Recent scholarship on golf carts, home field advantage, sexual aggression and David Beckham.

Walking vs. Riding and Performance among Professional Golfers. Charles O. Dotson and Seppo E. Iso-Ahola. International Sports Journal. 7 (1) 2003.

Golfers Casey Martin and Ford Olinger have sued the PGA and the USGA seeking the right to ride golf carts during competition. In each case, the governing bodies have maintained that "walking is a fundamental aspect to competitive golf and allowing the use of a cart would provide an unfair advantage." The Senior PGA Tour allows the use of golf carts and therefore provides "a potential model for addressing the issues of cart riding and its influence on golfers' performance." The data indicate that "Walk-ride behavior among senior PGA touring professionals has no influence on tournament performance . . . [R]iding does not provide an advantage over walking among professional golfers. If anything, although trivial, the opposite may be true . . . In no case would we predict riders to perform better than walkers."

The Home Advantage Revisted: Winning and Crowd Support in an Era of National Publics. D. Randall Smith. Journal of Sport and Social Issues. 27 (4) 2003.

"Home teams win over 50% of sporting contests." In the past 20 years, the level of home advantage in the NBA, NHL and MLB has declined. "Distancing of players from fans via free agency and rapid salary escalation, coupled with marketing designed to create national publics, can produce declines in home advantage . . . [T]he social bases of home advantage have been eroded by economic forces and league marketing."

Sexual Aggression and Sports Participation. Dave Smith and Sally Stewart. Journal of Sport Behavior. 26 (4) 2003.

The study investigated the "sexually aggressive attitudes and behavior" among contact sport athletes, non-contact sport athletes and non-athletes at an English university. Two hundred eighty-two males completed several questionnaires. The results indicate that contrary to recent academic and media reports male "athletes do not have a greater propensity than non-athletes to commit sexual assault."

One David Beckham? Celebrity, Masculinity, and the Soccerati. Ellis Cashmore and Andrew Parker. Sociology of Sport Journal 20 (3) 2003.

David Beckham's "identity remains fluid and negotiable in accordance with the role and audience he seeks to address and the ends he seeks to achieve." Nevertheless, Beckham subverts "soccer's masculine conventions." His "inclusive popularity should be seen as a positive step in terms of the masculine norms which he clearly transcends and the subversive trends and behaviors he explicitly displays. " His identity "alongside his popular cultural appeal, has the potential to inform and impact upon a generation of young people both in terms of their sexual politics and the way in which they formulate their relational behavior."