Assessment 3

Article

Civilizing the Child: Violence, Masculinity, and Race in Media Narratives of James Harrison

Adam Rugg1

Abstract This article critically examines the media coverage surrounding National Football League (NFL) player James Harrison in 2010 and 2011. In 2009, medical research linking hits to the head and the Alzheimer’s-like condition known as chronic trau- matic encephalopathy prompted the league to institute rule changes to limit violent tackles. Harrison was repeatedly punished by the league office and criticized by sports media outlets for his violent tackles and recalcitrant attitude. Guiding both the discipline and media coverage of Harrison are narratives rooted in a neoliberal logic situating the existence of and responsibility for football violence within the individual decisions of football players. Intensifying these narratives is the NFL and its media partners’ invocation of discourses of Black criminality to construct the most damaging moments of football violence as unsanctioned acts that operate “outside the game.” This invocation serves to place the authority over the judgment and legitimation of football violence within the White corporate morality of the league’s offices and its media partners, allowing them to preserve the sport’s central place in producing and maintaining dominant American masculinities through football vio- lence while casting off the responsibility for the consequences of that violence to the footballing bodies that administer and receive it.

1 Department of Communication, Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT, USA

Corresponding Author:

Adam Rugg, Department of Communication, Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT 06824, USA.

Email: [email protected]

Communication & Sport 1-18 ª The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/2167479517745299 journals.sagepub.com/home/com

Keywords football, masculinity, race, violence, concussions

The National Football League (NFL) is in a period of serious transition in the way it

sanctions physical contact within the sport of football. The increased focus on the

sport due to massive television ratings, record profits, and global television exposure

coincides with an increased focus on the medical dangers of playing the game. Over

the past decade, the medical community has been building an increasingly strong

link between concussions sustained playing football and the eventual onset of

chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a condition similar to that of Alzheimer’s.

The mounting evidence from the medical community has led to increased awareness

and discussion of the issue in sports media and popular media alike and has pre-

cipitated a moment of uncertainty and instability in the dominant discourses that

shape the game.

In the present moment, the dangers and consequences of CTE are widely known

among athletes, sports fans, and the general public. The postmortem findings of CTE

in the brains of high-profile former players such as Hall of Famer Junior Seau have

brought the condition to the most elite players in the game. Continuing studies have

only confirmed the pervasiveness of CTE. A 2017 study finding all but one of 111

brains of former NFL players having the condition received significant media atten-

tion and even prompted John Urschel, a 26-year-old lineman for the Baltimore

Ravens, to retire from the league (Mez et al., 2017). Urschel’s retirement joined

those of a growing number of players such as A. J. Tarpley, Eugene Monroe, and

Chris Borland who have retired early due to fears of long-term brain damage (Bel-

son, 2017).

While the number of current players wary of the dangers of the game may be

concerning for the league, it is the potential desertion of the game at the youth levels

that stands to most significantly hurt the league’s pipeline of both future laborers and

fans. Stories about the debate over how and when children should play football (if

they should at all) receive coverage in mainstream news outlets such as CNN, the

New York Times, and CBS News, while the release of surveys about youth partici-

pation in football and other contacts sports is scrutinized in search of larger trends

(Jones, 2015; Marcus, 2017; Omalu, 2015; USA Today, 2016). Even those who have

found success in professional sports have begun to vocalize their concerns over

children playing football. Kurt Warner, a retired Hall of Fame quarterback, drew

significant media attention in 2012 when he stated that he did not want his sons

playing football because it “scares” him (Smith, 2012a). National Basketball Asso-

ciation (NBA) star LeBron James went further to declare that his sons were prohib-

ited from playing football due to the risk of brain injury (Broussard, 2014).

The NFL, aware of the potential consequences of CTE for the sport, sought to

undermine, stifle, and discredit early research into CTE. High-profile exposes on the

NFL’s attempts to downplay or marginalize research into the condition have been

2 Communication & Sport XX(X)

produced in the New York Times and Public Broadcasting Service’s League of

Denial documentary and dramatized in the major Hollywood film Concussion. In

recent years, as public awareness of CTE has increased, the NFL has begun enga-

ging in explicit marketing and corporate social responsibility campaigns in

attempts to keep children invested in playing and consuming the game and

ameliorate the fears of mothers who may pull their children away from the game

(Dohrmann, 2016; Johnson, 2016; Montez de Oca, Meyer, & Scholes, 2016; Wilk-

ing, Golin, & Feick, 2015).

