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.

Sometimes It's Just A Game - Sports Diplomacy In The 21st Century

In 1959, during the height of the Cold War, the Harlem Globetrotters took a trip to the USSR to entertain Soviet basketball spectators. The goodwill tour was representative of how international sporting events can paradoxically bring nations together, while at the same time still driving them apart through nationalistic self-promotion. While the Globetrotters went to the USSR to dissipate the tension between the superpowers through the entertainment and levity of sports, their trip still reproduced American hypersensitivity to Soviet propaganda of US race relations, and showed the desire of the United States to assert its cultural and sporting superiority abroad. The trip reflected a politically conscious effort by the US to present the black players on the squad, like Wilt Chamberlain, as contributing to American exceptionalism, rather than as figures subject to the nation’s racial abuse. 

The Globetrotters met with Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev during their trip to the USSR.

Sports diplomacy in the 21^st century can be understood as an emblematic prefiguration of international cohesion, but a force that cannot bring tangible changes to global politics. National rebranding through international sporting events, like the Olympics and World Cup, mirror how sports paradoxically transcend, and yet also further national stereotypes. While sports diplomacy and international sporting events can act as a symbolic pretense of the breakdown of political barriers and as re-defining a national image and identity, sports in and of themselves cannot create substantive international harmony, or improve the lives of ordinary citizens.

Sports diplomacy can act as a symptomatic representation of common ground between nations, and athletic events can manifest themselves as a symbolic forum for the beginning of international understanding. The love of sports can universalize the human experience, as Sharon Robinson noted her gratitude for “the unifying game of baseball” because it highlights the common interests of nations. By bringing teams together in a sporting venue, countries intrinsically recognize the legitimacy of the other country on the field, and simultaneously acknowledge their national identity while still reproducing international commonalities. 

When the Tampa Bay Rays played the Cuban National Team with Barack Obama and Raul Castro in attendance, the willingness of the United States team and the President to take the field with the Cubans implicitly symbolized American attempts to normalize relations with Cuba. Obama's deputy national security advisor for strategic communication and speechwriting, Ben Rhodes, said, “Baseball is part of both of our heritages, and part of the type of exchanges we are pursuing in business, in culture, in the arts, in sports.” The nations' love for baseball acted as a symbolic illustration of political attempts to reconcile the countries. Sharon Robinson reflected how the fan’s sense of hope, because of Obama’s presence at a shared national pastime, “struck [her] as a sign of the beginning of a changing Cuba.” 

Rob Manfred’s desire for a legal path for Cubans to play in the MLB without defecting serves as a representative framework for a new dialogue with Cuba that moves away from a practice where, as Dave Zirin said on TSN Winnipeg 1290 Radio, “Cubans are separated from their families and delinked from their home.” Thus, the US and Cuba used a sport that binds the countries to serve as a representation of political diplomacy.

However, while sports diplomacy can act as an emblematic demonstration of international understanding, athletic events do not irrevocably change the longstanding conflict between national officials. Michael Rubin referenced in his article in the magazine Foreign Policy how “President Franklin Roosevelt had granted Hitler legitimacy by having the U.S. Team participate in his Olympics [in Berlin in 1936].” Even if President Obama's main intention in Cuba was to merely “bury the last remnant of the Cold War” and begin negotiations with the nation, by sitting with Castro at such a public spectacle, Obama legitimized the exceedingly precarious elements of the Cuban regime. Rubin added “Athletic contests can’t bring rogue states in from the cold… when the final whistle blows, the lights dim, and competitors break their final handshakes, it is the same politicians who remain in charge.” 

President Obama was the first US President to visit Cuba while in office since Calvin Coolidge in 1928. 

Although politics and political regimes are reproduced through sporting institutions, sports themselves cannot construct international harmony because they are subject to political structures. Therefore, sports are politicized through symbolic codifications, but can only make social change in conjunction with politics. 

While the baseball game in Cuba may have personified an attempt at international convergence through sports, the athletic event did not change the nature of the Castro political dictatorship. Sports cannot transcend politics because sports are inherently political, as Cuban descendant Dan LeBatard wrote, "I'm not in the mood to play ball with a dictator who still has the blood of our people on his hands.” While sports may not actively bring about political change, the public still paradoxically imbues athletics with symbolic political implications, and the game in Cuba may have also implicitly desensitized the past torment of the Castro regime.

Hosting international sporting events project the conscious effort of a state to disseminate specific images of their nationhood and act as an extension of governmental identity politics. By putting a nation’s capabilities in front of the world, organizing a global athletic competition inherently assigns an immediate mythic grandeur to the host nation. It also re-defines previous external perceptions of the country’s organizational competency, and implicitly effects how other nations perceive them. 

