English Labor
Rutgers University Press
Chapter Title: The Black Athlete: Racial Precarity and the American Sports Icon
Book Title: On Racial Icons Book Subtitle: Blackness and the Public Imagination Book Author(s): Nicole R. Fleetwood Published by: Rutgers University Press. (2015) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15sk7t3.9
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81
Chapter 4
The Black Athlete
Racial Precarity and the American Sports Icon
Perhaps there is no other sector of cul- ture and commerce where the legacies and practices of chattel slavery are more explicitly invoked in the contemporary era than the lucrative and highly elite world of professional sports. From the ritual of the draft by which many athletes enter pro- fessional team sports to the periodic trade and the declining value of the aging body, the fundamental roots of racial capital are interwoven into the seemingly meritocratic and voluntary markets of athletics. As the vestiges of slavery cast a shadow on contemporary sports, commentary on the features, strengths, and weaknesses of the body—very often the masculine black body—is routine public discourse. Beyond market assess- ments on athlete’s performance, sports commentators regularly fetishize the black athlete in gleeful, erotic ways (e.g., “He’s a stud!”). We audience members and fans are a crucial party in the contractual agreement that regulates the value and usage of human (and other animal) bodies in athletics. Because of the particular emotional and financial investment of fans in athlet- ics, the racial icon in sports registers differently than in other sectors of entertainment culture.
Over the past century, a complex, laden relationship between black athletes and American media and audiences
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has heavily influenced the business of sports. A brief history of the black professional athlete as American cultural icon in relationship to racial politics and capitalism helps make this relationship clear. Moreover, the massive campaigns to corpo- ratize, brand, and market superstar athletes as global commod- ities since the 1980s only highlight the tensions between black athletes and American capitalism. In particular, the growth in the sports industry has led to hyper-scrutiny of the career pro- file and decision making of superstar athletes, especially the career choices, personae, and seeming public errors of black athletes. The fraught and sensational reception of two contem- porary athletes—Serena Williams and LeBron James—illumi- nates the shifting dynamics of race, gender, corporatization, and superstar power. In looking at these two figures, the par- ticularities of racial iconicity in sports where blacks have been valorized, fetishized, and rendered as threats for their athletic prowess become apparent.
The Politics of Black Athlete as Racial Icon
American public awe of black athletic success is a long and checkered history. Pioneer boxer Jack Johnson remains an emblematic figure in the history of race and sports and in unraveling the connections between athletics, sexuality, and the demonization of black men in the United States. Johnson, the child of former slaves, was one of the most famous Amer- icans in the early twentieth century. Rising to prominence at the same time that the modern celebrity industry emerged, Johnson became one of the first black American celebrity athletes.1 His fame was partly a result of his unprecedented achievement in the boxing ring, as “the first black man to win the heavyweight championship.”2 Outside the ring, Johnson lived a highly public life in which he enjoyed the wealth and fame of his sporting career and openly dated and married white
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The Black Athlete 83
women. Performance theorist Harvey Young emphasizes the different reception of Jackson among black audiences and white ones, writing: “If his plans called for a stop in Chicago, or any other large city with a significant black population, then the [black] press would tell its readers where and when to wel- come the champion. Consistently, thousands of black specta- tors would attend these welcome and send-off events.”3
However, whites saw Johnson as a threat, flashy and indul- gent. Young continues: “Equal to the esteem given Jack John- son by blacks was the loathing directed toward him by many whites. To them, ‘Jack Johnson’ represented the most detest- able traits of the black race. He was arrogant and flashy, and his desire for white women established him as a threat.”4 As a result, Johnson was arrested in 1912 and convicted for vio- lating the Mann Act (White Slave Traffic Act of 1910) when he crossed state lines with one of his former girlfriends.5 His deliberate eschewing of the limitations placed on blacks during the era and his willful and pleasure-driven attempts at self-de- termination transformed the boxer from a threat in the boxing ring to a boding menace to white male supremacy. Johnson’s notoriety and his iconic status resonated for generations, long after the height of his career.