As Morrison and Casper (2016) argue, the NFL’s response to CTE is a reflection

of the “sports-masculinity complex,” which is “deeply embedded in the politics of

race, gender, and capital” (p. 159). Other scholars have also interrogated the links

between responses to CTE and larger structures of gender and race (E. Anderson &

Kian, 2012; Benson, 2017; Furness, 2016; Johnson, 2016; Oates, 2017; Oriard,

2014; Rugg, 2016). This article seeks to broaden these critical inquiries into the

role of race and gender in the NFL’s response to the emergence of CTE by focusing

on an important, yet understudied, moment in the time line. Between 2009 and 2011,

as the NFL first begin grappling with how to make the game ostensibly safer for its

players, it instituted a bevy of new rules between 2009 and 2011 that reshaped the

rules governing tackling in order to reduce hits to the heads. In outlawing specific

types of hits and modulating the types of hits allowed depending on the offensive

player’s specific circumstance, the NFL sought to present the dangers of football as

not inherent to the game, but as the result of deviant acts that can be legislated away.

However, these new rules proved controversial among fans, sports media, and the

player themselves who argued that the rules deprived the game of its essential

qualities or attempted to control the game at a granular level that the speed of the

game does not allow. The use of these new rules to penalize players, then, became

material manifestations in the game of a larger debate over violence and danger in

football and just who is responsible for it.

This article utilizes an intersectional approach to assess the application of these

rules and their surrounding coverage in sports media to better understand and cri-

tique the ways in which the NFL and media partners sought to preserve the economic

momentum and masculine formation of the league by off-loading the dangers of

football to the unsanctioned actions of “deviant players.”

While the rhetoric employed by the league and its media partners was directed at all

players who violated (or could violate) the new rules, no player received as much

attention as Pittsburgh Steeler linebacker James Harrison. The article argues that

guiding both the disciplining of Harrison and its depiction within the media are

narratives rooted in a neoliberal logic that firmly situates the existence of and respon-

sibility for football violence within the individual decisions of football players. Con-

comitant with these narratives was the NFL and its media partners’ reinterpretation of

Harrison’s aggression, stubbornness, and confrontational personality—previously

celebrated as embodiments of the violent masculine ideal—through historical racial

discourses of Black criminality and mental instability and immaturity. These

Rugg 3

discourses helped reconstruct Harrison from an exemplar of footballing masculinity to

an “out of control” and maliciously violent deviant, bringing to the debate over

football violence a familiar construct of deviant Black athletes needing to be con-

trolled by the White corporate morality of the league’s offices and its media partners.

In doing so, the NFL and its media partners attempted to preserve the sport’s central

place in producing and maintaining dominant American masculinities through football

violence while casting off the responsibility for the consequences of that violence to

the predominately Black footballing bodies that administer and receive it.

To better understand this moment, I utilize Birrell and McDonald’s (2000)

“Reading Sport” framework for interpreting the circulation of media narratives

around specific sport celebrities in order to understand how different “power lines”

intersected in the construction of James Harrison to reformulate a new relationship

between the NFL, violence, masculinity, and race. The analysis centers on the

treatment of Harrison by the NFL along with the accompanying media coverage

from October 2010 through July 2011. The media coverage analyzed is the con-

stellation of media outlets most invested in promoting the sport: prominent national

sports media outlets such as ProfootballTalk.com, Sports Illustrated, and the sports

section of USA Today; the sports sections of daily newspapers in NFL markets; and

the national and regional outlets of NFL television rights holders (Fox, ESPN, CBS,

and NBC). In combining the specific actions taken by the NFL against Harrison with

the coverage of Harrison in sports media into a singular representation, I am recog-

nizing the mutual economic interests of both the NFL and the media apparatus that

cover it to promote the league and protect its long-term viability (McChesney, 1989;

Jhally, 1984)

