Thomas P Oates
Biographic Data
| ID | 331818 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas P Oates |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas P |
| FAMILY NAME | Oates |
| SIGNATURE | OATES T P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Iowa |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5746-3247 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 103 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 20 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Coordinating security, managing crowds, and marketing social control
The 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup will be the first to be co-hosted by three countries, an expanded tournament featuring 48 national teams. Its organization is likely to incur diverse logistical, technological, political, and diplomatic challenges. This paper examines key issues, including coordinating security, managing crowds, and facilitating social control at football mega-events. It outlines contexts of World Cup hosting specific to the event an…
Death at the Wing (2021)
Season 1 of Death at the Wing launched in March 2021. This podcast is headed by Adam McKay, a former writer at Saturday Night Live who went on to direct several Will Ferrell vehicles. His more recent films—including The Big Short (2015), Vice (2018), and Don't Look Up (2021)—have turned toward politics, and this project reflects McKay's interest in linking spectacle and politics.The series connects several profiles of NBA players or prospects who…
Antagonistic Sports Fandom
This essay explains the role of sports media entertainment in habituating audiences to a logic of conservative populism, which connects justifications for racialized and gendered violence with a sense of anxiety and humiliation. The essay develops the concept of antagonistic sports fandom, a mode of engagement in which verbal duels become the dominant way that fans and media figures engage with sports. It argues that one of the crucial roles of a…
This Means More
Liverpool’s elite soccer clubs are at once carefully managed global brands and local institutions infused with community values. As billion-dollar companies, Liverpool FC and Everton FC deploy a tactic we call “branded solidarity”: leveraging the historical enactment of leftist politics in the city to appeal to a broader, global audience through value-laden marketing campaigns that frame the clubs as authentic representations of working-class sol…
Sport Is Argument
This article analyzes what we term the 'televised sport debate format' exemplified in shows such as Pardon the Interruption and First Take. This design borrows from established formats in political television such as Firing Line, Crossfire, and Hannity and Colmes, and is characterized by mostly male hosts debating a range of salient events, often with an animated, argumentative tone. This article identifies the convergence of factors influencing …
Where I’m From”
This article examines the articulation of the Black ghetto to authenticity through the involvement of hip hop star Jay-Z in two highly publicized basketball-related ventures during 2003. During that year, Jay-Z organized a team for the Entertainer’s Basketball Classic (EBC) in Harlem’s Rucker Park and joined a team of investors aiming to move the New Jersey Nets to a new arena in Brooklyn. Informed by cultural studies scholarship, the paper expla…
Shifting formations
In the past several decades, the NFL’s brand of gridiron football has come to utterly dominate live television in the United States. The game’s violent, deliberate spectacle features only 11 minute
Family Splatters
Although many scholars argue that zombie narratives position the apocalypse as a new way to imagine social relations, recent cinematic and televisual examples of the genre feature the resiliency of the heteronormative nuclear family as the central formation from which a new social world is to spring. By analyzing 21st-century zombie narratives that have been among the most financially successful (e.g., Zombieland; AMC’s The Walking Dead) or innov…
The Crash Reel
Book Review| April 01 2016 The Crash Reel The Crash Reel, (2013). Dir. Lucy Walker. HBO Documentary Films. 108 mins. Thomas P. Oates Thomas P. Oates University of Iowa Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Sport History (2016) 43 (1): 100–101. https://doi.org/10.5406/jsporthistory.43.1.100 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Thomas P. Oates; The Crash Re…
Race, Economics, and the Shifting Politics of Sport Media
In the past several decades, a new narrative framework for American football in the United States has been offered to mainstream consumers. In a number of entertainments, notably fantasy football, fans are invited to enjoy National Football League (NFL) games through the lens of cool, dispassionate analysis. This article traces how this framework entered mainstream media coverage of the NFL through the CBS pregame program The NFL Today, highlight…
Discipline and Indulgence
Failure Is Not an Option
With the growth of sport documentary, the biographical profile has become an increasingly prevalent form of meaning making around sport. This essay develops a critical approach to the genre by engaging two examples produced by ESPN Films that profile a failed National Football League (NFL) player: The Best There Never Was and The Marinovich Project. It engages Judith Halberstam’s concept of the “queer art of failure” and adapts it to racialized, …
The Sporting Paratext, Reception, and the Male Domain in CBS’s “One Shining Moment”