Rook Campbell said about the World Cup in South Africa in 2010, “The World Cup helped outlay a nation branding legacy in which a post-apartheid South Africa could show itself as truly democratic global power.” The value of the World Cup to South Africa was how other nations saw the event as a legitimization of the progress of the state from its internationally unaccepted past. Campbell added that the event “was celebrated as both a national and continental opportunity to correct stereotypes and forge new stature.” The World Cup acted as a symbolic divide between the state and the vestiges of apartheid, and shaped a nationalistic identity apart from racial oppression.

While hosting an international sporting event may act as a symbolic representation of a nation’s re-branding in global politics, it does not ensure actual structural changes to the nation on the ground. In the past, global sporting events have come at the expense of public facilities for the nation’s ordinary citizens. Even the public transportation in South Africa that was developed for the World Cup or received more funding because of the tournament, like the transit railway system Gautrain, are as Andrew Harding said in the BBC, "priced out of the reach of most South Africans, and highly controversial new tolls on the motorways mean drivers are still paying for the renovations.” 

"Soccer City" in Johannesburg is one of many World Cup Stadiums in South Africa that cannot cover its operating costs.

Sporting events may temporarily act as a shrine to national identity, but once the glow of the event is over, ordinary citizens are left with the brunt of the event’s cost. The protests in Brazil against the World Cup showed how the commercialization of a sporting event as national rebranding, regardless of the costs, removes it from being the “people’s cup.” Sporting events further the marginalization of a nation’s democratic masses, and often act as a symbol of national progress rather than actually helping to bring it about.

Telling It All Podcast With Ben Goodman - Rio 2016 Summer Olympics

Topics Include: Rio de Janeiro As The Host City (1:00). NBC's Coverage Of The Olympic Games (12:10). Experiences As A Fan At Rugby, Table Tennis, Swimming, and Volleyball Events (20:25). Lilly King-Yulia Efimova Swimming Rivalry (28:40). Mainstream Sports At The Olympic Games (34:05). Overall Impressions Of The Olympics (39:55).

SoundCloud Podcast Homepage: https://soundcloud.com/ctellallsports

Tell The Truth - 42 and Race Movie Review

As such a widely consumed vehicle of entertainment, the film industry can encapsulate collective norms, and shape how people look at race relations. Movies like 42 and Race explored established societal hierarchies and Hollywood’s construction and reproduction of power relationships through character’s race. Some film critics condemned the movies for their historical inaccuracies, dramatization of the facts, and historical omissions, such as the fact that 42 completely ignored that Robinson was not the only black player on the Dodgers roster in 1947 (pitcher Dan Bankhead was also on the team in Brooklyn). 

Films that attempt to rigorously portray circumstances accurately can still obscure reality with a general untruthful representation of racial opinions. On the other hand, dramatized and fictionalized scenes in 42 and Race removed the independent identity of Jackie Robinson and Jesse Owens, and embraced the role of the white savior coming to the aid of the black athlete. Fictionalized creations of reality in these films also tended to imply a heroic democratization of sports due to the actions of the athletes, which obscured the maintained prevalence of systematic racism in society. 

42 and Race became problematic pieces of cinema, not from their factual inaccuracies, but when their stories unsettled a truthful representation of structural racism and removed the independent agency of the black athlete to instill their own place in society

42 Movie Trailer

Race Movie Trailer

In 42, Jackie Robinson was turned into a stoic, human myth rather than a complex figure that had to deal with the difficulties of baseball integration. The film failed to contextualize black discrimination in the majors by implying that Robinson’s heroic story could obscure the racial injustices of the past. Dave Zirin complained in the The Nation, “To tell his tale as one of individual triumph through his singular greatness is to not tell the story at all” because the film untruthfully conflated Robinson’s eventual baseball acceptance with overall black social integration. 

Despite accurately portraying the racist vitriol that Phillies manager Ben Chapman shouted at Robinson, the film failed to deftly show the subtle mechanisms of racial discrimination in the 1940s. By creating one of the film’s climatic scenes around teammate Eddie Stanky confronting Chapman, the manager seemed like the singular focus of white hatred against Robinson. In the New York Times, A.O. Scott mentioned how Chapman’s actions were “not an exception to the rule, but an especially ugly instance of it." The film underemphasized the systematic racism that black athletes faced by implicitly creating a sole representative image of that racism. 

