The Sporting Body: Jack Johnson and Helen Wills to Odell Beckham and Brittney Griner - Part 1

This is the first part of a three part article on the evolution of masculinity, femininity, gender, and sexuality in sports.

Societal norms and behaviors are refracted through the sporting body, and athletics often act as a reflection of socially constructed representational politics. While sports can reproduce pre-existing gendered ideologies, external perceptions of the athletic body and its effect on gender specific self-consciousness also actively shapes discursive understandings of self-identity and transverse, or deepen, constructions of gendered athletic spheres. 

Sports act as a representative medium for the formation of individual manhood, and the valorization of the heroic ethos allows for the construction of a glorification of the masculine body. Throughout history, sporting discourse has explored the sexualized classification of sporting figures, and how the gendered body of male athletes negotiates within, or functions against, underlying social understandings and pre-conceived perceptions of masculinity and sexuality. By constructing separate athletic spheres, males have inherently marginalized the self-identity of women through their sexualized objectification and their dissociation from masculine-defined sporting glorification and social agency. 

Over time, individuals have gone from explicitly exploiting the sporting body in a systematic embrace of cultural manifestations of a gender specific self-identity to more implicitly policing any representations of a feminized sporting body that is not aligned with socially accepted heteronormative masculinity. While not beholden to a monolithic gendered classification, the culturally contrived and dictated formulation of the male sporting body has been used to codify masculinity and male dominance, while also being composed as a dichotomous construction to feminine sexualization and objectification.

During the early 1900s, as the country began to urbanize and technological innovations proliferated throughout a modernizing society (think Wright brothers and Henry Ford), men used sports as an emblematic re-affirmation and restoration of their dominancy over an ever-changing world. Ty Cobb’s rugged individualism and assertiveness acted as a conspicuous representation of the maintenance of American masculinity, despite external attempts to protract societal emasculation. In his journal article "The Most Popular Unpopular Man in Baseball," Steve Tripp said, “Fans needed fiery players like Cobb to test raw definitions of manhood; Cobb needed the active engagement of fans to goad him to further exploits of nerve and masculinity. Neither side was ever completely satisfied. Both sides recognized that manhood something needed to be continuously reestablished.”

Charles Leerhsen - author of Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty - discussing Cobb's complex sense of self.

As a player that on the field slid into bases with his cleats up and constantly got into heated exchanges with opposing pitchers, and off the field was notoriously disgruntled with those around him and had quite a morose personality to say the least, Cobb acted as the archetypical symbol of the persistency of masculine aggression and toxicity. Cobb fought in War World I and he treated baseball like a battlefield, as if it was a constant test of his internal will. Since sports function as a public spectacle, Cobb’s relentlessness and dominance on the baseball field (the guy won 12 batting titles in 13 years if you include the disputed one he won over Nap Lajole in 1910) acted as a perpetual pageant-like performance of his masculinity.

Ty Cobb "sliding into home plate," in line with the Chase Utley school of sliding.

However, an article in the old Chicago Eagle newspaper in 1918 said, "A star player is easiest to handle. Ty Cobb, fiery and aggressive though he is, has caused the umpires less trouble than almost any man that wears a big league uniform today.” The newspaper reflected a sporting discourse of how Cobb could paradoxically project his masculinity and primordial impulses within the sporting sphere, while still maintaining a semblance of his bodily self-discipline. Funny enough, three years later in September of 1921, Cobb actually got into a fight with umpire Billy Evans under the grandstand of a stadium after some in-game disagreements (and we thought Blake Griffin acted out of line punching Clippers equipment staffer Matias Testi).

Phil Deloria added in Indians in Unexpected Places, “Upper-crust American manhood, the games suggested, could survive the taming of the frontier, the threat of effeminating urbanism, and the challenges of reorganized family relationships and politically and economically active women." Individual males needed to embody virile athletic tropes to certify their dominance over a hierarchically gendered power structure. Men, like Cobb, embraced the physicality of sports to fortify their collective identity and to maintain their place in an ever-changing society during the Progressive Era.

Steven Riess added in the journal article "Race and Ethnicity in American Baseball: 1900-1919," “Fans often took their sons to the ballpark as a kind of ritual passage into manhood.” As Riess noted, sports acted as a sacred passage into adulthood, so consecrations of the fully formed male identity could only be awaken through masculine sporting activities. The symbolic sanctification of personal development was defined by masculine sporting characteristics, and assimilation into society became based on embodying normative masculine behaviors. Through a conceptualization of the sporting experience as a ritualistic passage into manhood, the male dominated ballpark not only affirmed individual masculinity, but also encompassed a sense of masculine self within a larger communal feeling of reassured male identity.

Beginning during the early 20^th century, sporting institutions and individuals quickly conformed to the culturally constructed concept of patriarchal “hegemonic masculinity,” which sociologist R.W. Connell purported as the dominancy of athletes based upon externally defined standards of physical manhood and aggressiveness. 

However, masculinity did not form in a gendered vacuum independent of wider social structures, as masculinity specifically cut across class and race as ethnic groups began to conjugate together during the turn of the century. Sports offered a platform for the formation of a collective male identity, but only if individuals prescribed to their specific “manly” sporting orientation. 

