A Performative Feel for the Game by Trygve B. Broch

Author:Trygve B. Broch
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030351298
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

B:

This is how we need to play. We must hold our ground. We must fight and battle (wage war/‘krige’)

B:

It is all about reaching that level (of playing) and to win the duels, to be willing to absorb the bangs [smellene] that are headed our way, and that we know are headed our way. We have to hustle hard.

A:

That it was going to be rough, that we knew. So are the women’s games between Norway and Hungary, and so it is, to an extreme degree, when the men are playing.

Notably, the media is “selling” sport entertainment and a little bit of extracurricular and social drama is to be expected. There might even be a perceived need to differentiate boy from the girl handball, both for spectators and sponsors. TV2 reconstitutes handball, when played by men, in a new condition, as slightly different than when played by women. Both women and men fight on the handball court, but men bodies are bigger and so is their fight. The actual space men bodies occupy on the court is larger than that of the smaller women bodies. This material reality shapes their gendered games. Men’s handball was dubbed a fight sport with a ball. Indeed, every now and then, given the meager variations in the staging of men and women’s handball, a few handball boys and some journalists have insisted on big gender differences. However, many men also laugh at these accusations. Former handballboy, long-time coach of the successful domestic-league women team Larvik and now coach of the men team Drammen, says he is totally ok with comparing men and women’s handball. Nevertheless, Gjekstad says the debate is at the moment dominated by speculating men claiming women’s handball is slow and less technically advanced. “Not even with a large dose of goodwill and attempts at objective evaluations can I possibly see that the differences are as big as many boys want them to be.” Gjekstad admits to TV2 that men are slightly faster and jump slightly higher, but also informs us that the husband and wife, handballboy and handballgirl Einar Riegelhuth Koren and Linn-Kristin Riegelhuth Koren, run the 20 meters at the exact same pace. Taking over as coach for the men team in Drammen, he says the men players “were not even close to accomplishing the technical drills that [the women team] Larvik did” (Bakkehaug, 2012). TV2’s own insider expert and former national women team player Randi Gusta ads that talking down the girls show signs of a “Stone-age mentality. I am really done with this debate about quality. Men have said the same thing for generations. Won nothing. Yawn” (Aarsæther, 2012). True or false, struggles over meaning in Norwegian sports are alive. And, the bright aura of the handballgirl is not easily dimmed.

Norwegian handball begs us to rethink the notion of sports as male preserves in which men and women athletes foremost learn and are evaluated in light of masculine and patriarchal values. Overall, the depictions of women and men are very similar.

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