Considering the significance of Johnson in the early twen- tieth century, Young analyzes an important link between the bodies of black athletes and the history of captivity of blacks as slaves. Johnson emerged as a celebrity only a few decades after the legal end of slavery, during the period of Jim Crow seg- regation. Young notes how Johnson, similar to enslaved black boxers who had come before him, “was repeatedly displayed as an object for amusement and even potential financial gain for others.” As he became increasingly aware of his status, the prizefighter “actively sported his own body for financial gain. Through performance, a performance of himself as a body on display, the prizefighter asserted control over the presentation
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of his body.”6 Sports historian Theresa Runstedtler similarly examines how Johnson self-consciously promoted himself both during and after his professional boxing career. By 1933, the aging icon “had become a kind of museum piece as he ‘boxed’ with youngsters in Dave Barry’s Garden of Champions at the Chicago World’s Fair.”7
Johnson’s career and legacy are testament to the distinct and complex positions of black athletes in American culture. On the one hand, sports have been touted as a clear and definitive arena where black achievement can be “objectively measured” and, indeed, where individual acts and successes become sym- bolic of collective progress. On the other hand, the struggle for blacks to integrate professional athletics and to establish lives of their own making, within and outside of the sports world, has been a recurring source of public drama, a familiar cultural narrative of success and failure played out on various media platforms. In essence, black integration of professional athletics has been interpreted in two dominant frameworks: representational politics and racial achievement. For example, in team sports, historical accounts of baseball as “America’s national pastime” often focus on the impact of Jackie Robin- son, the first black player in the major leagues, who joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. While recognized for his skills on the playing field, Robinson also became an iconic symbol of racial integration; the quiet, respectable man who refused to be driven to rage even by the racist taunts of fans and fellow players appealed to a broader public and national narrative of progress. This framework continues to dominate the discus- sion of professional athletics and public acceptance, from the rise of Tiger Woods in golf, to the growth of black coaches in the National Basketball Association (NBA), to the lack of black ownership in the National Football League (NFL).
Another crucial framework for analyzing the black sports icon, historically, is as a “race man,” an overtly and deliberately
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politicized figure who uses athleticism to challenge white supremacy. In this framework, the black sports icon represents racial achievement and serves as a counterweight to the forces of racial subjugation. Paul Robeson is literally and figuratively a giant in this genealogy of black sports accomplishment. Robeson integrated the Rutgers University football team in 1915; he was twice selected a first team All-American and was accomplished in other intercollegiate athletics. In addition to his storied sports career, he was an accomplished singer, orator, and actor. As a stage actor, he performed in The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings and played the lead role in Othello in New York City and in England. Emerging during the rise of cinema, Robeson also starred in the masterpiece Body and Soul (1925), directed by pioneer black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. Known for his intellect and skilled performance in multiple arenas (performing arts, sports, scholarship), Robeson was also widely admired for his bodily form. Theorist Hazel Carby examines how during the height of his career, he was represented by white and black critics and audiences alike as “a national icon”; he was idolized for his many talents and his physique.8
In 1925, Robeson posed for a series of nude photographs for portrait photographer Nickolas Muray in Muray’s Green- wich Village studio. Carby theorizes:
To modernist imaginings, Paul Robeson offered the possi- bility of unity for a fractious age, while he simultaneously embodied what the dominant social order imagined to be an essential “blackness” or “Negroness.” Through this alchemy of the elements of classicism, a utopian representation of Robeson’s body evolves as a prescription for the healing of the historical rupture of the nation between North and South. The cultural projection of meanings onto Robeson potentially applied to all black men because he was also
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represented as a symbol: “A sort of sublimation of what the Negro may be in the Golden Age”; or as an embodiment of “the very accent and spirit of . . . Negro laborers.”9
Robeson, who was once idealized as a symbol of national healing, was demonized in his later years as an enemy of the state by politicians, white mainstream media, the black con- servative press, and theater audiences. As Robeson’s polit- ical views evolved, he became a staunch antiracist activist and participated in several international leftist alliances against militarism and fascism. Because of his activism, he was blacklisted and investigated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956. His passport was revoked by the State Department, and many of his concerts and pub- lic performances were canceled. Robeson, once idolized, became shunned by many. Still, he continued to advocate for human rights and to build international alliances with oppressed groups, garnering admiration among progressive black Americans and leftist activists. Robeson’s legacy con- tinues to loom large and is a powerful example of how vari- ous publics make use of racial icons at different historical and political moments.
In the 1960s, black athletes such as Hall of Fame boxer Muhammad Ali and Olympic runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos experienced similar ostracism and public hostility, especially from many non-black Americans, because they used athletic platforms to fight for racial justice. In 1968, Smith and Carlos staged one of the most iconic photographs of the twen- tieth century. During the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, Smith and Carlos, representing the United States, ran in the 200-meter race, with Smith setting a new world record and earning a gold medal and Carlos winning the bronze medal. Smith and Carlos used the Olympic medal podium to perform a strategic enactment of black power. Australian runner Peter
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Norman, who won the silver medal, sympathized with Car- los and Smith’s protest. All three wore human rights badges as they stood to receive their medals. Carlos and Smith then raised their gloved fists in the Black Power salute. They offer compelling examples of political activism by black athletes in the 1960s and 1970s.10 But in this case as in others, black sports icons were punished by respective sports associations and the mainstream American public for bringing freedom struggles and civil rights activism onto the playing field.