The Celebration and Punishment of Black Sporting Bodies

The black male athlete occupies an unstable place within the larger cultural forma-

tion of sport. Oscillating between a figure of celebration and consternation, the black

male athlete reflects the larger structures of racism that other Black bodies while

simultaneously exoticizing them in ways that produce perverse pleasures for White

audiences. As King and Springwood (2001) describe the meaning of the Black body

in sport,

Ultimately a social artifact, it naturalizes distinction, physically inscribing racial dif-

ference and materially legitimating social asymmetries. The body of the African-

American athlete, as a site and source of (exceptional) ability, (criminal) deviance,

and (spectatorial, if not sexual) pleasure, simultaneously facilitates imagination and

exploitation. And as it entertains, inspires, troubles, and revolts, it legitimates, if not

encourages, discipline, regulation, and control. (p. 104)

As others have ably shown, the institutions of sport, the sports media, and White

audiences resolve the paradoxical relationship of a fear of Black athletes and the

4 Communication & Sport XX(X)

attraction to them through the controlling of Black bodies and the sanctioning of

Black athletic behavior by White moral authorities such as coaches, team owners

and league offices, and the sports media, structures that remain predominately White

(King & Springwood, 2001; Lapchick, 2015a, 2015b; Oates, 2007, 2009).

Andrews (1996) has shown, for example, that the NFL has used changes to its

rules to exert control over the expressive behavior and celebratory performances of

players to restrain and restrict Black cultural expression. Through this rulemaking,

Andrews argues, the league “wield[s] not only economic power, but also the power

over what is construed as normal and abnormal behavior in professional football”

(p. 48)

This power to construe what is normal and abnormal has increasingly moved

away from ostensibly governing behavior within the field of play to dictating accep-

table and unacceptable behavior and performance in the spaces around and adjacent

to the game, such as in the NBA’s change to its dress code requiring players to dress

in “business casual” attire (Cunningham, 2009). In the current moment, the anger of

disgruntled fans (as well as the president) at the inability of the league or its owners

to formally “punish” players who protest racial inequality during the national

anthem reflects the contemporary role of rulemaking within sport. Their frustration

reveals the expectation that rules put forth by the leagues should operate not merely

as technical guidance for determining winners and losers of the game but as mechan-

isms that reflect the larger cultural and racial politics of the leagues and their owners.

As Cunningham argues, the legislating and subsequent punishment of “deviant”

Black athletes emerged from a sporting environment which saw “a fusion of the

black athlete with the black criminal” (p. 40). Indeed, the criminalized Black athlete

figure, whether criminalized in their off-the-field actions or on-the-field actions,

carries weight not only in sports media, where Black athletes are overrepresented

as criminals compared to White athletes and covered in more explicit and negative

ways (Lapchick, 2000; Leonard, 2010; Mastro, Blecha, & Atwell, 2011; Primm,

DuBois, & Regoli, 2007), but also in the minds and perceptions of sports fans (L. C.

Anderson & Rainey, 2017).

While the overrepresentation of the criminalized Black athlete figure offers the

most explicit rationale for controlling and “taming” Black athletes, it works in

conjunction with another common racist stereotype: that of the infantile simpleton.

As Collins (2006) argues, this representation works to showcase “safely tamed

Negroes who pose little threat to white society” and who are “castrated, emascu-

lated, and feminized versions of black masculinity” (p. 75). This infantilization,

then, rooted in the practices of slavery, works not just to promote White masculinity

over Black but to justify the need for White control by presenting Black men as

mentally and emotionally incapable of fulfilling the duties of a “real man” without

guidance and direction (Hall, 1997).

While these two negative representations seem contradictory, they each point

toward the same conclusion: that Black athletes need to be controlled, guided,

punished, and harnessed. Whether that is due to malicious deviance or inherent

Rugg 5

incapableness matters less than the resulting ways in which those representations are

seized upon to reinforce dominant racial hierarchies.

Complicating the performance and reception of Black sporting bodies in football

is the prioritization of the game as a space for what Morrison and Casper (2016) label

the “routine spectacle of gendered cultural politics” (p. 157). Football has, since its

inception, been intimately intertwined with a culturally centered masculinity based

on aggression, strength, and dominance. As Messner (1990) argues, the incorpora-

tion and promotion of these qualities within the structures of play naturalized the

equation of violence with male identity, constructing sport as a continuously replen-

ishing source of rationalization and legitimation for patriarchy (p. 205). Similarly,

these violent sporting masculinities found cultural synergies with militarism and

nationalism, transforming football into a politically valuable crucible for the pro-

duction and maintenance of the militarized citizen (Butterworth, 2012; Butterworth

& Moskal, 2009; Montez de Oca, 2013; Rugg, 2016).

