Telling It All Podcast - Kyrie Irving/Isaiah Thomas Trade, Fantasy Football, MLB and NFL Predictions

Topics Include: The Kyrie Irving Trade Saga (0:30). The Trade From The Cavaliers Perspective (2:45). The Trade From The Celtics Perspective (8:45). The Top Of The Eastern Conference (17:00). Players To Target In Earlier Rounds Of Fantasy Football (20:40). Players To Look For In Later Rounds (25:00). Fantasy Football Strategies (28:15). The LA Dodgers Playoff Outlook (32:40). AFC Divisional Predictions (36:20). NFC Divisional Predictions (40:25).

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The Sporting Body: Jack Johnson and Helen Wills to Odell Beckham and Brittney Griner - Part 3

This is the third 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.

In the contemporary sporting world, gender specific identity concerns have constructed a hetero-normative social order. During interviews at the NFL Combine, Atlanta Falcons assistant coach Marquand Manuel asked Ohio State cornerback prospect Eli Apple in an interview, “Do you like men?” The fundamental perverseness of the inquiry was the underlying connotation that it took a specific type of “manhood” to make it to the top in “manly sports.” The Falcons were attempting to ensure Apple’s compliance to a self-prescribed league dictum of the specific internal male testosterone needed to compete at the highest level. The question also implied that the basis of male sports was an attachment to a very specific type of sporting sphere, detached from any remnants of effeminacy or perceptions of physical or sexual weakness. It confirmed a sporting standard of thinking based upon the culturally constructed concept of patriarchal “hegemonic masculinity.” 

Before NBA player Jason Collins came out as gay in 2013, he was recognized as one of the toughest players in the league, but after his announcement, he had to prove that his sexuality did not make him soft. Travis Waldron said Jason Collins had "to affirm that there isn’t a relationship between his sexuality and other signs of masculinity” because the league assumed that homosexuality was antagonistic to physical success.

The image of a specific type of manhood is so well imbedded into the fabric of the sporting culture that Odell Beckham lost his self-control after opposing players on the Carolina Panthers reportedly hurled gay slurs at him. In an attempt to defend his aggressive black masculinity from the stigma of any feminized traits, Odell reinforced an embodiment of strength and toughness by acting recklessly on the field. Michael Irvin defended Beckham, saying, “Everybody goes after him with gay slurs. He's a different kind of dude. He has the hairdo out, he's not the big muscular kind of dude... I can’t promise you that [I would have handle it correctly.] That is why they give you leniency for crimes for passion.” Irving justified Beckham’s actions through the notion that he had to conspicuously protect his manhood when he felt like the victim of an assault on his identity. 

Carolina Panthers players taunted Odell Beckham before the game with a bat and possibly homophobic comments.

Beckham is a threat to conceptions of forceful black masculinity because he has dominated the league for two years (see: one-handed catch against the Cowboys), but he does not conform to masculine standards of athleticism off the field. Beckham is in videos all over the internet dancing with former LSU teammate Kavahra Holmes, he dyes his hair, and he had a moment when he was caught looking at teammate Landon Collins's butt. Rafi D’Angelo claimed in the magazine Slate, “We need more black men who aren’t afraid to live outside of the box of black masculinity built for us by society.” The Panthers players assumed that Beckham had to have a compromised sexuality because sports understanding of heterosexuality limits any expression beyond established norms. While Beckham's reckless actions during the game cannot be justified by what the Panthers players may have said to him before it, the bipolar masculine construct of not being able to "live outside the box" while still reproducing individual manhood was one of the reasons why Odell lashed out during the game.

Odell Beckham was suspended for a game after his misconduct against the Panthers.

Men have constructed a social attitude towards the femininity of female athletes in such a way as to reconstruct their own gendered self-understanding. Similar to how the NCAA created a construct of "student first, athlete second" to maintain their claims of amateurism, the sexualization of female athletes has asserted “woman first, athlete second,” and marginalized their place in the sports world relative to men. The dichotomous construct between males and females in athletics has been challenged by the dominance of women in sports who are perceived to be symbolic of masculinity. However, Kate Fagan mentioned, “Women's basketball is maligned for not being as athletic as the men's game, but as women become more athletic, these players are often labeled as unfeminine, and therefore unwatchable.”