The Michael Jordan Effect: Making the Modern Corporate Sports Icon
From the segregationist hysteria that Johnson confronted in the early twentieth century, the anticommunist witch hunts that ensnared Robeson in the 1950s, and the progressive anti- war and pro-black politics of the 1960s and 1970s that Smith, Carlos, and Ali exemplify, the arrival of Michael Jordan to the NBA marks a very different era of race and professional sports. That Jordan forever changed the relationship between black athletes, commercialism, and professional sports is not an understatement. In 1984, the Chicago Bulls drafted Jordan after a very successful college basketball career at the Univer- sity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He played a highly ath- letic form of basketball marked by gravity-defying jumps, long and clean balletic lines, and highly entertaining slam dunks. In the cultural imaginary, Jordan is the quintessential black athletic icon performing superhuman feats that were as much spectacle as sport. During his industry-altering, pathbreak- ing career, he won five league Most Valuable Player (MVP) awards and six NBA finals MVP awards and led his team to six NBA championships. Jordan garnered immense fan worship from audiences nationally and internationally. He literally is described in godlike terms and is represented as such in posters
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and advertisements, such as the popular Nike “Wings” poster of the athlete with outstretched arms.
Arguably, Jordan’s greater impact on professional sports took place off the court. One of the lasting legacies of the NBA Hall of Fame star is the wedding of the celebrity athlete with American capitalism. Jordan embraced modern athlet- ics as a capitalist enterprise to a degree that no other black athlete before him had. This is not to say that sports and cap- italism were separate entities before his arrival; sports are a moneymaking venture. In addition to the capitalist ventures of teams, leagues, and associations, individual athletes have long endorsed various products, from cereal to insurance to under- wear and so forth, for pay. Yet the corporate endorsements of Jordan and his partnership with various businesses transformed the relationship between modern sports, audience, race, and capitalism. Norman K. Denzin writes: “Michael was every- where. And Michael and [David] Falk [his agent] saw this coming; indeed, they helped make it happen. The audience was huge, and just keeps getting bigger. In turn, the inter- nationalization of Nike, Coke, and McDonald’s overlapped with the rise of the sign of MJ. And this sign of MJ was one that would sell globally, the gentle, kind, warm, dependable, wholesome, authentic, family man; the man for all seasons.”11
Under the reign of Jordan, basketball went global through the expansion of the sport, athletic apparel (especially sneak- ers), and racial icons into international markets. Since then, many contemporary athletes have sought commercial endorse- ment as a pot of gold that is much more lucrative and poten- tially enduring than the profits achieved from their respective sports. The question that brings Serena Williams and LeBron James together in this analysis is this: Why have these two highly accomplished, game-altering athletes been uneasy fig- ures to iconicize within familiar narratives of rabid fandom, sports meritocracy, and racial inclusion? Williams and James
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signify beyond the strictures of racial, sexual, gender, and market economies in professional athletics. They are not the first black athletes to be known for their exceptional athletic skills and competitive drive—their ability to win even under public scrutiny and critique. Yet their iconic status balances precariously on the pillars of their mastery of their respective sports and a public sentiment of racial resentment toward both because of their seeming unwillingness (at times) to perform an accommodating, conciliatory posture, a gratitude for their stardom. Instead, both embrace sheer domination, physical prowess, and a sense of racial and self possession that can cause great unease to many non-black audiences. Especially for Ser- ena Williams, the sense of resentment and ambivalence from the sports world takes place on an international stage and in front of often hostile white audiences in many countries.
LeBron James: The Making, Unmaking, and Remaking of a Black Sports Icon
The cultural and economic capital that Michael Jordan accrued as a corporatized sports icon has heightened the stakes of a niche industry in sports recruitment and journalism with speculation of the next “great black hope.” There is not a more striking case of this anticipation than the media buzz gener- ated around LeBron James years before he was even eligible to play in the NBA. When James was a young teenager in high school, his basketball team received more national attention than many college teams. For many in the sports industry, he was clearly the heir apparent to Jordan.
Nike’s “We Are All Witnesses” campaign was a visually striking, oversized banner series meant to create, document, and generate an audience for a twenty-first-century corpora- tized sports icon: LeBron James. The site-specific advertisement located him in his hometown, in rust belt, underemployed,
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and racially polarized northeastern Ohio. The multistory pho- tographic banner hung high on the side of a downtown build- ing in postindustrial Cleveland; it was epic in size and as a statement of athletic greatness. One image from the campaign centers James’s torso, his arms outstretched and fingers reach- ing to the ends of the photographic frame. His face is tilted upward. He reaches toward what is unattainable for those who follow him. The Nike campaign is one of hyperbolic propor- tion, as was much of the public speculation and anticipation of James’s greatness. The messianic scale by which Nike and the sports industry measured him was even more crystallized in a television campaign in which the young athlete plays hoops in a black church while a choir sings of his glory and majesty. To further both his coronation and deification, he was nicknamed “King James.”