Crucially, these idealized forms of masculinity necessitate not just the enactment

of violence on others but also the acceptance of violence on oneself. As Sabo and

Panepinto (1990) argue, the structures of football condition players to become

“ritualistically accomplices in one another’s physical brutalization” (p. 123). This

focus on the willful acceptance of violence has resulted in a sporting culture in which

pain and vulnerabilities are masked and hidden in an expectation that they are to be

stoically withstood or, if unavoidably visible, solemnly appreciated as necessary

sacrifices to maintain the masculine ideal (E. Anderson & Kian, 2012; Howe,

2004; Messner, 1990; Sparkes & Smith, 2002; Trujillo, 1995).

Ultimately, then, successful participation in football encourages the adoption of a

masculine performance rooted in the display of excessive violence, bravado, and

domination. Yet it is these same displays that become articulated as evidence of

Black deviance and provide the rationale for regimes and structures of discipline and

control of Black bodies that permeate sport and society at large. Thus, the inter-

pretation and representation of Black violent masculinity within sports and sports

media is always perilously contingent on its perceived usefulness in maintaining the

mutually constitutive dominant structures of race and gender.

In the case of James Harrison, his displays of masculinity were historically seen

as largely positive. His success as an individual player and the success of his team

were often presented as validations of the masculine qualities he possessed. This can

be clearly seen in the major media profiles of Harrison between 2008 and 2010. This

was a time period in which Harrison was named defensive player of the year and

won a Super Bowl in which he orchestrated one of the greatest plays in Super Bowl

history, a 100-yard interception return for a touchdown. In the week leading up to

that Super Bowl in 2009, in an extensive ESPN profile (Merrill, 2009) titled

“Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Harrison’s glare is only half the story,”

Elizabeth Merrill depicts Harrison as a fierce competitor on the field and a kind,

caring individual off of it. Calling Harrison, a “thinker buried in 240 pounds of

chiseled steel,” the reporter recounts numerous positive anecdotes about Harrison,

6 Communication & Sport XX(X)

from his charitable work with hospitalized children, to his dogged determination to

do well in school and obey his mother, to his stubbornness to succeed by doing

things his own way. Throughout the article, Harrison is presented as a man of

principle and relentless determination, who continually overcame being told he was

not good enough and lived to prove people wrong.

This positive portrayal of Harrison is mirrored in a 2011 video profile of Harrison

for the NFL network program “NFL100” (Top 100, n.d.). The program, created by

the NFL as a promotion for its network, profiled every selection of the NFL’s “Top

100 players” list. An opposing player introduced each player profiled by the pro-

gram. James Harrison was Number 21 on the list. For Harrison’s video segment,

New York Jets offensive lineman Damian Woody provided the introduction, saying:

He’s mean, man. He doesn’t care about who talks about him, or anything like that. He

only knows one way of playing football. And even though I don’t like defensive guys I

can appreciate the way he plays the game . . . You know, another one of those undrafted

guys. They’ve got a great story. The one thing he said early in his career was he wasn’t

coachable. And that can get you cut a lot of times. He got cut 3 or 4 times from

Baltimore, landed on his feet in Pittsburgh. And once he got inserted into the lineup

that was it. That was all she wrote.

While the Harrison NFL100 segment aired in 2011, it is still worth considering it

within the scope of Harrison’s positive representations of pre-October 2010. As a

large-scale promotion by the NFL network to celebrate its players, the NFL100

avoided any mentions of controversy and produced only uniformly positive por-

trayals of the players. Thus, in Harrison’s case, it neglected any mention of Harri-

son’s recent history with the league and relies primarily on the pre-2010 narrative

of Harrison.

