Page 188 - Sport Culture and the Media

FRAMED AND MOUNTED || 169

full-page colour advertisement for Puma sports shoes in a magazine mainly
‘aimed at affluent young blacks’ (McKay 1995: 192). For Boyd (1997; and also
Maharaj 1997), the outcome of selecting and decontextualizing aspects of black
male culture, linking it to the appealing aspects of sport, and then fashioning
the combination into consumer iconography (extending from the orthodox
to the more threatening figure of the ‘bad nigga’) is not the liberation and
enhancement of an oppressed minority, but the commodification and expro-
priation of their difference and resistance (Marquesee 1999). Perhaps there is a
self-reinforcing element in such arguments – racial oppression is both cultural
marginalization and ‘mainstreaming’ – but it is important to remember that
there is more to racial equality than a billboard with a sassy image of an
athletic, affluent black man selling overpriced leisurewear.

Conclusion: sports images on the move

In this chapter, I have not attempted an exhaustive review of every type
and genre of sports photograph and ways of reading them, but rather to
demonstrate how they have proliferated in the media and are linked to specific
viewerships, ideologies, myths and other texts in a way that makes them
important components of contemporary culture. The still sports image, per-
haps sepia-toned for nostalgic effect, vibrantly coloured for dramatic impact
or glowingly lit for full sensual appeal, is important for the tasks of creating
sport’s social memory (‘Do you remember when?’), securing audience attention
(‘Did you see that?’) and extending its appeal (‘What a bod!’). The magazine
Sports Illustrated has received a good deal of attention in this chapter, which is
appropriate given its influential history as a popular site of sports photography
since 1954, and the controversy surrounding the annual swimsuit issue that it
has published since 1964. If Sports Illustrated has felt some concern about
criticism of, especially, its gender politics (Davis 1997: 6–7), it has also pro-
vocatively drawn attention to this aspect of its activities. Its September 2002
issue contained a spoof article on Simonya Popova, an invented 17-year-old
Uzbekistani tennis player who clearly parodied the much photographed, greatly
enriched, but poorly performed Anna Kournikova. The virtual Simonya,
fashionably and provocatively dressed in Sports Illustrated, led many would-be
media interviewers to seek her out through the bemused and then highly
unamused Women’s Tennis Association. The Popova prank, in seeking to make
fun of Anna Kournikova’s apparently successful formula involving photo-
gen(et)ics, marketing and indifferent tennis playing, only served to highlight
the magazine’s hypocrisy in view of its long record of sexualizing the bodies
of sportswomen. Sports Illustrated’s critique was not, ultimately, of the state