James was given the herculean task not only of saving the NBA in the post–Michael Jordan era but also of reviving the city of Cleveland, which for decades has endured high rates of unemployment, incarceration, legalized racism, and pov- erty. He was considered a hometown hero, having grown up in nearby Akron. Raised by a young single mother who strug- gled to care for him and at one time sent him to live with his coach, James’s much-anticipated rise to greatness would be the mimetic path that the city used to remake itself. Thus LeBron James and the “We Are All Witnesses” campaign became the public face of Cleveland.
Curiously, as commercial audiences and sports fans par- took in a coronation of the young athlete as the second com- ing, Jordan actually eschewed James as his heir and distanced himself from such comparisons. In public comments, Jordan was quick to diminish the talents of James; instead, he publicly ruminated and favored other players over James. This might partly be attributed to James’s modest beginnings, a poor child raised by a single parent, whereas Jordan was raised in
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a middle-class, two-parent family with a strong father figure. In essence, James was the audience to whom Jordan as com- mercial and sports icon most appealed. When the young James entered the league in 2003, he chose to wear a jersey with the number twenty-three in honor of Jordan, who wore that number throughout his career. Later, James would change his number after routinely being snubbed by the retired athlete.
While the stereotype that the NBA is composed of black men who grew up in poor urban environments persists, recent data indicate that most professional basketball players are from higher socioeconomic backgrounds and are raised in more affluent neighborhoods than their black male peers. In other words, James is actually an anomaly within the contemporary NBA. Economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s analyzes:
After winning his second N.B.A. championship last June, Mr. James was interviewed on television. He said: “I’m
Figure 22. LeBron James’s Nike ad: “We Are All Witnesses” banner in down- town Cleveland. Photo Alex Abboud, 2009.
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LeBron James. From Akron, Ohio. From the inner city. I am not even supposed to be here.” Twitter and other social net- works erupted with criticism. How could such a supremely gifted person, identified from an absurdly young age as the future of basketball, claim to be an underdog? The more I look at the data, the more it becomes clear that Mr. James’s accomplishments are more exceptional than they appear to be at first. Anyone from a difficult environment, no matter his athletic prowess, has the odds stacked against him.12
From 2003 until 2010, James led the Cleveland Cavaliers—a franchise with one of the longest losing records in the NBA— to its most successful era in the team’s history with sold-out games, sought-after merchandise, and winning records. And during this period, he was without a doubt the most venerated figure in Ohio and many other NBA markets.
Yet this fairytale turnaround shifted dramatically in 2010, when James became a free agent and publicly courted many high-profile teams and cities during the off-season. His free- agency dance was not a topic confined to sports buffs and regional fans. Instead, it became a national media event that dramatized black iconicity and the precarious relationship between the black icon and a national public invested in main- taining a narrative of black athletic talent and white benevolent sports owners. The media frenzy over James’s free agency and the hot pursuit by teams across the country led to an outsize national debate over whether the superstar basketball player would re-sign with the Cleveland Cavaliers or would “aban- don” the team and the city that most needed him.
The media production of the momentous event, titled The Decision, now resonates as part of ongoing white public resent- ment toward highly paid black athletes like James. During this live event aired on ESPN, sports journalists, the NBA, James, and his agents turned his career decision into a suspenseful
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televised bonanza. The Decision was set at the Boys and Girls Club in Greenwich, Connecticut, and the commercial proceeds from the event were donated to the nonprofit Boys and Girls Club of America. Nonetheless, the television show appeared less like a charitable event and more like a high-stakes business deal with millions of investors (from sports professionals to the watching public). James kept everyone in suspense about his basketball future and only revealed his decision in front of a live audience—shocking sports fans around the country when he decided to join the Miami Heat. Literally, within sec- onds of his announcement, it was clear that James’s choice was unpopular among his fans, the city of Cleveland, the Cavaliers franchise, and many sportswriters. There was an immediate backlash, which James was unprepared to handle in front of a live audience.
What I find most affective about the event—both James’s telecast decision and the pursuant uproar and demonization of him—was the moment on live TV when sports journal- ist and host Jim Gray directed James’s attention to a monitor with a feed showing fans in Cleveland violently reacting to his decision. In one scene, a group of men curse the NBA star as they set fire to his memorabilia—his iconography. This is an unprecedented moment in the history of icons, racial or oth- erwise. For in this televisual instance, part of the icon-making machine—sports journalism—arranged a moment in which a real, flesh-and-blood human who has been transformed into venerated, redemptive sports icon is asked to witness the undo- ing of his image. In that moment when the journalist asked James to bear witness to live footage of fans burning pictures of him and his Cavaliers jersey, his voice cracked as he attempted to compose a response to the violent spectacle of his undoing as sports hero. James’s pain and disappointment were palpa- ble in those uneasy seconds of live television. I, as part of the audience, held my breath too in shock and discomfort at how
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quickly the racial icon can become vulnerable and disregarded when her or his actions do not garner dominant public sup- port. For days afterward, the sports public participated in and witnessed across print, radio, and televised media not only the workings of fandom but also the affective investment in the icon and what transpires when the icon fails to live up to our expectations and emotional investment.