In these portrayals, Harrison is celebrated for his unconventional route to success

and the aggression with which he plays the game. The fact that Harrison became a

star despite being undrafted is seen as a testament to his will, determination, and

strength. His continual recalcitrant attitude toward coaching and his isolation from

others is regarded with admiration for a man who “goes his own way.” His playing

style, heavily built upon intimidation and aggression, reflected the qualities of

violent masculinity that football, and contact sports in general, had long favored.

Rearticulating James Harrison

As E. Anderson and Kian (2012) argue, however, the emergence of CTE and the

increased awareness of the dangers of football violence brought about a cultural shift

in the performance of masculinity within football spaces. While the “masculine

warrior narrative” would still be present and visible, it would increasingly be modu-

lated and softened by an emerging concern over health. Harrison, whose perfor-

mance of violent masculinity was uncompromising, would quickly move from being

Rugg 7

the embodiment of a celebrated masculine model to a representation of the ills of the

game. The accompanying rearticulation of Harrison, then, utilized the preexisting

frames of Black deviance to individualize the dangers within the Black criminal/

infantile body in an attempt to protect the economic futures of the league and its

media partners.

The NFL first began issuing rule changes in response to the emerging medical

concerns regarding concussions and violent hits to the head in 2009. Initially, the

rules were often unenforced except in egregious circumstances and the game played

in much the same way it always had. Things changed in Week 6 of the 2010 NFL

season, however, when there were four separate instances of extremely violent

helmet-to-helmet hits on defenseless receivers. James Harrison was involved in two

of them. Press coverage was immediate and heavily focused on the hits and their

repercussions. Describing the potential fallout of the events, Sports Illustrated writer

Peter King (2010), one of the most prominent NFL reporters in the country, declared

that Week 6 was a “seminal” moment that “may have changed how defense gets

played in the NFL.” Trotter (2010), another NFL writer for Sports Illustrated, wrote

an article declaring the events of the week as “carnage” and calling on the NFL to

further protect defenseless players.

The NFL responded quickly, fining the three players a total of US$175,000 and

threatening suspensions for future illegal hits on players. Harrison was the most

heavily fined at US$75,000 because he was a “repeat offender” (Florio, 2010a). The

next week, the NFL sent a video to all teams detailing what is and is not a legal hit. In

the video, Ray Anderson, the NFL’s executive vice-president of football operations,

frames the issue as one of individual noncompliance by directly addressing the

players and stating, “you are on notice” (NFL’s Video, n.d.). In the 11 weeks

following Week 6 of the 2010 season, the NFL fined 27 players a total of

US$533,000. Combined with the US$175,000 in fines from the week before, the

final 12 weeks of the 2010 season saw US$708,000 in fines for illegal hits on

defenseless players or almost 4 times as much as the entirety of the 2009 season

and the first 5 weeks of the 2010 season combined.

Many players, coaches, fans, and commentators responded negatively to the

NFL’s aggressive policing of the game. Defensive players, in particular, many of

whom who grew up learning an aggressive and violent style of play, vocally cri-

tiqued the league on two fronts: that the rules were confusing and impossible to

correctly follow within the speed of the game and that the new rules were an attempt

to eliminate the historically favored qualities of power, aggression, and toughness

from the sport (Chase, 2010; Serby, 2010; Silver, 2011).

Unfortunately, the articulations of many who criticized the new rules often were

packaged within the same gendered frameworks that naturalize male violence and

reinforce problematic depictions of violent masculinity. In an ESPN Radio inter-

view in 2010, Kevin Mawae, at that time the president of the NFL Players Asso-

ciation, criticized the league’s renewed efforts to penalize helmet-to-helmet by

stating that the rules were too ambiguous and unfairly punished well-intentioned

8 Communication & Sport XX(X)

players. He finished his critique by saying, “I think it’s ridiculous and I think the

skirts need to be taken off in the NFL offices” (Rosenthal, 2010). Former NFL

player and current NFL Network Commentator Warren Sapp said, “It’s gotten

sissyfied, it really has” (N. Davis, 2011). Current players who felt they were being

unfairly targeted by the new rules also utilized this language. Redskins player

LaVar Arrington told ESPN’s Outside the Lines in an interview on adopting

greater safety measures, “to me, it’s sissification, and I think that’s the only way

to put it” (Smith, 2011, 2012b). Even Ed Reed, a respected veteran, spoke out

against what he perceived as unfair treatment by the league by declaring, “They

want it like powder puff to where you can just run around and score points ‘cause

that’s going to attract the fans” (Rosenberg, 2012).

