Tiger: Sweaty Celebrity Pawn

In the end, it proved impossible to ignore. I had hoped to write my final Flow contribution focusing on the media-hype surrounding John Terry’s national team disrupting assignations, or even Tim Tebow’s representation as the poster child of the new Christian right. However, the half-life of each of these hot topics proved short, as they soon became submerged within the perpetual clutter of the sport media landscape. Of course, one sensationalist scandal has remained atop the pile of sport media detritus. Try as I might to avoid it, I kept being pulled back to the mass media’s response to Tiger Woods’ epiphanic automobile accident, and attendant facial lacerations, which ultimately lifted the lid on his “double life”.1

Understandably, the media chatter came to a crescendo during what were Woods’ first steps in what is likely to be an interminable, never-ending road to redemption: his return to the PGA golf circuit with his recent appearance at the 2010 Master’s Tournament at Augusta, GA.

One can only imagine the glee felt by CBS television executives at Wood’s decision to choose the 2010 Masters’ as the occasion and venue for his deliverance from the sexual addiction wilderness. In more routine circumstances, Wood’s presence in a tournament guarantees elevated television audience ratings as compared to the sans Woods condition. Thereby, in such times of tabloidic hyperscrutiny, one could have anticipated the mass media-cultivated and salacious inquisitiveness of the global viewing public to draw them in record numbers to this most pornographic of sporting moments. Such expectations were confirmed by television ratings up 43% on the opening day of coverage on ESPN, culminating in a 36% rise in CBS’ final day broadcast.2 There are, of course, numerous issues of interest and relevance which arise from the whole Woods’ scenario, however, I have chosen to focus on one; something about the workings of the promotional media complex that is at best naive, and at worst wholly disingenuous.3

People Magazine cover, December 14, 2009

Much of the post-revelation Woods’ circus would seem to have been fuelled by a media disgruntlement (which rapidly transformed into avaricious glee) that this most iconic of American, and indeed global, sporting figures had failed to live up to the public Tiger persona carefully constructed by his image management team over the preceding fourteen years or so. He was living this “double life” which pitted inauthentic “good Tiger” against what was subsequently revealed to be the authentic “bad Tiger.”  Of course, the logic of such responses are rooted in the hack journalistic practice of looking to craft a story through the mobilization of simplistic binaries. Furthermore, it reveals a willing and strategic deceit regarding the workings of the contemporary celebrity media complex, of which journalists are such an integral part. As Whannel insightfully noted, “The comparison of image and reality, of represented star and real person becomes problematic when all we are dealing with is layer upon layer of mediation…Meanings emerge precisely from the representational practices of the media, and not simply from the inherent characteristics of the star represented”.4 With far too few exceptions, those writing within the various platforms (television, newspaper, magazine, web) of the sport media are little more than ancillary purveyors, and de facto authenticators, of commercially conceived imaged identities.

With the case of Woods, he was presented, and represented, to the global media audience via a series of television advertisements (for Nike, American Express, Gillette etc.) which nurtured a seemingly engaging–initially progressive yet increasingly banal–public persona through which Woods was able to safeguard his own identity (whatever that may have been).

Tiger as Inscrutable Nike shill

As John Feinstein noted, he became “The Invisible Man” who hid behind the “non-stop image crafting being done by Tiger and his managers at IMG”.5 Or, in Bissinger’s terms:

In an age of constant gotcha and exposure, he had always been the bionic man in
terms of personality, controlling to a fault and controlled to a fault, smiling with
humility and showing those pearly white teeth in victory or defeat, sui generis in the world of pro golf, where even fellow pros and other insiders didn’t really know him, because he didn’t want anybody to know him. With Woods, everything was crafted to produce a man of nothing, with no interior—non-threatening and non-controversial.6

While his star was in the ascendancy, it suited the other domains of the commercial media to enthusiastically corroborate this heavily sanitized imaged orthodoxy. Counter narratives may have periodically arisen, but they were routinely dismissed and/or ignored under the welter of the established Woods logic. Thus, uncritical Tiger fetishizations abounded within the commercial media until, of course, the established script was so rudely interrupted. Only at this point was the contrivance and insincerity of Woods’ imaged identity revealed. Subsequently (and perversely given the recent dissection of celebrity manufacture), we have witnessed an attempt to establish either the new authentic and sincere Tiger through restricted and highly orchestrated media performances (one of which is surely to be an appearance in the last throes of The Oprah Winfrey Show; that most visible of celebrity confessionals?), or the depths of sexual depravity of the real Tiger (as revealed by the in-depth investigations of the salacious and parasitic tabloid media).