Brittany Griner is constantly referred to as a “man” or a “gorilla” because it gives the public a way to justify how her athleticism in a masculine space displaces her femininity and womanhood. Unlike how American tennis player Helen Wills was constructed as maintaining her “girlish beauty” in tennis because she ostensibly accepted her different sporting sphere, women like Griner have carved out a space in a masculine realm. Sporting discourse has had to aggressively assert her basketball ability as a product of a divergent feminine defect in her nature to reinforce perceptions of hegemonic masculinity. 

Baylor University was happy to exploit Griner’s feats on the basketball court, but she could not discuss her homosexuality because the school wanted to maintain an image that did not transcend normative lines of sexuality. Waldron said that when Griner came out as gay, “it confirms the idea that a woman who succeeds in athletics does so because she’s breaking with expectations for women, both physically and sexually.” The reaction to Griner’s sexuality was muted because the public assumes female homosexuality in male sporting spheres, and that their success is a product of that masculinization. The connotation was that women could not conform to a gendered self-identity because of their sexuality, and that they could not maintain their athletic prowess and stay within the norm of femininity.

In 2013, hockey broadcaster Don Cherry said, "I don’t believe women should be in the male dressing room.... I don't feel women are equal. I feel they’re above us. I think they're on a pedestal and they should not be walking in when naked guys are walking in. And some guys take advantage of it.” Cherry showed the subconscious male need to concretely separate the masculine athletic sphere from any female involvement. He reinforced the public’s conception of a possible female obstruction to manhood, and argued for unequal access to the male sporting body between the genders, even though excluding female media members from male locker rooms would subvert their ability to carry out their job. Cherry represented the way in which men trivialized the female role in the sporting community to reinforce sports as a “men’s game,” and propagated protectionism over the locker room as an impenetrable masculinized domain of power for a gendered superiority. 

Don Cherry commenting on women in the NHL locker room, which just made Ron MacLean cringe.

Men are not always comfortable with women who exceed their sporting knowledge because it acts as an affront to their masculine identification within the athletic arena. For example, on a Fox Sports Radio morning show, Mike North said, "Jessica Mendoza is the worst baseball announcer who has ever announced the game of baseball. Now, if you want to call me a sexist, go ahead. But I'm an observer." While North should not be precluded from judging Mendoza's performance just as he critiqued Dennis Miller and Tony Kornheiser's jobs on Monday Night Football, he gave no actual evidence as to why Mendoza was so terrible at her job. North implied that Miller and Kornheiser were not good analysts because of the content of their message to the audience, but his dislike of Mendoza came off as a mere function of her gender without further explanation of his point.

All sports media members, but specifically women, are subjected to abuse from people on social media. Sarah Spain, a columnist for ESPN, reflected how she receives tweets every day like “Why don’t you take your top off and just make me lunch,” showing that women are not welcomed into masculine spaces and athletic spheres.

The online video campaign "More Than Mean" highlighted the harassment of women in the sports world on social media.

Through the prism of sports, external perceptions of the athletic body and its symbolic effect on a gender specific self-consciousness can be acutely examined. Sports act as a representative medium for the formation of masculinity, and to reproduce understandings of self-identity. Gender concretizations have constructed separate athletic spheres for males and females to avoid a pluralistic understanding of sexuality. The male sporting body has been used as a symbolic codification of masculinity, and male dominance is portrayed as a conspicuous foil to feminine sexualization and objectification.

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.

Telling It All Podcast With Ben Goodman - Patriots-Falcons Super Bowl LI Recap

Topics Include: The Atlanta Falcons Dominate First Half (2:37). The Patriots Comeback/Falcons Collapse (7:33). The Falcons 4th Quarter Play-Calling (16:30). The Inevitable Patriots Touchdown In Overtime (22:30). Tom Brady As the Greatest Quarterback Of All-Time (26:40). The Devastating Loss For The Falcons (29:30). Roger Federer-Rafael Nadal 2017 Australian Open Finals (34:00). Carmelo Anthony Trade Speculation (39:30).

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Trigger Fingers Turn To Twitter Fingers: Sports In The Digital Age

On June 30, 1962, Sandy Koufax threw the first of his four career no-hitters for the Los Angeles Dodgers against the New York Mets. Recorded baseball was so primitive at the time that only a single radio version of the game remains today for fans to relive the experience. More than 30 years later, when NBC cut away from game 5 of the Rockets-Knicks NBA Finals to follow the O.J. Simpson car chase in 1994, nobody outside of the arena knew what was happening on the court.