Deepening the wound for James and further undoing his image was a highly emotional and racially tinged letter penned by the Cavaliers’ owner and his former boss, Dan Gilbert. In it, Gilbert criticizes James for his “cowardly betrayal,” lashing out:
As you now know, our former hero, who grew up in the very region that he deserted this evening, is no longer a Cleveland Cavalier.
This was announced with a several-day, narcissistic, self- promotional build-up culminating with a national TV special
Figure 23. Cavaliers fans set fire to LeBron James Cleveland Cavaliers jerseys after James announced he was signing with the Miami Heat on July 8, 2010, in Akron, Ohio, at Dante’s Gameday Grille. Photo Phil Masturzo / Akron Beacon Journal.
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of his “decision” unlike anything ever “witnessed” in the his- tory of sports and probably the history of entertainment.13
Gilbert’s letter laid the weight of racial iconicity on the shoulders of the singular black athlete. It absolved all the cor- porate interests, including his own, in creating and profiting from the corporatized black sports icon. Moreover, the ven- omous and denigrating tone of his words conveyed both the visceral attachment to the black icon and the claim to owner- ship that many whites still make to black bodies and destinies.
Outside the realm of sports fandom, various media critics and casual viewers of sports have had a range of responses, from “Who cares? He’s a rich, spoiled athlete” to “He should not have chosen to create a live nationally televised event to essentially announce a career decision” to “What he did was awful to the city of Cleveland. He’s so arrogant.” Some have commented on how racialized the event became and what many perceived as the racial overtones of the Cavaliers’ presi- dent’s vitriolic response to James’s decision.14
While many still express anger toward or dislike of James as a result of this decision and the way it became a media spec- tacle, for the most part, sentiments have faded with time and with the successes of his then chosen team, the Miami Heat. Yet his image as an exceptionally talented and highly paid sports icon has moved beyond the surface effect of campaigns like “We Are All Witnesses.” Gone is the assumption that everyone cares about or endorses his prowess. One of the responses to this unraveling of the icon in visual culture and public dis- course has been a series of Nike advertisements where James deliberates on himself as an iconic figure and the racial/visual paradox of being knowable in the most overdetermined ways and yet unknowable or controllable as icon and sign.
After joining the Miami Heat and weathering the anger and backlash that his decision inspired, James claimed a more
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emboldened sense of agency and self-determination. In an era in which professional athletes are discouraged from taking political stances or making statements on topics considered controver- sial or polarizing, he took several actions to condemn racism in American society and within professional sports. His vocal stances on racial injustice have made him a leader among other professional athletes. One instance that garnered a great deal of public attention was in March 2012, one month after Tray- von Martin’s death, when James posted on his Twitter account a photograph of the Miami Heat team in hooded jerseys with their heads bowed to show support for Martin’s family. The message from his @KingJames account read, “#WeAreTrayvonMartin #Hoodies #Stereotyped #WeWantJustice.”
In 2014, when tapes of then Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling making racist comments against blacks were released, James issued a public statement calling Sterling’s com- ments “appalling” and asserting, “There’s no room for Donald Sterling in the NBA—there is no room for him.”15 James told league executives that he would lead a player boycott if Ster- ling was not banned from the league in a timely manner. He reportedly told an NBA official that he would not play in the NBA if Sterling remained an owner.16 Through these actions, James challenged the power imbalance between black players and white owners.
And yet in another surprising and clear example of James’s sense of self-determination and agency, he shocked the sports world again when four years after The Decision and after two NBA championships with the Miami Heat, he decided to return to the Cleveland Cavaliers, the site of his dethroning (quite lit- erally). James was careful not to announce this decision as a live media event and instead revealed it through print media—a less spectacular and instantaneous form in the contemporary media landscape. The Cleveland Plain Dealer ran an image of James in a Cavaliers uniform with his arms stretched above his head and
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his eyes toward a heavenly light with the word home in large letters. A quotation above his head reads: “In Northeast Ohio, nothing is given. Everything is earned. You work for what you have. I’m ready to accept the challenge. I’m coming home.”17 In these words are a claim of a blue-collar work ethic that speaks to local constituents and an inferred apology. James’s statement of his now readiness takes up “the challenge.” While the media frenzy was not nearly as heightened as in 2010, one question that circulated loudly and publicly was how James could play for Gil- bert, still the Cavaliers’ owner, after Gilbert had published such a harsh and disdainful letter four years earlier. James addresses this issue in an essay published by Sports Illustrated called “I’m Coming Home”:
I always believed that I’d return to Cleveland and finish my career there. . . .