Perhaps the strangest example of Woods’ representational strategies has been a recent Nike ad featuring a monochrome image of a suitably somber-looking Tiger Woods, whose late father, Earl, voices a pathway to redemption through self-examination. Whether successful or not, through such initiatives, the commercial media looks to encourage a willing suspension of disbelief in celebrity artifice, as the mechanism for engaging and seducing the consuming populace.

Tiger Woods Nike Ad, “Did You Learn Anything?”, April 2010

However, as if the workings of the celebrity-obsessed sport media complex were not sufficiently transparent, one only has to look to the end of 2010 Masters tournament. Framing the visually obtrusive yet compelling intimacy of winner Phil Mickelson’s tearful embrace of his wife, Amy–herself in the midst of a much publicised struggle against breast cancer–CBS commentator Jim Nantz opined, “That’s a win for the family”. This proved a catalyzing moment in the doubtless much anticipated and rehearsed anointing of Mickelson as the socially and morally upright anti-Tiger, and seeming embodiment of middle America’s affective and ideological sensibilities.7 Of course, it matters little if Mickelson is indeed a suitable candidate for such populist adulation, lest we forget that sport celebrities are “spectacular representations of living human beings”.8 They are no more nor less than (sometimes) compelling fictive illusions.

Phil Mickelson embracing his wife, Amy. April 11, 2010

Image Credits:
1. Tiger: Sweaty Celebrity Pawn
2. People Magazine cover, December 14, 2009
3. Tiger as Inscrutable Nike shill
4. Tiger Woods Nike Ad, “Did You Learn Anything?”, April 2010
5. Phil Mickelson embracing his wife, Amy. April 11, 2010

Please feel free to comment.

1. Associated Press (2010, April 2). “Woods lookalikes are hoping for a comeback, too.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/sports/golf/04doubles.html
2. Associated Press (2010, April 15). “TV ratings rise for Masters but fall short of record.” http://www.usatoday.com/sports/golf/masters/2010-04-12-masters-tv-rating_N.htm
3. Wernick, A. (1991). Promotional culture: Advertising, ideology and symbolic expression. London: Sage.
4. Whannel, G. (2001). Media sport stars: Masculinities and moralities. London: Routledge, p. 51.
5. Feinstein, J. (2010, February 7).
   “The disappearance of Tiger Woods.” The Observer. http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2010/feb/07/tiger-woods-john-feinstein
6. Bissinger, B. (2010, February). “Tiger in the rough.” Vanity Fair. http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/02/tiger-woods-201002
7. Grossberg, L. (1992). We gotta get out of this place: Popular conservatism and postmodern culture. London: Routledge.
8. Debord, G. (1994 [1967]). The society of the spectacle (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). New York: Zone Books, p. 38.

Much has been written about the politicization of the modern sporting mega-event, and with considerable justification.  Looking specifically at the Olympic Games–from de Coubertin’s distinctly Eurocentric and masculinist inaugural modern Olympiad in 1896 Athens, through the Third Reich’s Berlin Olympic maneuvers of 1936, the 1968 Mexico games brutally sanitized by the Díaz Ordaz regime, to the scrupulously choreographed spectacle of Beijing 2008–there exists an incontrovertible history of ruling elites looking to use the very delivery of the games as a seductive mechanism for legitimating systems and practices of governance to internal and external audiences alike.

Notwithstanding the Chinese state capitalist 2008 Beijing Olympiad, it would seem that the most overtly politicized Olympiad of recent times was the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games.  While on the surface this would appear to be the case, it could be argued that every contemporary Olympic Games, and indeed other commercially mass-mediated sporting mega-events, are implicated in the tacit politicization of everyday life.  They are, in Debord’s terms, monumental spectacles responsible for informing the political economy of the vernacular. 1

Coming a few months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and in a complementary vein to the delayed Super Bowl XXXVI which was rescheduled for the same week as the Games’ opening, the Salt Lake City Olympics provided an emotive context for the ceremonial performance of the United States’ wounded but nonetheless newly energized nationalism.  Doubtless scripted as a justification for its contemporaneous (Afghanistan) and future (Iraq) military incursions that were, initially at least, publicly trumpeted as seeking to right the wrongs of that “one day in September”.2