However, the technological revolution of the 21st century has created a more accessible viewing experience for fans at the game, and for those watching at home. The availability of sports data has allowed for more inclusive online sports fandom, and social media and massage boards have contributed to the continual reproduction of the sporting spectacle.

Despite individuals increasingly feeling associated with an online sporting community through social media, sports in the digital age remain reliant on the construction of heroic sporting narratives. While social media does not ostensibly exclude fans from the sporting sphere as much as it did in the past, it upholds a groupthink ideology that marginalizes opinions outside of the collective norm. Overall, social media and new sporting technology have allowed fans to establish a connection with each other and better understand the game, and for the players, new data has emphasized certain sporting techniques to perform at a higher level, but created ambiguity over who controls, and releases, technological data.

The data revolution has allowed sports teams to use wearable technologies to track player movement and apply health standards to regulate their physical activity. Teams have attempted to use data analysis to improve performance and keep players healthy, and biometrics have allowed players to use the data as a reference point for their physical activity. Player Position Tracking is penetrating all the professional sports, especially basketball and soccer, because the technology has given athletes a way to monitor themselves. 

The Seattle Sounders use wearable tracking devices to monitor their players during practice.

The proliferation of tracking technology has caused an ethical dilemma over the right of employers to have too much information about their employees. Teams blood testing their athletes, or tracking their sleeping patterns, can easily be construed as invasive labor practices. Moreover, the ownership and transparency of sports data could inhibit player’s earning power and freedom of mobility if teams use exclusive data gathering capabilities to limit their off-court activity or to manipulate their salaries in contract negotiations (agents are already deeply concerned about this potential).

Wolfram Klug contented in an article in The Guardian, "The wider stakeholders stand to benefit as much, if not more, from analytics than the players themselves.” Player’s privacy, and fairness concerns over how teams use the new sports technology, have been exacerbated by the fact that employers can sell their confidential data material for commercial benefits. Klug noted that teams should partner with “technology providers with a commitment to being transparent and acting ethically,” because of the moral ambiguities over data control. Teams may complicate the situation by distributing information to fans to ostensibly improve their experience, even though the data infringes on player’s rights.

In the pre-digital age, public engagement with sports through the radio or television medium constructed a circumscribed subjectivity of the individual viewer. Without social media to allow for fan expressionism or interaction beyond the sporting venue itself, sports fans were objectified through their subjugation to a narrowly contrived heteronormative, gendered identity of fandom. In Jeffrey Montez's Discipline and Indulgence, in a chapter of the book titled "The Best Seat in the Ballpark: Lifestyle and the Televisual Event," he 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, restricting their access to athletes merely through a controlled and externally constructed media imagery that objectified their experience. 

However, fans over the last decade have directly interacted with athletes, and each other, through new digital technology. Maxwell Neely-Cohen referenced Durga Chew-Bose’s observation in The New Republic that, “Sports for so long were actually not inclusive… but [for] NBA Twitter fans, it’s almost, dare I say, it’s wholesome.” Social media has allowed for the creation of online fan groups that transcribe the traditional sporting spheres into online communities, especially subcultures like NBA twitter. Cohen added that through social media the NBA “promotes itself inevitably, a self-replicating monster.” Since most people have digital technology, Twitter allows the league to reproduce its sporting spectacle for a more democratized fan base. 

Amy Bass said in her book, Not The Triumph But The Struggle, track stars John Carlos and Tommie Smith “needed a space for people to see them represented in the public eye," which was only available to them during the 1968 Summer Olympics. Athletes today have a platform to speak directly to the public whenever they want. Overt political statements, like when the Miami Heat wore hoodies in solidarity with Trayvon Martin, have entered the public consciousness because of the mobility of images through Twitter. Since consumers derive their socially constructed identity from what they consume and follow, sports fans have refracted their sense of self through the accessibility they have to the actions of their favorite players or teams. As such revered figures, athletes can actively shape public discourse over political topics.

In 2012, players on the Miami Heat wore hoodies to show support for Trayvon Martin.

However, social media has allowed fans to interact with others that confirm their opinions, rather than challenge them. Cohen said, “On Twitter, each basketball fan gets to curate their own assemblage of voices.” The ability of an individual to tailor thoughts to a specific audience paradoxically allows them to interact with a specific subculture, and yet, still secludes them from experiencing dissenting opinions through a conscious social media filtering. 

