The Physical and the Possible

Abstract

This article examines ‘the physical’ and ‘the possible’ as bound together in recent political engagements of and with professional athletes – for example, Rashard Mendenhall, Luke Scott, and members of the Phoenix Suns organization–who have recently become entangled with/in mainstream debates concerning the “war on terror” and Tea Party discourses. In so doing, it critically interrogates politics as consumer culture within the domain of sport. It concludes by outlining one potential ‘way forward’ for scholars of the active, moving, and mobile body to conceive of a politics of possibility in paroxysmal political times.