Harrison was at the forefront of these criticisms, even threatening at one point to

retire. Although his retirement threat barely lasted longer than a day, the football

media was quick to criticize him. In an article titled “Memo to Harrison: Go ahead

and quit the NFL,” Orange County Register’s Earl Bloom (2010) invokes many of

the framing tactics found in later coverage of Harrison. He declares Harrison to be

a “reckless, dangerous man” who “doesn’t care about the lives and livelihoods of

his competitors.” Further, in a caption to a photo of Harrison, the article accuses

Harrison of “headhunting” and posits that he does not “understand” the conse-

quences of his actions.

Despite some criticism of Harrison’s recalcitrant attitude toward the fines and

emphasis on safety in the aftermath of “Black and Blue Sunday,” much of the sports

media seriously engaged with Harrison’s early criticism of the NFL. Many articles

focused primarily on the dry mechanics of Harrison’s fines or engaged with larger

discussions about safety and violence in the NFL, of which Harrison’s viewpoint

was widely shared. This can be seen in the numerous articles in which Harrison’s

teammates and coaches defended him. Even the owner of the Steelers, Art Rooney,

questioned the fines and penalties levied on Harrison and spurred debate over how

football should be played. However, as Harrison continued to rack up penalties and

fines through November and December 2010, the narrative began to shift, with

Harrison increasingly depicted as an angry problem child for the NFL to deal with.

This emerging negative narrative of Harrison was cemented and intensified on

July 13, 2011, when Men’s Journal released excerpts from a provocative interview

with Harrison entitled “Confessions of a NFL Hitman.” The interview, which was

conducted over several days, was full of many inflammatory quotes from Harrison,

including negative statements about two of his teammates, accusations of racism by

the NFL, and many profane statements about NFL commissioner Roger Goodel

(Solotaroff, 2011). Accompanying the article was a picture of Harrison—a vocal

gun advocate and collector—posed shirtless against a Black background holding two

of his guns across his chest (Figure 1).

As mentioned in the positive 2009 profile of Harrison, he was once accused of

hitting the mother of his son, though the charges were eventually dropped. Negative

media descriptions of Harrison, however, were quick to invoke criminal metaphors

Rugg 9

in describing the actions and mentality of Harrison. During the infamous “Black and

Blue” Sunday from October 2010, Pro Football Talk (2010), one of the heaviest

trafficked football sites on the web, ran a story with the headline, “James Harrison

claims another victim.” Numerous times he is identified as a “repeat offender” when

referring to his penalized hits on players (Florio, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c)

While criminal metaphors such as these are frequently used in sports when

referring to rules and on-field actions, media reactions to Harrison’s interview in

Men’s Journal began to use criminal metaphor in describing Harrison’s off-field

actions and his general person. In particular, the picture of Harrison and his guns

enabled discussions that connected Harrison to gun violence. For instance, the

picture prompted Boston Herald writer Ron Borges (2011) to exclaim, “Judging

by the Harrison photo and recent police reports from around the country, NFL

owners best end the lockout soon before their players all end up in lock-down.”

Going further, ESPN writer L. Z. Granderson (2011) ended a lamenting editorial on

Harrison with the graph,

I guess I’m at the point where my desire for someone to be something he’s not has

given way to accepting who he really is. Fines and suspensions can punish, jail can

deter but eventually a person’s going to be who he is going to be. I hope for change but

accept people may not. If Harrison was reported arrested tomorrow, I doubt anyone

would be shocked. He’s projected that kind of image

In continuingly describing Harrison’s on-field behavior as criminal and drawing

criminal interpretations from his interview photo, a slippage occurred that

allowed many in the media to re-interpret Harrison’s on-field actions as

“reckless” and “dangerous,” and as troubling manifestations of an intentionally

Figure 1. Confessions of an NFL Hitman.

10 Communication & Sport XX(X)

criminal mind-set, not as the necessary machinations of a hegemonic masculi-

nity previously celebrated by the league and its fans. The Men’s Journal inter-

view enabled Harrison to become marked as a criminal visually (through the

accompanying photo) and mentally (through the vitriol of his responses). In

many ways, the Men’s Journal article became the ex post facto explanation

of Harrison’s entire career.

