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Drawing on interviews with football wives from the Canadian Football League (CFL), this article examines how these women define their personal identity through their talk about being married to a pro football player. Using the concept of courtesy identity and Anderson and Snow’s (1987) conceptualization of identity talk, this chapter explains the processes in which these women claim a courtesy identity of a football wife. I identify two strategies these women use to construct their identity: distancing from stereotypes and envisioning self as his teammate. I argue that women performed this verbal identity work in pursuit of legitimizing their courtesy identity of a football wife. They accomplish this by distancing self from a stereotypical, anticipated social identity of the football wife as a “gold digger” or naïve woman and then working up another socially positive and normative one that they are supportive women who have worked alongside their husband and are part of their career. I conclude by summarizing the findings and argue that by constructing themselves as devoted football wives, they uphold these idealized images of traditional masculinity and femininity in professional sports.

The purpose of this paper is to review the acquisition of the Mark H. McCormack Collection by the University of Massachusetts, McCormack's role in marketing history and the significance of the collection to researchers.

The study is based on an examination of selected documents in the collection and interviews with University of Massachusetts archivists.

The McCormack Collection contains eight million pages documenting the history of IMG, McCormack's groundbreaking marketing and management company. Most documents cover the period 1960‐2000. IMG, which began as a golf company, became a key player in the marriage of sport and television, as well as the commercialization and globalization of sport and celebrity culture. The University Archives staff plan to make the collection a dynamic multidisciplinary research tool. The collection will be valuable to students of marketing, sport and other forms of popular culture. The availability of archival resources affects what topics researchers pursue. The McCormack Collection will make it possible to investigate a wide range of new topics and personalities.

The paper was written before University of Massachusetts had fully developed its collection access policies or plans for digitizing the collection.

This paper alerts scholars to a major new research resource.

Extensive ethnographic research with wives of professional athletes revealed that in certain sport families, the mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationship is among the numerous unique marital and occupational stressors these wives confront in their everyday life. Many wives believe they must compete with their mothers-in-law for their husbands’ attention, love, and support. This chapter makes a case for their use of the intersecting and complementary processes of “control management” and emotion management, which involve a variety of interactional strategies, in maintaining these relationships. Although these self-management processes tend to further entrench the wives in the subordinate status to which they are relegated in this male-dominated occupational world, they learn to skillfully use these processes as they struggle to preserve their marriages, support their husbands’ careers, and maintain a well-defined sense of self.

Sport match-fixing has emerged as a complex global problem. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it critically reviews how match-fixing is typified as a policy problem. Second, it advances an analysis of the legal framework and regulatory system for sports betting as a causal source for “routinized” match-fixing.

This study extracts and synthesises (cross-national) materials from policies, media releases and scholarly works on the subject of match-fixing and sports betting. The analysis is framed by the contrasts between rational choice and sociological institutionalist approaches.

Match-fixing is typically attributed to: criminal organisations and illegal sports betting; vulnerable individuals; and failure of governance on the part of sports organisations. Each cause holds assumptions of utility-maximising actors and it is argued that due consideration be given to the fundamental risks inherent in legal sports betting regimes.

Match-fixing in sport is a recurrent social problem, transcending national boundaries and involving a wide range of actors and, sporting disciplines and levels of competition. Within such an environment, it may matter little how strong the incentive structures and education programmes are, when betting on human beings is both normatively and cognitively advanced as a value and institutionally permitted as a practice.

This paper argues that legal betting regimes paradoxically contribute to routinised match-fixing because: for betting customers there is no qualitative, ethical difference between legal and illegal operators; and legalisation serves to normalise and legitimate the view of athletes as objects for betting (like cards or dice).

This paper examines different means of associating image attributes in sport. The findings reveal that an attribute strongly associated with a specific sport can have almost no association with the sponsor, and vice-versa. Conversely, a low profile attribute can have a strong reference to the sponsor.

The main focus of the paper is an examination of the nature of sponsor commitment to a team, an event or a sport. Established notions of “sponsor commitment” typically involve the sponsor engaging in a transaction with a sponsored property. Through this process a sum of money is paid to property managers in return for which the sponsor expects to achieve a tangible outcome. The paper argues that this is a crude view of commitment, and highlights the relevance of a more collaborative and relational perspective of sponsor commitment. It begins with an examination of the relationship literature, highlighting the important role of commitment between collaborative partners, and concludes by exploring a range of implications for sponsorship managers embracing a broader view of commitment.