"While athletes' own navigation of family life has received some attention, how does this arrangement affect their partners who are tasked with an array of visible and invisible labor to make their family work? This is the focus of Steven M. Ortiz's The Sport Marriage. . . . The Sport Marriage opens up many new avenues to interrogate the interweaving of gender, work, and family in the world of professional sports." --Symbolic Interaction
”In this keenly observed, empathic, and insightful work, Steven Ortiz recounts the inner experience of wives married to both a man and his sports career. Ortiz observes the precise order in which wives sit on the bench in the stadium, how they respond to affair-seeking groupies, to more senior sports wives, news of a sudden cross-country trade, an intrusive mother-in-law, a lasting head-injury. He explores the complex art of managing a backstage role. This is the best book I know of on the sport marriage.”—Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
”In this insightful book, Steven Ortiz unveils the heretofore hidden realities of the lives of women who marry male pro athletes. Beneath the veneer of public glory and fortune the general public may assume makes for a perfect life, Ortiz reveals the stresses and strains of women’s emotional and managerial labor as 'marriage workers' in a high-pressure, career-dominated marriage. Through sensitive interviewing and deft observation, Ortiz shows both the oppressive costs of these women’s subordination within the sport marriage, and their creative, and even sometimes resistant, strategies to assert and meet their own and their children’s needs.”—Michael A. Messner, coeditor of No Slam Dunk: Gender, Sport, and the Unevenness of Social Change