To make the move I needed the support of my wife and my mom, who can be very tough. The letter from Dan
Figure 24. The Miami Heat in solidarity with the family of Trayvon Martin, 2012.
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Gilbert, the booing of the Cleveland fans, the jerseys being burned—seeing all that was hard for them. My emotions were more mixed. It was easy to say, “OK, I don’t want to deal with these people ever again.” But then you think about the other side. What if I were a kid who looked up to an athlete, and that athlete made me want to do better in my own life, and then he left? How would I react? I’ve met with Dan, face-to-face, man-to-man. We’ve talked it out. Every- body makes mistakes. I’ve made mistakes as well. Who am I to hold a grudge?18
The Force of Serena Williams
While I pair Serena Williams with LeBron James, there are important distinctions between their careers and their respective sports and between the ways in which athletic power, body, and sexuality are read for black female athletes and black male athletes. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, basketball became associated with urban life and black masculinity in a way that no other sport has; in fact, the NBA has the highest percentage of black players of all major sports. Tennis, by contrast, is an individual sport that has historically been associated with the leisure and genteel classes, private clubs, and racial exclusivity. For tennis, training tends to be expensive and often takes place in exclusive facilities, many of which historically excluded blacks. The type of journalis- tic and media coverage and corporate sponsorships that these sports receive are also drastically different. Compared to most other professional sports, the culture of tennis undoubtedly produces very different conventions of dress, etiquette, and demeanor. Historically, it has been a sport played by the elite for elite fans.
Before the rise of the Williams sisters, Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe were two notable black American players who achieved success and recognition in tennis.19 Both are
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remarkable for mapping paths for other blacks in professional tennis. Gibson’s and Ashe’s playing styles and on-the-court dress were much more in line with tennis’s convention than the Williams sisters’ are of generations later. Venus and Serena, who were raised in Compton, California, in the 1980s before moving to Florida to further their training, began playing ten- nis as young girls with their father as their coach. The parents, more so than the daughters, have spoken about the challenges that the girls endured as teens because of their racial and class differences from the majority of participants in tennis schools and tournaments. As is generally known, Serena Williams is not the first Williams sister to rise to national and international attention due to her tennis skills. Venus, the older of the sis- ters, entered professional tennis one year earlier than Serena, in 1994. Yet, not long after, Serena turned professional, and in 1999 she won her first Grand Slam title at the U.S. Open. By 2002, Serena claimed the number one ranking by the Women’s Tennis Association, winning the French Open, the U.S. Open, and Wimbledon that year.
The Williams sisters’ role in tennis highlights how sports, race, and convention work together to buttress ideals of gen- dered physicality, racialized femininity, and performative aesthetics. The sisters’ ambivalent reception in the sporting world also uncovers a serious divide in how race, gender, and physical prowess are perceived by black fans of the sisters and the majority of white sports journalists and tennis fans. From very early in the sisters’ careers, journalists and critics made comments on their clothing and hairstyles (especially the signature braids and beads of their teenage years) as much as on their aggressive playing style. In particular, Serena Wil- liams’s fashion choices on and off the court have been read as an explicit signification of difference. Even more, her sense of style has called forth a rehearsed and familiar response to what is perceived as racial excess, specifically the black female
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body as excess. Together, Williams’s style of playing tennis, her “grunting,” the musculature of her body, and her clothing produce affective responses that play into polarized discourses where such choices are embraced by many of her black and progressive fans while questioned by the normative American public as markers of the black figure’s unwillingness, or even inability, to conform to American and European conventions of sporting, femininity, and social cues. The unflinching bold- ness of the Williams sisters as tennis players and fashion icons and always as black American women is a challenge as much to the racial exclusivity of the game as to its class privilege, which the culture of tennis naturalizes.
On the most rudimentary and material levels, Serena Wil- liams has defied tennis conventions by playing in attire that has veered from the standards of female tennis outfits. Tradition- ally, women’s tennis gear has been restrained and dainty, color coordinated, and flirtatious, but not overtly sexual. The flare of the skirt suggests more than it reveals. Women’s tennis attire in its feminine constraint and design is also a signal of the lei- sure and upper-class inflections of the sport: outfits that are not suited for labor or much more than playing tennis. From the beginning of their careers, Venus and Serena Williams moved away from the conventions of tennis fashion and incorporated bolder colors, a variety of fabrics and patterns, and urban and black accessories. Although my focus is on Serena here, it is important to note that her choices are in alignment with her sister’s, as well as their training and coaching by her parents.