Just as fans were once objectified by the television experience, as Montez said, “There is an objectified status of television sports fandom,” fans have lost their individuality by allowing groupthink on Twitter to formulate their subjectivity. As an argument solidifies itself on Twitter, and a mob mentality justifies the prescribed conventional wisdom, thoughts outside of the collective norm become ostracized. As sports media members tweeted their disdain over Cam Newton’s post-Super Bowl press conference, conformity to that opinion became the standard judgment, rather than an individual appraisal of the situation. Twitter facilitates an arena where the first opinion becomes sanctified as fact, regardless of how individuals conceive of that viewpoint. Sometimes first is not always best.

Moreover, due to the feeling of impunity online, social media has become a vacuum for societal negativity, such as when Michigan punter Blake O'Neill received death threats for his costly fumble against Michigan State.

The growth of sports documentaries in recent years has reflected a demand for stories that create a heroic imagery of the athlete in the digital age. ESPN staffer Connor Schell advised, “Sit people down and tell them a good story.” Documentaries like ESPN’s You Don’t Know Bo have consciously told a story that glorifies the sporting subject to compel the viewer towards classifying athletes as mythic paradigms. The conflation of reality and heroic narrative is not confined to modern day, as Michael Oriard said in his book Brand NFL, the original “NFL Films has sustained a sense of mythic grandeur in decidedly antimythic times." However, television networks today have even more incentive for documentaries that create a mythical athletic identity because they need a compelling story to fill their air time. These stories have reproduced the sporting spectacle to create an athletic pageantry infused with a dramatized, and often masculine, narrative of success.

Looking At Cam Newton Through The Lens Of Jack Johnson

Throughout history, people have cultivated their own self-identity by orienting themselves against contrasting social groups. By outlining the different physical and social behavior of others, individuals defined their own existence and re-affirmed their self-perceptions. F. Scott Fitzgerald challenged the natural propensity to neatly classify the human experience when he said, “Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy."

Jack Johnson and Cam Newton are the most visible representations of external figures attempting to project their own self-conceptions and anxieties onto the actions of others. While the overt racist vitriol shouted at Johnson in the early 1900's was reflective of the gradual hardening of Jim Crow America and a reaction to his threat to racial norms, recent condemnation of Newton’s on-field behavior, mainly his post-touchdown celebrations and the dabbing, have similarly mirrored the social environment of this modern time. Just as there have been attempts in modern society to obscure the systematic mistreatment of African-Americans, the “it’s not race” argument surrounding Cam Newton from both the black and white media have been suggested to deflect attention away from the maintenance of racial boundaries more than a hundred years since Johnson. Horror over Johnson and Newton’s individualism have shown the urgency to precisely project onto others dichotomous categorizations of good versus evil, rather than recognizing that all people fit into a gray area somewhere between “heroism” and “tragedy.”

White anxiety towards Johnson was entrenched in his unwillingness to comply with the athletic and social standards of his race in the early 20th century. He drove fast, dated the woman he wanted, and was a symbolic precursor to Muhammad Ali. The duplicity of the term “unforgivable blackness” in Ken Burns’s 2005 Jack Johnson documentary not only reflected Johnson’s egoism to live “without the dictation of any man," but also how he “unforgivably” distorted white self-identity. In her fantastic piece on Cam Newton, Kate Aguilar pointed out, “Black culture cannot fully exist separate from White cultural practices as they each, in part, define themselves against and through the other.” Whiteness has always been filtered through its juxtaposition to blackness, and white superiority can only be defined through that very contrast. Johnson recalled about his Fight of the Century with James Jeffries in 1910 in Reno, “Hardly a blow been struck when I knew that I was Jeff’s master," showing how white masculinity could not be defined through the inferior and subservient “other" because of Johnson's boxing prowess.

