonable, if that “action” or practice was efficacious.Humans perhaps feel/sense and endow sport with importance because it is an innate part of being human, an enduring deposit of a vital early human condition. Aligned with Sansone, although writing in a different field, Raymond Williams's idea that “certain experiences, meaning and values which cannot be expressed or substantially verified in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of the residue—cultural as well as social—of some previous social and cultural institution or formation” is similarly applicable to studies of the pentimento of sport.15If sport is, at its original basis, a ritualized symbolic sacrifice of human physical energy, then at stake is an altering idea of what we perceive as sport. Sport is imperative to humans, yet not for reasons highlighted in popular and academic renderings. Although they do not consider sport, Seligman et al.’s work on sincerity and ritual addresses my point. From their scholarship, I can reason that sport cannot cure humanity; it cannot meld values and beliefs. Sport does place humans next to each other (in real time, virtually and/or imaginatively) just as art, religion, military, and communal activities do, but that is as close as humans get to one another.16 Further, sport need not be competitive or contest-based. In Sansone's thesis, “If sport is the ritual sacrifice of physical energy, it makes little difference whether I choose to engage personally in the ritual or . . . observe” it.17 He theorizes that sport is primarily a symbolic sacrifice, not a competition, “the competitive aspects of sport and of other forms of sacrifice are secondary and are not essential to the message that is communicated.”18 Thus the nature of sport is not inherently competitive or modern, not an outgrowth of religion, hunting, war, rationalism, or industrialist inventions (ideas that historians who take on sports origins most often rely upon). What zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz calls “a behavior pattern,” such as activities that look or seem like sport, can morph into something else.19 When a species or a society, Lorenz suggests, “deals with certain environmental conditions, acquires an entirely new function, that of communication. The primary function may still be performed, but it often recedes more and more into the background and may disappear completely.”20I know that I have gone beyond the forum's charge to reflect on one specific smell regarding sport and Osmond's valuable work. Instead, I made an ambitious call to sport historians to begin again with the history of sport, pointing to Sansone's tome as foundational to this kind of research. When we study/interpret sport, history, physical culture, and smell, we can notice the universality and timelessness of sport, perhaps of an epoch before human language. I viscerally remember the grizzly bear smell from my encounter. That olfactory memory has deep evolutionary roots before the domination of hominid sight and language.21 Sport history can revisit foundational works that may probe primordial elements of humanity such as associated with the beginnings of human enterprises that took the form of what we in the English language call sport. They may be faint outlines. But our histories can build upon earlier historical scholarship as well as team with experts in interdisciplinary sciences to take serious account of, reveal, search, create and/or simply wonder at sports’ pentimento.Humans may sense, think, and feel that sport is able to serve multifarious noble “sincere” purposes because the symbolic function of sport is innate to humankind. Yet sport at its core is not actually about all that we have attached to it. Sport cannot cure humanity, nor move society along linear positive transformations. Sport's pentimento is related to early humans’ expenditure of energy for survival. That pentimento was painted over/ritualized into sport and, plausibly, if we stretch this hypothesis to its limits, into all projects with which sport studies are concerned.The grizzly bear smell was and continues to be engraved in my mind, my memories when I trace that personal event. Manifestations of sport and physical culture, including past, current, digital-virtual, yet to come in human-machine and non-human animal futures, humans’ inner and mental worlds, and peripherals such as smells associated with sport, also have a first engraving, an original occurrence.
Synthia Sydnor (Thu,) studied this question.