Tiger Woods’ impact on golf.
Place your order now for a similar assignment and have exceptional work written by our team of experts, At affordable rates
For This or a Similar Paper Click To Order Now
For this essay you might want to choose a topic of Tiger Woods’ impact on golf. How it once was considered an elitist sport that has now become a game everyone can play. The impact he had on race in the sport. Remember that when anything becomes popular, it is a sign that is worthy of investigation. Remember too that signs are overdetermined—there are multiple, plausible ways to interpret them. Signs reflect both the values and anxieties of a society. When writing about sports, the non-critical tend to focus only on the ‘values’, often in glowing terms that, while there may be some truth to them—teamwork, effort, achievement, and so on—really do not add to the conversation about why sport has such a ubiquitous presence in U.S. culture and instead tend to parrot learned cultural mythologies or value systems. These myths/value systems/big-stories-we-tell-about-who-and-what-we-are simultaneously bind us together in a collective agreement about social identity, but also can blind us to cultural and institutional contradictions. These contradictions are often obscured by these Big Stories at the expense of the vulnerable. How many times have you heard that if you just believe in yourself, you can do anything? Think Nike’s famous slogan “Just Do It.” This is another common cultural refrain and an easy one to break down. I’d like to be on Mars and able to breathe its atmosphere, and I don’t want to have to take a spaceship to get there. Shall I believe? Okay, I am admittedly being hard and your dreams will come true is another one. Does this always happen in reality? Of course not. Our cultural myths may help us form a social identity, but they also have the habit of obscuring our social reality and that works just fine for the political, economic, and cultural elites—the ones for which the market will bear stunning, multi-billion-dollar results. With this in mind, for this assignment, choose a topic related to sport. You might focus on a particular personality or sports celebrity like Michael Jordan. Or you might focus on a current event like the Olympics, World Cup, or Wrestlemania (yes, it is ‘fixed’ and more theater than sport, but there is no denying its cultural significance or that the performers are elite athletes). You might focus on a sport more broadly like golf, or curling, or MMA. Take care if you choose this route that you have some sort of plausible, critical angle on it and do not merely write a history of the sport. You might focus on something more abstract like gender, or race, or class structures in sport. You have latitude to pursue your own interests in this assignment, but keep in mind what good cultural criticism asks you to do.
