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Pukey Jocks: BBS Productions’ Drive, He Said (1971) and the Cultural Revolution in Sports

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2025

TRAVIS VOGAN
TRAVIS VOGAN*
Affiliation:
School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Department of American Studies, University of Iowa. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

This essay uses BBS Productions’ Drive, He Said (1971) to consider how New Hollywood cinema and a cluster of campus revolt films contributed to activist critiques of American sport during the Vietnam era. Drive, He Said conceptualized a “pukey jock,” an athlete who was ambivalent about sport's stereotypical embodiment of establishmentarian values. In doing so, it created a template for the emergence of a new kind of politicized athlete that emerged in the 1970s.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , First View , pp. 1 - 21
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with British Association for American Studies

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References

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2 See Crisis at Columbia: Report of Fact-Finding Commission on Columbia Disturbances (New York: Random House, 1968).

3 Robert Lipsyte, “Jocks vs. Pukes,” The Nation, 27 July 2011, at www.thenation.com/article/archive/jocks-vs-pukes.

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10 The film unsurprisingly represents the jock and college athlete as male. But it was made and released before the passage of Title IX, which mandated that federally funded educational institutions include women's sports. In this sense, its depiction of the male jock is consistent with the institutionalized discrimination that marked the broader sports landscape of its time.

11 Joseph Darda and Amira Rose Davis, “The Body Athletic,” American Quarterly, 75, 3 (2023), 443–68, 447.

12 Shortly after the publication of Drive, He Said Larner worked as a speech writer for Eugene McCarthy's antiwar campaign for the 1968 democratic presidential nomination and wrote a book about the experience. See Jeremy Larner, Nobody Knows: Reflections on the McCarthy Campaign of 1968 (New York: Macmillan, 1970).

13 See Jeremy Larner, Drive, He Said (New York: Bantam, 1964).

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