Of course, the Salt Lake City opening and closing ceremonies provide an illustrative example of the convergence of sport and politics.  However, it would be remiss not to acknowledge the role of the U.S. television broadcaster, NBC, in the delivery and indeed politicization of this and other recent Olympics.  As the host broadcaster, NBC played a key role in, quite literally, representing the Salt Lake City Games to the worldwide viewing public.  However, its narrativizing of the post-September 11 Olympic spectacle to the American public evidenced the role played by the commercial media in corroborating the political sensibilities and machinations of the moment.  That is not to say NBC, or any other commercial national network broadcaster for that matter, necessarily possesses an identifiable and consistent political orientation.  Rather, by their very raison d’etre, commercial broadcasters are compelled to seek the maximum possible audience for their corporate advertisers which, whether consciously or otherwise, thereby guides production decisions and content.  In order to produce programming with a broad-based appeal and thereby commercial value, network broadcasters thus have to be closely attuned to the “mattering maps” of the national audience at any given time: the “socially determined structure of affect which defines the things that do and can matter to those living within the map.” 3

Attention to contemporary cartographies of affect were clearly evident within NBC’s coverage of the Salt Lake City Games.  With specific regard to the all important primetime network broadcasts, the carefully scripted words of Katie Couric, Bob Costas et al, myriad background features, and the overall production aesthetic and orientation, framed the Games in a manner which both engaged, and simultaneously advanced, the then ascendant ideological tropes of “American jingoism, militarism, and geopolitical domination.” 4   Largely as a by product of its commercial impulses, as opposed to any conspiratorial political machinations, NBC’s Olympic representation could thereby be said to have acted as a de facto corroboration of the affective investments in the subject positions advanced by the Bush regime (i.e. those of the uncritical and unquestioning American patriot) in securing its position of authority and justifying its hawkish stratagems.  As a consequence, NBC’s Olympic coverage became a seductive agent of popular conservatism, in that its affectively-charged coverage of the games actively reinforced, and mobilized popular support for, the ideological underpinnings of America’s ascendant militaristic and neo-imperialistic order.

The argument herein centers on the notion that national network sport broadcasters contribute to the politicization of everyday life, however, they do so in a manner which belies an ideological promiscuity resulting from the primacy of commercial logics.  In this vein, NBC’s coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics confirmed the popular conservatism of network broadcasters, through coverage which to some degree afforded an unstated legitimacy to China’s blend of state socialism and market capitalism.  For, if they had chosen to do so, NBC could have used the Beijing Olympics as the catalyst for a considered examination of the Chinese state, with specific references to its well scrutinized economic policies, political organization, and human and civil rights record.  Of course such a contextualizing of the Beijing Games on network television is all but unthinkable.  While it would placate a minority who long protested the awarding of the games to China, it would doubtless extinguish the interests of the vast viewing majority looking to NBC for its established blend of sporting performance and soap opera melodrama.

Hence, from the choreographed televisual magnitude of Zhang Yimou’s opening spectacular, through the remainder of the games, NBC pad scant attention to extra-sporting issues, preferring instead to celebrate the spectacular nature of Beijing 2008, in seemingly equal measure regarding its phantasmagorical built environment (specifically the instantly iconic bird’s nest and water cube stadia) and the superhuman feats of those performing within it (specifically Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps).

What of the forthcoming 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics?  In a moment charactered by prolonged healthcare indecision, enduring military sacrifice, purported economic recovery, and attendant Presidential vulnerability, one could expect NBC to use the Vancouver Games as a 17-day dramatic and entertaining escape from America’s woes.

Doubtless this is Dick Ebersol and the rest of the NBC Universal production team’s brief.  Nonetheless, even within the throes of Olympic escapism, one is never far from the affective investments responsible for the rightward shift in American life over the past 40 years.  Uppermost among these is the preoccupation with abstracted individualism associated with the instantiation of roll-with-it neo-liberalization. 5   Thus, every one of the interminable narrative focuses on individual Olympic athletes’ lives–their trials and tribulations, strengths and weaknesses, failings and redemptions–as a means of representing sporting contests and competitions, inexorably accents the neo-liberal individualism whose hegemonic position has stymied the development of the collective conscience necessary for the realization of a true American democracy.  So much for the liberal [sport] media.

Image Credits:
1. Olympic Torch Runner, Berlin 1936
2. The “World Trade Center Flag” at the Salt Lake City opening ceremony
3. Performers in traditional costume from the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics
4. NBC’s Vancouver Olympics Logo

Please feel free to comment.