Sports often function as a bodily performance of a particular identity and facilitate formations of masculinity, so Johnson’s conspicuous domination of the white male body arose widespread unease over the reversal of the power relationship between the two races. The fight between Johnson and Jeffries was halted prior to “the great white hope,” being knocked out because the image of a black men standing over a white man would symbolically assert Johnson’s agency. In a voiceover in the Ken Burns documentary, William Pickens said, “Better for Johnson to win and a few Negroes to be killed in body for it, than for Johnson to have lost and all Negroes to be killed in spirit by the preachment of inferiority from the combined white press." When blacks were treated as inferior non-entities under the boxing color line in the 1900s, they were a product of white manifestations, but by Johnson defining himself independent of external social agents, he became a menace to white self-perception. Unlike when heavyweight champion John Sullivan refused to fight any black boxers during his reign as title holder from 1885 to 1892, which allowed the white man to set himself against the non-being black man, Johnson’s victory called into question white self-perception. The idea that the masculine supremacy that Johnson showed in the ring would extend to all political and social spheres of life created a discernible and explicit animosity towards the impetus of that movement, even if Johnson did not see himself functionally acting as a symbol of blackness.

Whereas Johnson was overtly attacked because of his “unforgiveable blackness,” the portrayal of Cam Newton as disrespectful and arrogant have come out of a more implicitly defined uncertainty over how his blackness defines those around him. The psychological projections of white individuals have been exhibited through the media’s discourse around Newton. After the quarterback abruptly walked out of his post-game Super Bowl press conference, former NFL player Bill Romanowski tweeted, “You will never last in the NFL with that attitude. The world doesn’t revolve around you, boy!” 

While Romanowski’s tweet may ostensibly seem like a referendum on Newton’s lack of post-game sportsmanship, it was a not so well hidden code for the racial underpinnings that promote only specific types of normative behaviors. In his terrific examination of Peyton Manning as "The NFL's Great White Hope," aligning the external perceptions of Jeffries with the public's orientation towards Manning, Andrew McGregor referenced the idea of “produced whiteness that downplays racial difference." While Romanowski may not have as explicitly projected his racial angst towards Newton like people did in the past towards Johnson, he clearly implied it through his rhetoric. By referring to Newton as “boy,” his comments showed the continued evaluation of blacks as not having the capabilities to develop into socially accepted men. 

Even if Romanowski somehow did not intentionally direct his comments at Newton with racial malice, which is highly doubtful from someone who previously said he would "try to get him by the neck and choke him at the bottom of the pile," the linguistic connotations of the word “boy” speak to a prevailing subconscious desire to differentiate whiteness from blackness. McGregor acknowledged that, “behavioral critiques of non-white athletes rely on race,” even when race may supposedly be dissociated from the actual content of what an individual is saying. Romanowski continued a line of dehumanizing blacks for their behavior that is heavily steeped in a historically racial power structure.

For all the idiocy of The League, one of the most pointed scenes of the show was in season two when the guys discussed how code words are always used to intentionally or even unintentionally describe players based upon their race. Key and Peele similarly satirized how sportscasters are so prone to race based categorizations of athletes.

(The audio of the scene is from 3:25-4:15)

Key and Peele sketch

Everyone subconsciously partakes in this use of language, like how we all called Aaron Craft a terrific "coach on the floor" for Ohio State or how we always reference the terrific motor of J.J. Watt. Kenny Vacarro pointed this out when asked about Andrew Luck's "deceptive speed," saying, "Not deceptive. Just because he's white doesn't mean he's deceptive. He's actually a great athlete."

The divisive reactions to Johnson and Newton were similarly extended to their reflection on the black community itself, furthering proving that individuals function in society as reflections of other’s projections of them. The fears of upper and middle class blacks of Johnson were manifested in his strand of “blackness.” In the Ken Burns documentary, Booker T. Washington said of Johnson, “A man with muscle minus brains is a useless creature,” because his perception of black progress was rooted in individual educational growth rather than directly “fighting” social inequality. Washington was wary of Johnson’s open dissent of established rules of conformity, particularly his miscegenation with white women. By arousing fears amongst white men of removing the purity of what they perceived to be “their women,” Johnson was not the exemplar of black representation that Washington had hoped would promote black discipline.

While the criticism of Cam Newton has been less explicit, it has similarly been formulated based upon a lack of comfort with what he represents. In response to Ryan Clark’s comments that “it wasn’t racism at work, but culture,” Kate Aguilar pointed out that “his culture is a part of a racial framework.” Not only did Clark misconceive of the interdependency of race and culture, but he even more importantly attributed the criticism of Newton to his divergent culture, subconsciously implying that black culture, a manifestation of race, could not in itself be a form of culturally accepted expressionism.