The Sporting Body: Jack Johnson and Helen Wills to Odell Beckham and Brittney Griner - Part 2

This is the second 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.

The growth of the NFL in mid-century America contributed to how the league created a public image based upon its masculine qualities of toughness and stoic resolve. Especially during the 1950s and 1960s, consumers derived their identity from the things they consumed, the games they attended, and the sports that they listened to on radio or watched on television. The NFL took off after the Colts and Giants squared off in "The Greatest Game Ever Player" in 1958, and it continued to expand in large part because of the marketing brilliance of NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle. Rozelle even won the "Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year" in 1963 for crying out loud (I'm sure Sepp Blatter wanted that recognition, so instead he made just made his own movie).

In Jeffrey Montez's Discipline and Indulgence, he mentioned, “Football broadcasting opens up a safe and unquestionably heterosexual public space for the scopophilic pleasure of looking at football heroes whose masculinity is heavily fortified.” The NFL very consciously branded the league as a social institution that embodies raw emotion and manhood, and as a sport that glamorizes acts of controlled savagery within the game,. Therefore, consumers could identify with a masculine self-conception through their interaction with football. Male football fans implicitly took on the characteristics of the players and coaches that they followed on the field because of their desire to become associated with the heroic imagery of the game. Men internalized the actions they saw on Sundays and externally protracted them onto mass society as tangible evidence of their masculinity.

Travis Vogan added in Keepers of the Flame: NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media, “Big Game America [an NFL Film] suggests the NFL has always signified the same uniquely American qualities and that those characteristics reached full force during the 1960's.” By connecting the NFL with traditional American values, becoming a fan of the league was a performance of a gendered and nationalized citizenship, and inherent in that fandom was a devout acceptance of the striking masculinity of the game and the brutal physicality of players like Bears linebacker Dick Butkus, the "Secretary of Defense" Deacon Jones, and Packers legend Ray Nitschke. NFL Films consciously told a story that glorified their subject to compel the viewer to a conception of mythic athletic paradigms. Michael Oriard added in Brand NFL: Making and Selling America's Favorite Sport, “NFL Films has sustained a sense of mythic grandeur in decidedly anti-mythic times,” and these stories reproduced the sporting spectacle to create an athletic pageantry infused with a masculine narrative of success. 

The gladiatorial music played during NFL Films infused the players with a heroic sporting ethos.

Male sporting fans that watched live games or football documentaries were objectified through their subjugation to a narrowly contrived heteronormative, gendered identity of fandom. Montez said, “This [television] genre produced male sports fans as crucial objects of their technical narratives, but objects all the same.” Fans consumed sports through specifically delineated sporting spheres, but male sports fans closely followed an externally constructed media imagery that objectified their experience because it allowed them to continually reproduce their masculinity.

Vince Lombardi was the representative archetype for how masculine stoicism and order could act as the forces to counteract any uncertain masculine ideals in American society. As people in the U.S. began to face the countercultural and anti-establishment movements of the rebellious and often very cynical 1960s, especially during the latter part of the decade in response to the Vietnam War, Lombardi represented a stabilizing presence that men could turn to as an affirmation of their masculine authority. 

Lombardi was a coach that identified masculine forcefulness, violence, and discipline as the primary tools for success in the NFL in an almost Nietzschean “will to power.” Oriard reflected, “Lombardi football was a violent game, to be played violently without apology; it was rugged and old fashioned. He had no use for fancy formations and tricks on offense.” The style of football of Lombardi’s Packers, and the famous "Lombardi sweep play" that Green Bay ran to set up half-backs Paul Hornung and Jim Taylor for long runs, were representative of how he wanted his teams to force their will on their opponents and run right through them. His football philosophy demonstrated a societal thinking along masculine-defined lines, where whichever team had the manly “will to victory” would come out victorious.

Vince Lombardi's famous power sweep play.

In his article "On Miles Davis, Vince Lombardi, and the Crisis of Masculinity in Mid-Century America," Gerald Early said, “Lombardi represented a male desire for dominance in a democratic framework, largely centered on white ethnic, blue-collar virtues of masculinity as strength, stoicism, and loyalty: a deliberate reinscription of the democratic male heroism of WWII.” Lombardi was representative of a masculine urge to impose male order and authority upon those around them. Early showed that by Lombardi wanting his players to be the physical manifestation of soldiers in war, football acted as a testing ground for their masculinity, the athletic equivalent of violent warfare.

Early added, that Lombardi’s "worship of authority, order, and the soil of tradition had the seeds of a fascist urge.” Lombardi’s authoritarian leadership style, much like a military commander, conscripted his players to a narrowly defined manhood. He restricted the different ways that his men could define their self-identity by making it seem as though manhood could only come about through the enforcement of one’s will onto others. His Packers won 5 NFL Championships (1961-1962, 1965-1967), including the league's first two Super Bowls against the Chiefs and Raiders respectively, behind his mantra of toughness and domination of an opposing force.

Vince Lombardi's authoritarian nature defined his tough coaching style.