In addition to positioning Harrison as having a criminal mind-set, the media

repeatedly positioned Harrison as a child through the use of metaphor. In November

2010, after being penalized for a hit on Saints’ quarterback Drew Brees, Harrison

met with Roger Goodell to discuss the NFL’s agenda against illegal hits. In a short

and mundane news item on the meeting, Florio (2010d) attached the headline,

“James Harrison gets called to the Principal’s Office.” After the Men’s Journal

interview, the child comparisons came back in even greater numbers. The princi-

pal/student metaphor reappeared in a July 13, 2011, article by Fox Sports Ohio

reporter Zac Jackson (2011) who stated that Harrison was “no stranger to a trip to

the principal’s office.” Also, Harrison’s obsession with cartoons, positively seen as

an escape from the stress of the world in his 2009 ESPN profile, became the basis for

a Washington Times article that compared Harrison to Elmer Fudd and argued that

he lives in a “cartoon world” (Daly, 2011).

The most egregious example of the infantilization of Harrison can be found in an

article in the Orlando Sentinel by Owens (2011). The article, “James Harrison needs

to be responsible with the truth,” begins with an anecdote about how one of the first

lessons parents teach a child is to tell the truth, before leading into the statement,

“Ladies and gentlemen, meet the man-child otherwise known as James Harrison.”

The article maintains the child motif for the length of the story, culminating in the

author comparing the “filter” of Harrison to that of a 3-year old.

In addition to the use of child metaphors in describing Harrison’s actions and

comments, Harrison’s mental stability and level of intellect are repeatedly ques-

tioned. He is depicted as “without a clue” (Bloom, 2010), “stupidly” (Borges, 2011),

“looking like an idiot” (Fox, 2011), and a man who “could not get from thought A to

thought B without demeaning this person or ridiculing that one” (Lopresti, 2011).

Florio (2010e) at Pro Football Talk repeatedly questioned Harrison’s understanding

of the game, sarcastically detailing the rules and concluding with “it’s as simple as

that,” and suggesting that a Steelers coach needs to teach the 8-year veteran “the

rules of the game.” The demeaning, or ignoring, of Black intelligence has long been

a technique of racism. In sports, in particular, many scholars have shown how

representations of Black and White athletes often invoke descriptive binaries that

situate the Black athlete as athletic and the White athlete as intelligent. While many

of these studies refer to in-game descriptions of athletes, they are still cultural

descriptors that place players within larger cultural frameworks based on race and

would thus work to guide and inform off-field representations of athletes (L. R.

Davis & Harris, 2002; Rada & Wulfemeyer, 2005; Van Sterkenburg, Knoppers, &

De Leeuw, 2010).

Rugg 11

Harrison’s mental maturity was also challenged in the form of his sanity. Jackson

(2011) called Harrison “a little bit nuts” and suggested that he might be “genuinely

crazy.” Brinson (2011) of CBS Sports declared that Harrison had taken a “spin over

into crazytown.” The Rap Sheet (2011), a sports blog for the Boston Herald, easily

provided the most explicit use of the descriptor, headlining an article about Harri-

son’s interview with the title, “Steelers LB James Harrison, possibly crazy, says a

bunch of crazy about everyone.”

Frequently in the coverage of Harrison, columnists made allusions to how

Harrison’s interview did contain legitimate criticisms. However, those criticisms

could never be addressed because of the incivility in which Harrison presented

them. Lopresti (2011) of USA Today accused Harrison of using “flamethrower

rhetoric” that could only be defended by “those whose bar for civility is no higher

than an anthill.” Kerry Byrne (2011) of Sports Illustrated said Harrison “took a

machete to sports etiquette.” Freeman (2011) of CBS Sports stated, in an article

generally approving of Harrison’s critiques, that Harrisons’ lack of filter prevented

him “from being taken seriously.” NBC Sports’ Mike Florio (2011) echoed similar

feelings, stating “If Harrison could confine his comments to those points and avoid

reckless accusations and name calling, Harrison’s views would be taken far more

seriously.”

