The Erotic in Sports

The good news: Amherst professor Allen Guttman's The Erotic in Sports takes a look at a subject that lurks behind the sports industry but is seldom talked about--the eroticism inherent in athletics, both for spectators and among the participants. The bad news: Guttman is first and foremost an academic, and his approach to the topic is largely clinical and dispassionate, depriving the work of the passion that the subject cries out for. Still, he does manage to work himself into a bit of a lather in writing about the incomparable Soviet gymnast Ludmilla Tourischeva: "a bewitched anthropologist and an enthralled historian both described [Tourischeva] as a woman endowed with a disturbing sexual attractiveness . . . For me, as well, she remains an unsually vivid personification of Eros and sports."