Ben Chapman (played by Alan Tudyk) subjected Robinson to extreme racist vitriol.

Some of the film’s dramatizations did reinforce truthful characterizations of Jackie’s independent agency. Although the scene where Robinson was chased by a mob in Wendell Smith’s car was not strictly accurate, he told him “I don’t like needing someone to be there for me.” Jackie’s expressionism was not sullied by a need to show himself as the archetypical heroic figure that suppressed his black rage at the urgency of society. Unlike the rest of the film, Jackie was able to show his raw emotions. The truthfulness of Jackie’s complex humanism was shown through artificial manifestation of reality to symbolize that message.

Nonetheless, the movie largely fictionalized Robinson as a manifestation of Branch Rickey, a player that embodied Rickey’s sentiment of having “the guts not to fight back,” rather than espousing his own identity. As Robinson melted down in the clubhouse after hearing Chapman’s verbal abuse, it was only when Rickey came as the white savior to restore order did the seemingly helpless Robinson return to the field. By portraying Robinson’s emotional breakdown away from the public spectacle, and returning him to silent, individual suffering on the field, the film removed the truthfulness of Robinson’s active attempts to challenge and subvert systematic American racism as a black activist. 

Branch Rickey (played by Harrison Ford) coming to "rescue" Jackie Robinson (played by Chadwick Boseman) and return him to the field for the Dodgers. 

Zirin suggested that the movie followed “the classical Hollywood formula of heroic individual seeds obstacle… obstacle is overcome… the end.” By starting the film with Rickey’s dramatized proclamation, “I’m going to do it,” 42 ensured that the audience would not see Robinson’s identity and heroism as independent from Rickey’s own self-proclaimed courage.

Similarly, when Pee Wee Reese put his arm around Jackie during a ballgame in Cincinnati, a historically contested moment, the dramatized scene showed Reese giving Robinson the courage to continue to play and the transference of agency to Jackie only through the white athlete. 

Pee Wee Reese (played by Lucas Black) putting his arm around Jackie Robinson in Cincinnati.

Even if the film accurately reflected Robinson’s devotion to Ricky and his promise that, “I won’t let you down,” it still created an untruthful narrative of Robinson lacking his own independent agency. For example, years later, Robinson exalted the black power salute of track athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics, saying that he took delight in the fact that they were proud to be black. Ultimately, the movie dissociated Robinson from a collective black experience, implying that his internal emotions were an external construction, and making him, as A.O. Scott argued, “the least interesting character” in the film.

In the movie Race, director Stephen Hopkins did a commendable job of establishing Owens’s self-defined identity. The movie gave considerable thought to depicting Owens not merely as a product of the projections of his external environment, but based upon how he decided to present himself. 

When contemplating the request from the NAACP to boycott the Olympics, Owens told Coach Snyder, “Let me make the decision on my own.” Although the relationship between the athlete and the coach was clearly sentimentalized, Owens showed his desire to dictate his own actions and athletic body. Ella Taylor reiterated that idea in NPR as she said, “The point of view belongs not to Coach, but to Owens.” Unlike the mythic glorification of Robinson in 42, Race did not shy away from divulging Owens’s failures to stay faithful to Ruth Solomon, as Stephen Holden recognized in The New York Times when he said, “Owens, although usually well-behaved, can at times also be defiant, willful, and immature.”

Jesse Owens (played by Stephan James) won the 100-meter dash, 220-meter dash, the 220-yard low hurdlers, and the long jump at the NCAA Championships in both 1935 and 1936 under Coach Snyder (played Jason Sudeikis).

Race still lacked a truthful representation of the violent strand of racism present in the 1930s. As Race conspicuously displayed, a film can tell a factually correct story, and yet, still be devoid of an overall truthful illustration of the black experience. Although the movie accurately showed Owens being forced into the back of a bus, and showering only after white athletes, the film treated the racist behavior towards the black community as a mere inconvenience, rather than as a systematic repression. As the crowds wildly cheered for Owens during the movie, it obscured the "unforgivable blackness" of Owens.

Moreover, the film made it seem as though the ideology of white supremacy in Germany was isolated to what Carl Luz called the “insane Nazi government,” and its attempts to depict both domestic and foreign subjugation made it seem as though it was comparing forms of oppression. Race dissociated the German public from their racist dogma, as film director Leni Riefenstahl reinforced to Owens “The world can never forget what you did.” 

At the end of the movie, when a young white boy asked Owens for his autograph, the film implied that the future of race relations was changing simply because of Owens’s victory, although his own future was later constrained by a segregated American society.

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.