Since 1987 CBS has ended its television coverage of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament with “One Shining Moment,” a sentimental highlight package that reflects on and celebrates the event. In 2010, CBS commissioned the popular vocalist Jennifer Hudson to sing “One Shining Moment’s” featured song, which had previously only been performed by men—most notably the R&B crooner Luther Vandross. Hudson’s performance elicited a flood of derision from c…
Representing the Audience
In many ways, the Olympics offer anomalous examples of televised sport. In the United States at least, sports that typically receive scant attention can suddenly draw huge audiences when they are p
New Media and the Repackaging of NFL Fandom
This essay identifies an emerging form of pleasure offered to fans of elite football. I name this mode of engagement “vicarious management” and focus on its emergence in National Football League (NFL) related products of fantasy football, media coverage of the NFL draft, and the video game Madden NFL . Through an analysis of sports marketing literature and promotional materials provided for consumers by ESPN and EA Sports, the article posits that…
Jim Harding, "Canada's Deadly Secret" (Halifax
Left History features articles from a variety of theoretical approaches; these include feminist, marxist, and postmodernist deliberations on topics such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, culture, the state, labour, the environment, theory, and method
The Erotic Gaze in the NFL Draft
The National Football League (NFL) draft is an annual meeting where professional teams claim contract rights to college players. It has recently become a major media event, previewed extensively by scores of magazines, newspapers, and websites, and televised in its seventeen-hour entirety by ESPN. A critical reading of these discourses finds frequent expressions of desire for the bodies of draft prospects. The paper situates this homoerotic comme…
Sports Journalism as Moral and Ethical Discourse
This paper explores the marginalized practice of sportswriting to demonstrate the limited ways in which the question “who is a journalist?” has been answered within the profession. Following John Dewey and Raymond Williams, we offer an alternative view of democratic culture that values narrative as well as information. We also discuss how “New Journalists” (and other writers since), in their quest for fresh, sophisticated storytelling strategies,…
The mismeasure of masculinity
The athletic male body has long been idealized in western culture, and its dimensions are a key aspect of its iconic status. Oates and Durham examine the discourses of the athletic male body as it is presented in media discourses surrounding the NFL Draft. They focus specifically on the enumerative strategies used to define and delimit the racialized bodies of football draftees. Through a close textual analysis of publications that deal with the …
Critical Essays and Reviews
Sports Journalism as Moral and Ethical Discourse
This paper explores the marginalized practice of sportswriting to demonstrate the limited ways in which the question “who is a journalist?” has been answered within the profession. Following John Dewey and Raymond Williams, we offer an alternative view of democratic culture that values narrative as well as information. We also discuss how “New Journalists” (and other writers since), in their quest for fresh, sophisticated storytelling strategies,…
The mismeasure of masculinity
The athletic male body has long been idealized in western culture, and its dimensions are a key aspect of its iconic status. Oates and Durham examine the discourses of the athletic male body as it is presented in media discourses surrounding the NFL Draft. They focus specifically on the enumerative strategies used to define and delimit the racialized bodies of football draftees. Through a close textual analysis of publications that deal with the …
New Media and the Repackaging of NFL Fandom
This essay identifies an emerging form of pleasure offered to fans of elite football. I name this mode of engagement “vicarious management” and focus on its emergence in National Football League (NFL) related products of fantasy football, media coverage of the NFL draft, and the video game Madden NFL . Through an analysis of sports marketing literature and promotional materials provided for consumers by ESPN and EA Sports, the article posits that…
The Erotic Gaze in the NFL Draft
The National Football League (NFL) draft is an annual meeting where professional teams claim contract rights to college players. It has recently become a major media event, previewed extensively by scores of magazines, newspapers, and websites, and televised in its seventeen-hour entirety by ESPN. A critical reading of these discourses finds frequent expressions of desire for the bodies of draft prospects. The paper situates this homoerotic comme…
Sport Is Argument
This article analyzes what we term the 'televised sport debate format' exemplified in shows such as Pardon the Interruption and First Take. This design borrows from established formats in political television such as Firing Line, Crossfire, and Hannity and Colmes, and is characterized by mostly male hosts debating a range of salient events, often with an animated, argumentative tone. This article identifies the convergence of factors influencing …
Family Splatters