Instead of attempting to conform or “fit in” to tennis’s racialized and gendered propriety, Serena Williams has used fashion and athletic technique to further distinguish herself from her white counterparts. One could argue that she embraces and plays with the discourse of excess through which her body and athletic performance are understood. For example, she has done publicity practice sessions in a neon pink body sheath; she
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has won major titles in outfits accessorized with gold chains and large earrings, the accessories linked to urban black wom- en’s hip-hop style. On more than one occasion and before a live, televised audience, Williams has removed tennis skirts to finish matches in “booty shorts” that commentators respond to with gasps and not-so-silent pauses. With a sophisticated, yet not explicitly (at least verbally) articulated, understanding of how her body is interwoven with racial discourse, physical prowess, fashion, and sexuality, Williams not only performs to expectation but performs with such dominance and presence that she forces us to witness our investment in the signs that we employ to make sense of her athleticism and embodiment.
Undoubtedly her most discussed outfit/win came in 2002 when she donned a skintight black catsuit for the U.S. Open. About this sensational moment and performance, scholar Ramona Coleman-Bell writes:
The attention given to Williams’s catsuit is rooted in the wider historical imaginary of the black female body in the American public consciousness. The catsuit accentuates every curve in Williams’s body, and images of her in such form-fitting gear often draw attention both to her breasts and her butt. In fact, many of the images of Williams’s body that have circulated via magazines and internet sites have focused on her extremely fit, curvaceous physique. The cat- suit, with its connotations of the feline huntress, and the repetition of sexualized and racialized iconography, works to draw attention to, and then displace, the fascination with Williams’s hyper-encoded sexuality.20
Williams has also played the U.S. Open in a denim mini- skirt, a black studded tank top, and knee-high boots. Williams prides herself on her role in designing and marketing her ten- nis outfits. Moreover, she has capitalized on her embrace of a style distinct from traditional tennis’s codes and propriety
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Figure 25. Serena Williams, U.S. Open, 2002. Photo Claudio Onorati / EPA.
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by creating her own fashion line and partnering with Nike to market sporting apparel. (Before Nike, she partnered with Puma.)21 At the same time, she has been charged with creating an “anything goes” atmosphere in women’s tennis, where now more conventional white athletes experiment with color and style in ways that were previously unacceptable.22
The commentary on Williams’s fashion are often subtle and not-so-subtle ways for sports commentators and fans to talk about her body—that which most explicitly sets her apart from the typical physique in women’s tennis. She and her sister are noticeably taller than most contemporary women tennis players. Serena is also muscular and curvaceous in ways that set her apart from the typically lean and slender female form seen on the court. As cultural fixations, Serena Williams’s garb and physique have garnered tremendous coverage in mass media— from sports writing to gossip columns to black lifestyle mag- azines—in a way that her taller, thinner, and more reserved sister has not. Serena’s body is discussed as a site of controversy. At the same time, her body and size are routinely defended and celebrated by black and feminist scholars and cultural critics. Williams’s relationship to her body and the commentary on it enacts a striking and powerful mode of embodied presence that demonstrates a deep awareness of her significance as an individuated subject, an exceptional athlete, and as part of a racialized and gendered collective, chosen or not.
Such embodied presence can be seen in Williams on the 2009 cover of “The Body Issue,” ESPN magazine’s inaugural issue. Positioned as an attempt to compete with Sports Illustrated’s highly popular annual swimsuit issue, ESPN’s magazine ven- ture pulled in part from the same talent pool of Sports Illustrated; Williams had appeared in Sports Illustrated’s 2004 swimsuit issue. However, ESPN’s special issue distinguished itself by focusing on the athletic nude. On the cover of the issue featuring Wil- liams, she is naked and smiling, accented by bright red lipstick.
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Figure 26. Serena Williams, U.S. Open, 2004. Photo Jason Szenes / EPA.
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Her hand reaches to her ear, and her hair, typically pulled back in a ponytail or braided during matches, is flowing and straight here. The taut, defined muscles at work on the tennis court appear relaxed and supple. Williams is all curves. Inside the magazine, she poses in a black bikini. She teases and flirts, as she partially pulls down one side of her bikini bottom. In another image, she is photographed nude from behind, standing in shiny heels and holding a white bouquet at the center of her buttocks. To great success, the magazine chose a sensational body and a body that causes sensation in various sectors of media and pub- lic culture to launch this annual issue. To date, it is one of the best-selling issues in the magazine’s history.
The focus on Williams’s fashions and her body titillates and excites, but perhaps also distracts and masks the underlying threat that she and her sister pose to tennis and idealized white femininity. The Williams sisters have been dominant forces in
Figure 27. Serena Williams, U.S. Open, 2004. Photo Rhona Wise / EPA.
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tennis without making many public overtures to its white fan base and while eschewing the sport’s culture and aesthetics of restraint, exclusivity, and entitlement. In an article proclaim- ing Serena Williams the greatest American athlete of any sport in a generation, journalist Ian Crouch writes:
Forget tennis for a moment, though: when I say the greatest athlete in a generation, I mean the greatest in any sport. Sorry,
Figure 28. ESPN, “The Body Issue” cover: Serena Williams, 2009. Photo © 2009, ESPN, Inc. Reprinted courtesy of ESPN.
