Page 182 - Sport Culture and the Media

FRAMED AND MOUNTED || 163

Bad As I Wanna Be (Rodman with Keown 1996) – parodied, it should be noted,
in the naked appearance of his ex-wife Anicka Rodman (with Scott 1997) on the
cover of her own ‘right of reply’ book, Worse Than He Says He Is: White Girls
Don’t Bounce – and the rather less successful Walk on the Wild Side (Rodman
with Silver 1997), have bizarre covers of a naked Rodman. They contain con-
ventional action photographs of him on the basketball court alongside
(especially in the latter book) many outlandish shots of him off it. The
images of Rodman that circulate readily in newspapers, magazines and books,
including academic works like Baker and Boyd’s (1997) Out of Bounds: Sports,
Media and the Politics of Identity, which has an apparently now de rigueur cover
of Rodman in vinyl displaying his biceps and biting a metal chain, are clearly a
major departure from the orthodox, traditional images of sportsmen that still
form the vast bulk of sport photography. Indeed, they raise a question that
I shall take up below of what constitutes a sports photograph in the first place.
It is still necessary to ask how such images can be read as an index of the state
of sporting masculinity. One obvious response is to adjudge them to be mere
effects of the American sports hype media machine, a ‘freak show’ designed to
give celebrity status to a publicity-craving exhibitionist. There is no doubt some
validity to such an assessment, but there is also something more culturally
disruptive in the figure of a black elite basketballer known for his aggressive
approach to the game (and hence gaining approval within traditional masculine
sports culture) whose stock-in-trade is projecting an extraordinary visual image
of himself while making pronouncements like ‘I’ve fantasized about being with
a man many times’, ‘the sports world is the ultimate prison of macho bullshit’
(Rodman with Silver 1997: 179, 188) and ‘people have assumed I’m bisexual. I
don’t do much to discourage that, since it fits into my idea of keeping people
guessing’ (Rodman with Keown 1996: 211). At the same time, Rodman’s ‘penis
narratives’ (Lafrance and Rail, 2001) – the self-enunciated homages to his own
virility – speak of a much more traditional and constraining form of black
masculine identity (Rowe et al. 2000)
‘Keeping people guessing’ is not the usual function of sports photography,
which I have argued has been a rather conservative force that has tended to
confirm rather than challenge dominant (especially patriarchal) roles, identities
and structures of power. But, as it develops through the proliferation of genres
and subjects – moving away from a reliance on action shots of men and ‘honey’
shots of women to a greater coverage of the aesthetic, ‘ambient’ and ‘flexibly’
sexual aspects of sport – it can be expected that the sports still image bank will
play a more prominent role in recording cultural change and challenging pre-
vailing social ideologies. I have concentrated in this section on the increasingly
sexualized masculine sports image whereby ‘thanks to the commodification
of the male subject, men are brought out into the bright light of narcissism