Although many scholars argue that zombie narratives position the apocalypse as a new way to imagine social relations, recent cinematic and televisual examples of the genre feature the resiliency of the heteronormative nuclear family as the central formation from which a new social world is to spring. By analyzing 21st-century zombie narratives that have been among the most financially successful (e.g., Zombieland; AMC’s The Walking Dead) or innov…
Failure Is Not an Option
With the growth of sport documentary, the biographical profile has become an increasingly prevalent form of meaning making around sport. This essay develops a critical approach to the genre by engaging two examples produced by ESPN Films that profile a failed National Football League (NFL) player: The Best There Never Was and The Marinovich Project. It engages Judith Halberstam’s concept of the “queer art of failure” and adapts it to racialized, …
Antagonistic Sports Fandom
This essay explains the role of sports media entertainment in habituating audiences to a logic of conservative populism, which connects justifications for racialized and gendered violence with a sense of anxiety and humiliation. The essay develops the concept of antagonistic sports fandom, a mode of engagement in which verbal duels become the dominant way that fans and media figures engage with sports. It argues that one of the crucial roles of a…
Where I’m From”
This article examines the articulation of the Black ghetto to authenticity through the involvement of hip hop star Jay-Z in two highly publicized basketball-related ventures during 2003. During that year, Jay-Z organized a team for the Entertainer’s Basketball Classic (EBC) in Harlem’s Rucker Park and joined a team of investors aiming to move the New Jersey Nets to a new arena in Brooklyn. Informed by cultural studies scholarship, the paper expla…
Shifting formations
In the past several decades, the NFL’s brand of gridiron football has come to utterly dominate live television in the United States. The game’s violent, deliberate spectacle features only 11 minute
The Sporting Paratext, Reception, and the Male Domain in CBS’s “One Shining Moment”
Since 1987 CBS has ended its television coverage of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament with “One Shining Moment,” a sentimental highlight package that reflects on and celebrates the event. In 2010, CBS commissioned the popular vocalist Jennifer Hudson to sing “One Shining Moment’s” featured song, which had previously only been performed by men—most notably the R&B crooner Luther Vandross. Hudson’s performance elicited a flood of derision from c…
Representing the Audience
In many ways, the Olympics offer anomalous examples of televised sport. In the United States at least, sports that typically receive scant attention can suddenly draw huge audiences when they are p
Critical Essays and Reviews
The mismeasure of masculinity
The athletic male body has long been idealized in western culture, and its dimensions are a key aspect of its iconic status. Oates and Durham examine the discourses of the athletic male body as it is presented in media discourses surrounding the NFL Draft. They focus specifically on the enumerative strategies used to define and delimit the racialized bodies of football draftees. Through a close textual analysis of publications that deal with the …
The Erotic Gaze in the NFL Draft
The National Football League (NFL) draft is an annual meeting where professional teams claim contract rights to college players. It has recently become a major media event, previewed extensively by scores of magazines, newspapers, and websites, and televised in its seventeen-hour entirety by ESPN. A critical reading of these discourses finds frequent expressions of desire for the bodies of draft prospects. The paper situates this homoerotic comme…
Sports Journalism as Moral and Ethical Discourse
This paper explores the marginalized practice of sportswriting to demonstrate the limited ways in which the question “who is a journalist?” has been answered within the profession. Following John Dewey and Raymond Williams, we offer an alternative view of democratic culture that values narrative as well as information. We also discuss how “New Journalists” (and other writers since), in their quest for fresh, sophisticated storytelling strategies,…
Jim Harding, "Canada's Deadly Secret" (Halifax
Left History features articles from a variety of theoretical approaches; these include feminist, marxist, and postmodernist deliberations on topics such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, culture, the state, labour, the environment, theory, and method
New Media and the Repackaging of NFL Fandom
This essay identifies an emerging form of pleasure offered to fans of elite football. I name this mode of engagement “vicarious management” and focus on its emergence in National Football League (NFL) related products of fantasy football, media coverage of the NFL draft, and the video game Madden NFL . Through an analysis of sports marketing literature and promotional materials provided for consumers by ESPN and EA Sports, the article posits that…
Representing the Audience
In many ways, the Olympics offer anomalous examples of televised sport. In the United States at least, sports that typically receive scant attention can suddenly draw huge audiences when they are p
The Sporting Paratext, Reception, and the Male Domain in CBS’s “One Shining Moment”