Deloria wrote about Native Americans, “Becoming manly meant, in many ways, becoming white. Indian players could beat white men, Pratt [founder of Carlisle Indian Industrial School] told his teams, not because they were Indian, but because they were becoming more like white people.” Deloria’s statement was that sporting discourse created a narrative where any Indian display of manliness was claimed as being a representation of whiteness. Indians being forced into assimilation was merely a manifestation of white domination to reassert a racialized masculinity. By denying a distinct Indian manhood, white men eliminated an independent Indian space for self-expressionism. Indians were dissociated from their own heritage, and their masculine identity was merely a conceptualization to reinforce white masculinity. Indians were part of the sporting community, but only based upon their orientation along “Americanized” ethnic standards.

Pop Warner (third from the right in the top row) coached at Carlisle from 1899-1903 and again from 1907-1914, and Jim Thorpe (third from the right in the seated row) was a two-time consensus All-American for the school.

Similarly, Jack Johnson’s conspicuous domination of the white male body threatened an inversion of the power relationship between the two races. If white men could not assert their masculinity within the ring, Johnson had to be symbolically disemboweled because by dating white women, he was removing the purity of what white men perceived to be as “their women,” or their sexualized objects. 

Johnson was arrested under the Mann Act in 1912 to prevent further subversion of white masculinity, and to reinforce white control of a gendered and racial social hierarchy. Jack London said before Johnson's fight against the "Great White Hope" James Jeffries in the "Fight of the Century" (although I would say that the first Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier bout in 1971 could contest that title), “It is the moment, the everlasting fantasizing, and Jack Johnson succumbs.” Unlike the masculine respectability that was placed upon Ty Cobb, who was the classical figure of racist white manhood, Johnson was a similar forceful and self-dictated figure. However, whites justified his place outside of a masculine-defined hierarchical society through an ideology that he lacked any self-control.

Jack Johnson may have had his way on the boxing canvas, but racial power hierarchies dominated outside of the ring. 

Sports allow individuals to project their own self-conceptions and anxieties onto the actions of others, so men quickly challenged newfound understandings of womanhood to re-affirm their own self-prescribed masculinity. During the early 1900s, there was widespread male unease as women began to embody masculine qualities in athletic activities, showcasing strength and quickness. Men described their manliness in opposition to womanliness, so as women embraced the bodily composition of men and eliminated their female sporting “otherness,” it challenged how men defined themselves. 

Males often maintained a gendered differentiation through separate athletic spheres by getting women educators to comply with female separatism. Susan Cahn said in her book Coming on-Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women's Sport, there was "a separate realm of play in which women could gain the traditional benefits of sport - health, fun, 'sportsmanship,' and a cooperative ethos - without fear of sexual harm or taint of masculinity.” By maintaining an emphasis on the different physical and social behavior of women, individual men were still able to hold onto their separated existence, and re-affirm their perception of internal superiority. Women were forced into playing certain seemingly more refined and “ladylike” sports to prevent the masculinization of the female body, creating a gendered separation. Women were not allowed to occupy the same space as their male counterparts.

Only upper class white women that could maintain their refinement and “womanliness” were allowed to participate in sports without being denigrated by the public, as Cahn said, “Calls for self-restrain, refinement, and efficiency celebrated a “womanliness” rooted in the privileged position of the lady.” Men could affirm their masculinity by restricting the sporting spheres that women occupied, and confined them to sports like equestrian, tennis, and golf. Any fears of female empowerment were subverted by a rationalization of their “womanliness” in sports. 

In her examination of women's basketball at Bennett College in North Carolina, Rita Liberti mentioned how sportswriter Ivora King reflected the pervasive belief amongst many men in the 1930's that, “in denying her femininity, the athletic woman threatened to corrupt her gendered and sexual identities, and in doing so, forfeited her existence as a real woman.” By creating a tangible tension between womanhood and athleticism, sports actively questioned women’s own gendered self-identity and sexuality, while acting as a vehicle to confirm the male identity.

Over time, in a society that glorified extravagance and social amusement during the 1920s (think Zelda Fitzgerald), wider cultural acceptance of leisure and entertainment for the masses allowed for a more public female sporting sphere. Women personified a “fit femininity” outside of Victorian ideals, and despite masculine attempts to create a monolithic female gendered ideology, women dramatized their social struggle for a new womanhood through the avenue of sports. However, since men cultivated their self-identity by orienting the self against contrasting social groups, women were still forced to accept more traditionally defined virtues of womanhood to not challenge notions of a hegemonic masculine agency. 

Helen Wills, a 19-time grand slam singles champion (only Margaret Court, Steffi Graf, and Serena Williams have more major titles), was accepted as a dominant force in women sports because she embodied an externally acceptable femininity that did not complicate gender specific conceptualizations of self-identity. Cahn reflected, "In her 1920s heyday, she [Helen Wills] offered a nonthreatening portrait of refined, well-bred, and charming womanhood that blended modern athleticism with aspects of conventional femininity.” Wills was given a sporting place as the ideal “American Girl,” rather than the more indomitable Molla Mallory (whose altercations with Suzanne Lenglen overshadowed her 7 US Open victories in 8 years), because men saw Wills’s femininity as conforming to traditional standards of womanhood. Willis's grace was often misconstrued as an act of implicitly accepting feminine fragility in a subservient gendered identity to men. Thus, only the non-radicalized, non-masculine fixated women were accepted in the context of wider sporting narratives.

Helen Wills was accepted by the male sporting community because of the narrative that she embraced her feminine, upper class "womanliness."