The monolithic representation of masculinity in the Lombardi 60's was challenged in the early 1970s, when the introduction of Title IX broke down the unequal access to sports for men and women. Despite having some long-term unintended consequences (programs like Towson soccer and Delaware track and field have been cut by schools in part because of the need for proportional representation in athletics between men and women), Title IX initially facilitated a more democratized female representation in athletic competitions. Much like how white men in 1974 may have seen Hank Aaron passing Babe Ruth as the baseball home run king as a form of racial displacement, some men felt that female sporting involvement was a remnant of gender displacement. As women were given a larger sense of possibility within the sporting domain, their more sprawling inclusion into athletics at the collegiate and professional level was depicted as a direct challenge to masculine sporting control. Bille Jean King playing and beating Bobby Riggs in the famous "Battle of the Sexes" tennis match in 1973, Janet Guthrie racing in both the Dayton 500 and the Indianapolis 500 in 1977, and Lusia Harris being drafted in 1977 by the New Orleans Jazz challenged traditional assumptions of gendered athletic spheres and posed a threat to a man's sense of self.

Unlike in the 1920s, when women were readily excluded from masculine sporting arenas, Title IX forced men to find new, deft ways beyond mere exclusionary practices if they wanted to continue to subvert female empowerment and reproduce their masculinity through sports. Therefore, sporting discourse created a narrative where unlike the male gender, which could be safely assumed, women often compromised their gender and masculinized their self-identity through steroid use to achieve success. Susan Cahn said, “There is a charge that women athletes must ‘sacrifice their sex’ to succeed in high-level competition. Strength, skill, and victory remain firmly wedded to masculinity.” The institutional resistance to female athleticism gave credence to the belief that sporting success was confined to masculine characteristics, and that the bastardization of the female form was the only way for women to reach athletic stardom. 

Cahn added, “The fear of lesbianism operates to police women’s behavior within the world of sport.” Female athletes had their sexuality, and their bodies, regulated in order to ensure that they embodied a male-prescribed femininity. In this way, athletic women would not disturb sexualized gender lines and would uphold a differentiated gendered order between themselves and men.

Moreover, to preserve sports as a male-dominated spectacle, men maintained control of female sporting resources and leadership opportunities to ensure that women did not exceed the strict confines of their new sporting freedom. An article in Sports Illustrated by Kenny Moore in 1988 proclaimed, “To bear Bob Kersee tell it, Jackie [Joyner-Kersee] has to be horsewhipped by her husband to run any distance. To hear Al Joyner tell it, Florence [Griffith Joyner] has to be reined in.” Sports discourse constructed an ideology in which Jackie and her sister-in-law Florence had to be regulated by the actions of males. Their success - Jackie winning Gold at the 1988 Seoul Olympics in the Heptathlon and Long Jump and Gold again in the Heptathlon in the 1992 games in Barcelona and Flo-Jo winning gold at the 1988 Soul Olympics in the 100m, 200m, and 4x100m relay and setting the World record in both individual events - was a product of male control of their bodies and the taming of their natural female instinctiveness.

Flo-Jo (left) and Jackie (right) often dealt with external figures trying to police their actions.

While social institutions created a changing edifice of masculinity, men used the athletic sphere to preserve their social position. However, although masculinity had a cross-racial basis as it attacked new forms of female sporting activity, differing racial conceptions of manhood still persisted through the 1970s and into the 1980s and 1990s. Masculinity was defined by its plurality, especially as it transposed itself along different racial lines, and black masculinity was forced to straddle a complex identity paradox between hyper-masculinity and effeminacy because of external stereotypes. 

While Denis Rodman was a flamboyant figure who dyed his hair and had tattoos all over his body, he was only allowed to transcend a gendered self-identity and still maintain his cultural popularity because he was steeped in masculine attributes. In her journal article "Who's Afraid of Shaq Attaq? Constructions of Black Masculinity and the NBA," Eva Boesenberg said, “Rodman’s transgression of gendered dress codes, I would argue, does not signify a critique of established gender roles, but a more general delight in the violation of rules." Rodman could wear a dress to a weeding and claim that he was bisexual and marry himself, and still be beloved by male fans because his behavior could be explained as part of his rebellious and non-conformist persona.

Dennis Rodman married himself to promote his book Bad As I Wanna Be.

Boesenberg added, "Such ego-tripping is rather firmly wedded to historical forms of outlaw masculinity.” Rodman’s individual self-hood was defined by his rebellious masculinity, and therefore, his feminine qualities were viewed as manifestations of what Bosenberg described as a performance of "outlaw masculinity." On the floor, Rodman, a back-to-back Defensive Player of the Year Award winner with the Pistons in 1990-1991, was as tough as nails, dominated the boards, and even kicked a cameraman in the groin for getting in his way. Rodman's off-court antics were classified as an extension of him "just being as bad as he wanted to be," but his on-court toughness allowed him to maintain his place within normative male conceptions of sports.

Dennis Rodman was suspended 11 games in 1997 for kicking cameraman Eugene Amos during a game in Minnesota.

Meanwhile, Shaquille O’Neal’s fun loving on and off the court behavior gave him a considerable following among white fans that saw him as an innocuous black giant. Eva Boesenberg said, “Shaq Attaq is strangely sexless… Shaq’s image responds to specific ways in which black masculinity is perceived as threatening.” Shaq represented a black athletic duality because while he was ostensibly hyper-masculine as a dominant and imposing big man (the man averaged 29.7 points and 13.6 rebounds per game in his MVP season in 1999-2000), his asexual and harmless nature allowed him to transcend white racial fears of blackness. Even on the floor, as he was dominating opposing teams during his Lakers years from 1996-2004, Shaq embraced the performative aspects of the game. 

Shaq discovering that his left-hand "is alive."

However, Shaq was only accepted as one of the game’s most marketable figures by corporate America because he seemed to not embrace the stereotypical images of black culture that were seen by the mainstream middle class as unacceptable forms of self-expressionism. Shaq was so goofy and playful that it gave him a space within mainstream culture.