Friday, March 23, 2007

* RADIO RANT: "Sports Talk Studs"

It was curious to listen in on how the John Ameche vs. Tim Hardaway flap played out a few weeks ago on sports-talk radio. Ameche had just "come out of the closet" after having retired from the NBA; fellow NBA alumnus Hardaway, when asked about the possibility of a gay teammate, said, "I hate gay people."

As expected, Hardaway's remark was lambasted nearly unanimously by ESPN, Fox Sports, and local-affiliate radio-heads—with good reason, of course. But what strikes me as curious about the whole affair is how disingenuous, even hypocritical, this whole chorus seemed, given the day-to-day blatant macho heterosexism that characterizes most of the "talent" in the syndicated sports talk media. The interminable adolescents-in-an-alley sexist wink-wink double entendres about women, the frequent admonishments to "man up" and to "show you got a pair," come across finally as desperate appeals of "Look at me! I'm a manly man (though I may well be in sports 'journalism' because I wasn't even 'man' enough to make the high school varsity team)!" The shtick on ESPN's morning show between Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic—the former casting himself as a metrosexual "sissy man," much to Golic's consciously exaggerated manly-man chagrin—may seem to be an exception, but it ultimately only reinforces the heterosexist ideology. But the heterosexism really deconstructs itself in the banter between many a radio-sports-talk-show team, as their interchange becomes "embarrassingly" (to them, if they were conscious of it) "homosocial"—to use Eve Sedgwick's term—even homoerotic. (A welcome exception: at least Dan Patrick can be consciously self-ironic about it.)

Of course, this is just one manifestation of sports fandom as the great homosocial outlet for the American male. . . . Come now, we don't look forward so desperately to next Saturday afternoon w/ a six-pack and the boys just because Whatsamatta U. is playing South-South-Central Missouri State, do we? Hey, and if it's football, we get to watch other men throw their bodies against each other. Woo-hoo! "Go—uh—Big Red!" . . .

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