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LeBron. Sorry, Tiger. Sorry, Derek. For fifteen years, over two generations of tennis, Williams has been a spectacular and con- stant yet oddly uncherished national treasure. She is wealthy and famous, but it seems that she should be more famous, the most famous. Anyone who likes sports should love Williams’s dazzling combination of talent, persistence, style, unpredict- ability, poise, and outsized, heart-on-her-sleeve flaws.
But not everyone loves her. Part of this is owing to the duelling -isms of American prejudice, sexism, and racism, which manifest every time viewers, mostly men, are moved to remark on Williams’s body in a way that reveals what might most charitably be called discomfort. What are they afraid of? The bodies of athletes, both male and female, are habitually on display, yet there has been something espe- cially contentious and fraught about the ways in which Wil- liams’s singular appearance—musculature both imposing and graceful—has been discussed.23
The sisters have commented about their disappointment and pain at being booed on the court and after their victo- ries in ways and situations that are racially inflected. While being known for their emotional responses to calls from ref- erees and the results of their matches, they have performed a type of restrained humility and occasional surprise as they have racked up title after title. Their responses show a deep aware- ness of tennis’s audiences and fan base and can be interpreted as attempts to mitigate their presence as threat. Yet, for both sisters, their championship titles and wealth are undeniable; Serena Williams is among the highest-paid female athletes in sports history. Even more, she has earned the highest prize money total in women’s tennis history. At the age of thir- ty-two, in 2013, she won eleven titles.24
When Serena Williams won her sixth U.S. Open title (her third in row) on September 3, 2014, she entered a very
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exclusive club. She tied with Chris Evert and Martina Navrati- lova in having won eighteen Grand Slam single titles in wom- en’s tennis. Evert and Navratilova were there to congratulate Williams and present her with a Tiffany bracelet. During this event, there were active attempts by media commentators and sports pundits to incorporate explicitly her signs of difference. The features that had long served as sources of critique and ambivalence—her fashion, her “passion” and brashness (but not her body)—were now discussed as part of the package. This, I venture to say, is because Williams made it very clear that as much as some wish that she were not a dominant force in tennis, her presence will not and cannot be erased.
As the on-air celebration wrapped up, a female journalist turned to Serena and asked: “Before I let you go, you’ve been such a trendsetter. [Points to her dress.] It’s called Fierce?” Serena responds with a big smile: “It’s called ‘Fierce.’ It’s a fierce dress. We decided to move away from solids for the year. Like I said at the beginning of the match, ‘Roar.’” While journalists chat- ted and joked with her about her new fashion line, seamlessly
Figure 29. Serena Williams, French Open, 2013. Photo Caroline Blumberg / EPA.
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interspersed with her recent challenges and that day’s historic victory, no one mentioned her elaborately painted fingernails, and in particular her middle finger—painted differently than the rest with sparkles on it. Here was her mark—both a direc- tive, a pointing to her presence and the future, and a “fuck you” to all who have denied the force of her presence for over fifteen years of professional athletics.
Serena Williams and LeBron James are two players who make no concessions or apologies about their sense of self pos- session and determination, as well as their athletic prowess in the form of “mastery” and “domination” over their opponents. They claim a corporate appeal—with many sponsorships— and yet do not explicitly attempt to placate white fans and audiences. In fact, one of their shared characteristics is their unabashed ambition and ability to dominate their respective sports without mitigating the threat of their blackness, intel- ligence, and physical prowess to appease white patronage or hierarchies. Thus they are extremely profitable to the white corporate power structures and yet physically dominant and athletically superior threats to it as well.
Williams and James inherit the stigma and achievement of previous black athletes who became national and racial icons. But they have also forged new paths in sports, brand- ing, and fashion, creating media sensation and controversy at nearly every turn. The stories of Johnson, Robeson, Carlos, and Smith are rife with the psychic costs of their exception- alism and concomitant state scrutiny. Even Jordan’s troubled personal and familial life has become media fodder, while he remains an iconic and wealthy sports businessman via his ath- letic line and corporate endorsements and as majority owner of the Charlotte Bobcats basketball team. Williams and James are still living and playing (with) their iconicity, their racial mean- ings unfolding in our increasingly corporatized and digitized lives as sports fans.
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Race, competition, and temporality come to the fore as we wrestle with our obsession with sports icons who achieve and do with their bodies what we cannot with our own. They literally embody the human body pushed to new levels of dis- cipline, power, and achievement. These performances become that much more potent and visceral when executed by a black American because of the logic of racial inequality and subju- gation, which continue to shape our national and collective psyche. Sports focus our attention on the performance of the body as it expends a masterly, skilled burst of energy. Profes- sional sports and their commoditization of the black athletic body also bring us face-to-face with the psychic and physical violence of the racial state that continually attempts to domi- nate and manipulate black bodies.
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