1. Debord, G. (1994 [1967]). The society of the spectacle (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). New York: Zone Books.
2. Silk, M., & Falcous, M. (2005). One day in September/A week in February: Mobilizing American (Sporting) nationalisms. Sociology of Sport Journal, 22(4), 447-471.
3. Grossberg, L. (1992). We gotta get out of this place: Popular conservatism and postmodern culture. London: Routledge, p. 398.
4. Silk, M., & Falcous, M. (2005). One day in September/A week in February: Mobilizing American (Sporting) nationalisms. Sociology of Sport Journal, 22(4), 464.
5. Keil, R. (2009). The urban politics of roll-with-it neoliberalization. City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 13(2), 230-245.

A less than wise, if well-travelled, Chelsea supporting acquaintance once confided in me that it was simply impossible to exist in a conscious state on this planet for more than a day, without being confronted by an individual wearing a Manchester United shirt.1 Such was the global reach and presence of this most polarizing of football institutions. My response to this observation was quite simple. While it may be an accurate depiction of cultural formations within some parts of the world, it simply did not hold true within the U.S., which was a largely Manchester United and English football-free zone. However, and as is frequently the case, at some point we awake to find our most oft-repeated aphorisms confounded by the realities of our current existence.

Today, within America’s public spaces–be it the cavernous lecture halls of its public universities, its teeming mega-malls, or even its cathedral-like major league sport stadia–one is never far removed from English Premier League (EPL) symbolism and paraphernalia. Evidenced by Hull City shirts worn by undergraduate students, Chelsea stickers adorning BMW Mini Coopers, game scores and analysis featuring in many newspapers, and C-list English football personas presenting live televised game coverage on ESPN, the EPL has conclusively landed.

From one vantage point, this discernible cultural trend can be attributed to the success of the EPL in globalizing the brand (and its sub-brands, i.e. individual teams and players), through its dissemination as a globally ubiquitous material commodity and mediated spectacle. However, I would also suggest that there is something else propelling the growing popularity of the EPL within the U.S. sporting context. In an America that, for the moment at least, occupies the position and influence as the commercial, economic, and political fulcrum of the global late capitalist order, it is possible to discern a palpable sense of disaffection displayed by some towards the hyper-commercial order of things. Of course I could be accused of exaggerating the American public’s renunciation of consumer capitalism, and such an observation may be more rooted in my own wishful thinking than any unassailable empirical grounding. However, if a late capitalist malaise exists anywhere, then I would suggest it is discernible within specific reactions to what neo-Marcusian Ian Macdonald insightfully characterized as “one-dimensional sport.”2

The burgeoning EPL insurgency among certain segments of the American sporting public can thus be construed as stemming from a yearning for an alternative to the hyper-mediated and hyper-commercialized logics that have enveloped U.S. professional sport culture. Such an observation is rooted in an unlikely source: Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy. Hoggart famously trained his unique blend of literary and anthropological humanism on the post-war commercializing cultures of northern English urban working class communities. Five decades later, and on the other side of the Atlantic, within their literal and figurative homeland, the Americanized and Americanizing popular culture industries that Hoggart wistfully depicted as disassembling the organic urban working class culture of his youth, are perhaps beginning to fray at the edges, if not wholly disassemble. America’s EPL fans are the late capitalist iterations of Richard Hoggart’s “juke-box boys”, whose ambivalence toward the everyday practices and institutions of his northern English urban working class, stirred Hoggart’s wistful and nostalgic resentment toward the popular culture industries that flooded Britain during the 1950s. The “juke-box boys”, and specifically their “American slouch”, created such ire because they were the embodied expressions of a commercial culture that was disassembling the organic urban working class culture (the institutions, practices, and values) of Hoggart’s youth, through their brazen championing of the new consumptive order. Conversely, in their very species-being, contemporary America’s football shirt boys and girls express an embodied problematizing of the extension of that very same consumptive order into the world of sport.3

This is, of course, both a grandiose and essentializing claim, however unlike Hoggart’s characterization of the “juke-box boys” (which has been criticized for his failure to actually engage the subjects of his censorious gaze), my brazenly un-scientific analysis is informed by what has become a compulsion to discover the “reasons” for the shirt, even in the most inopportune of circumstances.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Manchester United fans celebrate their ticket to Moscow at Nevada Smiths (NYC), arguably the best football pub in the USA.