Since 1987 CBS has ended its television coverage of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament with “One Shining Moment,” a sentimental highlight package that reflects on and celebrates the event. In 2010, CBS commissioned the popular vocalist Jennifer Hudson to sing “One Shining Moment’s” featured song, which had previously only been performed by men—most notably the R&B crooner Luther Vandross. Hudson’s performance elicited a flood of derision from c…
Failure Is Not an Option
With the growth of sport documentary, the biographical profile has become an increasingly prevalent form of meaning making around sport. This essay develops a critical approach to the genre by engaging two examples produced by ESPN Films that profile a failed National Football League (NFL) player: The Best There Never Was and The Marinovich Project. It engages Judith Halberstam’s concept of the “queer art of failure” and adapts it to racialized, …
Discipline and Indulgence
Shifting formations
In the past several decades, the NFL’s brand of gridiron football has come to utterly dominate live television in the United States. The game’s violent, deliberate spectacle features only 11 minute
Family Splatters
Although many scholars argue that zombie narratives position the apocalypse as a new way to imagine social relations, recent cinematic and televisual examples of the genre feature the resiliency of the heteronormative nuclear family as the central formation from which a new social world is to spring. By analyzing 21st-century zombie narratives that have been among the most financially successful (e.g., Zombieland; AMC’s The Walking Dead) or innov…
The Crash Reel
Book Review| April 01 2016 The Crash Reel The Crash Reel, (2013). Dir. Lucy Walker. HBO Documentary Films. 108 mins. Thomas P. Oates Thomas P. Oates University of Iowa Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Sport History (2016) 43 (1): 100–101. https://doi.org/10.5406/jsporthistory.43.1.100 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Thomas P. Oates; The Crash Re…
Race, Economics, and the Shifting Politics of Sport Media
In the past several decades, a new narrative framework for American football in the United States has been offered to mainstream consumers. In a number of entertainments, notably fantasy football, fans are invited to enjoy National Football League (NFL) games through the lens of cool, dispassionate analysis. This article traces how this framework entered mainstream media coverage of the NFL through the CBS pregame program The NFL Today, highlight…
Where I’m From”
This article examines the articulation of the Black ghetto to authenticity through the involvement of hip hop star Jay-Z in two highly publicized basketball-related ventures during 2003. During that year, Jay-Z organized a team for the Entertainer’s Basketball Classic (EBC) in Harlem’s Rucker Park and joined a team of investors aiming to move the New Jersey Nets to a new arena in Brooklyn. Informed by cultural studies scholarship, the paper expla…
Sport Is Argument
This article analyzes what we term the 'televised sport debate format' exemplified in shows such as Pardon the Interruption and First Take. This design borrows from established formats in political television such as Firing Line, Crossfire, and Hannity and Colmes, and is characterized by mostly male hosts debating a range of salient events, often with an animated, argumentative tone. This article identifies the convergence of factors influencing …
This Means More
Liverpool’s elite soccer clubs are at once carefully managed global brands and local institutions infused with community values. As billion-dollar companies, Liverpool FC and Everton FC deploy a tactic we call “branded solidarity”: leveraging the historical enactment of leftist politics in the city to appeal to a broader, global audience through value-laden marketing campaigns that frame the clubs as authentic representations of working-class sol…
Antagonistic Sports Fandom
This essay explains the role of sports media entertainment in habituating audiences to a logic of conservative populism, which connects justifications for racialized and gendered violence with a sense of anxiety and humiliation. The essay develops the concept of antagonistic sports fandom, a mode of engagement in which verbal duels become the dominant way that fans and media figures engage with sports. It argues that one of the crucial roles of a…
Death at the Wing (2021)
Season 1 of Death at the Wing launched in March 2021. This podcast is headed by Adam McKay, a former writer at Saturday Night Live who went on to direct several Will Ferrell vehicles. His more recent films—including The Big Short (2015), Vice (2018), and Don't Look Up (2021)—have turned toward politics, and this project reflects McKay's interest in linking spectacle and politics.The series connects several profiles of NBA players or prospects who…
Coordinating security, managing crowds, and marketing social control
The 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup will be the first to be co-hosted by three countries, an expanded tournament featuring 48 national teams. Its organization is likely to incur diverse logistical, technological, political, and diplomatic challenges. This paper examines key issues, including coordinating security, managing crowds, and facilitating social control at football mega-events. It outlines contexts of World Cup hosting specific to the event an…
Sports, Gender, and Society (17 works) · Political science (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Media studies (12 works) · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · Advertising (9 works) · Art (7 works)