Born in Cardiff, the son of a docks fitter and dressmaker, John Bale sadly passed away very recently at the age of 83. An early career as a school-teacher was followed by a move into higher education, and to becoming a Lecturer in Geographical Education at Keele University, to which he stayed loyal for his entire career. He was an enthusiastic and inspiring individual, a geographer and interdisciplinary scholar of true originality and great magnanimity.
His passion was sport, being himself a high-standard athlete, and he forged a highly distinctive stance on the geography of sports – or sports geography – that was wide-ranging and innovative on many counts and with implications far beyond the specific focus of sports geography. Indeed, his work spoke to embodied, performative dimensions of largely ‘pre-cognitive’ human-being long before that was a big theoretical attraction in the discipline; it engaged debates about the spatial organisation of spectacles, events and ‘disciplining’ regimes, as well as about many more empirical subjects such as sports stadia/events and the contestation of urban social space; and it addressed many different sports – football, cricket, running, and more – played and spectated in many different worldly contexts, in which regard John was also prescient in contrasting colonial visions/practices regarding the sporting body with the rather different ‘body-cultures’ indigenous to peoples and places beyond Europe and the West.
It might be argued that, for whatever precise reasons, sports has never attained the profile and credibility of many other popular-cultural activities – music perhaps – for geographers and other social-cultural scholars (notwithstanding its massive significance, in terms of consumption and participation, globally). As such, while John’s work definitely has been appreciated in interdisciplinary sports studies, as well as amongst those who call themselves sports geographers, there is arguably a treasure-trove of brilliant work in his published back catalogue from which so much more could valuably be learned by today’s social, cultural and urban geographers.
Christopher Philo
Read an extended tribute to John (via the Guardian)