In general, today’s market savvy sport consumers are contentedly resigned to their role within the domineering sport-media-entertainment industrial complex, and indeed the nature of its spectacularized entertainment and profit-oriented products. However, some are not. The sporting turn to the EPL catalyzes a growing disenchantment felt by some toward corporatized sport forms driven primarily by commercial rationalities and logics as, opposed to sporting contingencies. The allure of the EPL to this constituency is simple. To many disillusioned American sport fans, it encapsulates everything that the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League are not: It is considered to be a historically-grounded, and thereby authentic, sport league rooted in the fervour and commitment of team supporters, and facilitated by a immediate and organic link between team and the communities in which they are located. Thus, in Hoggart’s terms, the wearing of an EPL shirt signifies a disavowal of the “American slouch”, and the exhibition of an “English fervour“ that proclaims an affiliation to a somehow pre-commercial sporting intensity and authenticity. Following this logic, within the American context football hooliganism is routinely understood – and to some degree indulged – as little more than the exuberant expression of the EPL’s authentic sporting communitas. This English football romanticism can be the only explanation for the emergence of hooligan-exploitation movies typified by the disturbingly unconvincing Green Street Hooligans (2005).

The idealizing of English football culture as a somehow more genuine and legitimate sporting space, belies the deficiencies of the American model. To paraphrase John Clarke, America’s EPL fans are drawn in the spectacular discovery of authentic sporting community; something perceived as missing within the American sporting context, wherein popular fervour and unwavering commitment have been replaced by corporate and consumer ambivalence toward sport, as being nothing more than a leisure entertainment option.4 Of course, the discovery and experience of this authentic football communitas is largely mediated through the manner in which the EPL spectacle is represented through ESPN and Setanta coverage. In terms of the former, ESPN provide an affectively-charged simulation of EPL communitas through its spectacular game promotions, corroborating in-studio analysis, and allied broadcast commentaries.

As such, in true Baudrillardian fashion, ESPN’s EPL is pure simulation, since it is based upon “models of a real situation without origin or reality.”5 Despite carefully crafted allusions to the contrary, the contemporary EPL is every bit as corporatized and commercialized as its North American sporting equivalents. Its full title is, after all, the Barclays Premier League; demonstrating a level of corporate sponsorship that is presently untenable within the American context. Furthermore, a number of EPL teams (specifically, Arsenal, Aston Villa, Liverpool, and, yes, Manchester United) are either owned or controlled by American investors. American commercial interests have also made in-roads into the EPL, with ESPN’s securing of television rights to broadcast games on the United Kingdom’s satellite television platform from the 2009/2010 season onwards. Doubtless in response to the anti-American percolating across the English football landscape, ESPN secured the services of Wieden and Kennedy-Amsterdam, and utilized the warmly familiar voice of noted English working class character actor, Bernard Hill, in a blank parodic representation of the EPL’s default commitments and organic sporting communitas.

As much as anything, this promotion appears to be a diversionary tactic, taking attention away from the fact that English clubs have been transformed into rationalized and spectacularized football “brands”, designed to attract the interest and discretionary income of the plastic fans, or what Giulianotti more forgivingly described as football flâneurs. Typified by the “cool consumer spectator”, the football flâneur displays a relatively detached relationship with specific clubs, and indeed leagues, as they promiscuously share their attention across the football marketplace.6 Late sporting capitalism, whether manifest in the US or the UK, would seem to be the domain of the inauthentic and inorganic plastic fan. As such, for those looking to the EPL for “English fervour”, they may ultimately be disheartened to find the “American slouch” having already made the transatlantic crossing.

Image Credits:

1. Manchester United and Chelsea fans watching a televised game at Nevada Smith’s pub in New York City
2. Promotion shot for the EPL 2009/2010 Season
3. Still from Green Street Hooligans, starring Elijah Wood (2005)
4. Stills from ESPN’s EPL television advert, 2009/2010
5. Stills from ESPN’s EPL television advert, 2009/2010

Please feel free to comment.

1. Within the tribal world of English football, a Fulham supporter such as I would find friendship with a Chelsea supporter that step too far.
2. MacDonald, I. (2009). “One-dimensional sport: Revolutionary Marxism and the critique of sport.” In B. Carrington & I. MacDonald (Eds.), Marxism, cultural studies and sport (pp. 32-48). London: Routledge.
3. This is highly ironic, since the act of English football support is routinely enacted through consumptive practices (i.e. through the purchase of the obligatory team shirt, or the television programming package required to view games).
4. Clarke, J. (1975). The skinheads and the magical recovery of community. Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 7-8 (Summer), 99-105.
5. Baudrillard, J. (1983). Simulations (p. 2). New York: Semiotext(e).
6. Giulianotti, R. “Supporters, Followers, Fans, and Flaneurs: A Taxonomy of Spectator Identities
   in Football.” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 26, no. 1 (2002): 25-46.