Page 181 - Sport Culture and the Media

162 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

‘Men of League Calendar’ that was part of the modernization and reposition-
ing of the ‘working man’s sport’ in the early 1990s. This marketing campaign
included a video of African American soul singer Tina Turner performing
‘Simply the Best’ and casting admiring glances at the footballers in a manner
calculated to induce other heterosexual women to see them in a new, sexualized
light (Lynch 1993). Roberts also figured prominently in swimwear in the ‘Total
Fitness Body’ Campaign, his attractiveness to women signalled by his poolside
female ‘companion’ – except that she was his sister, not his implied lover.
Roberts, who was in his thirtieth year before he ‘came out’, had previously
hidden his homosexuality from view by pretending to the press that he had a
‘girl’.
Considerable consternation was caused for conventional masculine sports
culture by a self-declaration of homosexuality from a rugby league footballer
who had played for Australia in the most physically demanding position in the
game (prop) and whose muscular body had been much photographed, dis-
cussed and admired. His biography, Ian Roberts: Finding Out (Freeman 1997),
authored by the photographer who had persuaded him to pose for Blue maga-
zine, contains a foreword that reproduces congratulatory and denunciatory
letters for ‘coming out’ and copious text on the tribulations of his life. It also
contains many photographs of Roberts as child and adolescent, in conventional
(and often spectacular) sports action and standard team photos, in an injured
state (including being carried off on a stretcher and another shot with blood
streaming down his face), doing charity work with children who are ill,
attending dance parties and other social gatherings in Sydney’s ‘gay precinct’,
engaging in the usual ‘horseplay’ with teammates, and in various publicity,
calendar and magazine shots. It is difficult, therefore, to ‘pin down’ the images
of the sportsman to Connell’s (1987) ‘hegemonically masculine’ identity of
heterosexuality and aggression (Miller 1998c). It is not difficult to imagine
many readers scrutinizing images of Roberts, looking for the ‘tell tale signs’ of
the hidden ‘truth’ of his sexual identity (Davis 1995).
Roberts’ lack of ‘camp’ challenges stereotypes of the sporting male dif-
ferently to the presentation of self by African American basketballer turned
wrestler Dennis Rodman, whose self-consciously outrageous, ‘gender bending’
behaviour, which includes ‘getting married’ in a bridal gown, wearing leather
skirts, garish makeup and multi-coloured hair, and the prominent display of
body piercing. Like Roberts, Rodman is renowned for his toughness (in the
demanding role of ‘rebounder’), but his flamboyance and black identity provide
new dimensions to his image of a ‘different’ kind of sportsman. Rodman’s
image is also a sexualized one, but it is self-consciously ‘queer’ – that is, it
refuses an easy, fixed categorization as ‘straight’ or ‘gay’ (Seidman 1996). Both
of his books in the late 1990s, the ‘New York Times Number One Bestseller’