The discursive constructions of Harrison as negatively exceptional were fur-

ther reinforced by coverage that continually emphasized Harrison’s disconnect

with his teammates and other NFL players. Indeed, much of the reaction to the

Harrison interview centered on Harrison’s attacks on his fellow players and

gauging negative responses to the interview by current and former players on

other teams. Harrison was repeatedly criticized for not being in a “team frame of

mind” during the interview, with Burton (2011) even questioning whether his

teammates would “take it out on him.” The NFL Network (2011) aired a group

discussion segment entitled “Has Harrison lost his teammates with his words?”

Other reporters wondered whether Harrison would even be invited to teammate

Ben Roethlisberger’s wedding (he was). Reactions to Harrison’s comments by

current and former players were collected by many reporters, with much news

being made of former Steelers player Jerome Bettis’ comments that he was

“disappointed” in Harrison (Smith, 2011). Brooks (2011) of The Washington

Post’s “The Early Lead” blog even ran an article titled “James Harrison’s

incendiary comments drawing ire of fellow NFL players” that contained screen-

shots of critical tweets of Harrison from only two players in addition to a

fictional dialogue the author envisioned between Harrison and Roethlisberger.

However, despite the preponderance of articles on Harrison’s falling out with

teammates and players around the league, there was very little evidence of

actual fallout between Harrison and the player fraternity. In fact, Harrison’s

teammates continually defended him in the aftermath of the interview, and some

articles even emphasized that many players around the league quietly shared

Harrison’s feelings about Roger Goodell (Fox, 2011).

12 Communication & Sport XX(X)

Conclusion

Ultimately, the handling of James Harrison by the league and the subsequent media

coverage by the sports media represent an early indicator of the ways in which the

NFL and its media partners would attempt to keep an unstable compromise—to

preserve the league as a favored producer of violent masculine identities while

simultaneously absolving itself of the consequences of those identities. With James

Harrison, the league and its media partners were able to do this by pinning the

negative consequences of violent football masculinities on a reimagined represen-

tation of Harrison based on preexisting frames of Black criminality and mental

instability and immaturity.

Thus, the disciplining of Harrison represented a hegemonic negotiation aimed to

preserve football as a realm of (White) masculine dominance. As Enck-Wanzer

(2009) argues, certain aspects of violent masculinity, such as domestic abuse, violent

crime, and debilitating injuries, are rhetorically expunged from the whole of mas-

culinity by casting them off as machinations of deviant, criminalized, racialized

bodies. This is now occurring in the NFL, with the increasing amount of medical

evidence suggesting that football is an inherently debilitating enterprise to those who

play it. Moving forward, it is most likely that the most violent and damaging hits of

football will increasingly be depicted as abnormal occurrences of deviant players

rather than the consequences of a sport that has historically cultivated an expression

of masculinity based on the use of violence as a tool of domination and an expression

of power.

Importantly, Harrison’s actions, style of play, and demeanor remained consistent

through the shift in coverage from a masculine ideal to an out-of-control deviant.

Rather, it was his recalcitrance regarding the rules and his subsequent refusal to

acquiesce to punishment from the league and admonishment from sports media that

affected the shift. In doing so, the qualities he possessed which previously drew him

much acclaim—his aggression, stubbornness, and confrontational approach—

became threatening and unacceptable marks of deviance. Regardless of the ques-

tionable efficacy of the new rules, the upheaval they required in individual defensive

players’ approach to playing the game, or the culpability of the league’s investment

in constructing and promoting the masculine identity which Harrison embodied, the

new rules reflected a “new normal” that players were expected to follow. More

importantly, they stood as a reassertion of the league’s perceived right to legislate,

control, and dictate the behaviors of its players.

The rearticulation of Harrison, then, reveals the fragility of positive Black athlete

portrayals in media. With such a broad gamut of negative representations available,

from those based in weakness, laziness, and unintelligence to those based in aggres-

sion, passion, and individuality, the depiction of Black athletes is conditional more

than it is illustrative. The shifting relationship between the NFL and violence amid

the emergence of CTE produced new masculine formations within the sport that

Harrison did not align with. Without the accompanying support of broader gender

Rugg 13

hierarchies within the sport, Harrison’s actions quickly reemerged as a front in the

larger struggle over White control over Black sporting bodies.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-

ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of

this article.

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