Game Faces

Sport Celebrity and the Laws of Reputation

Sarah K. Fields

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780252098543
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

Sports figures cope with a level of celebrity once reserved for the stars of stage and screen. In Game Faces, Sarah K. Fields looks at the legal ramifications of the cases brought by six of them--golfer Tiger Woods, quarterback Joe Montana, college football coach Wally Butts, baseball pitchers Warren Spahn and Don Newcombe, and hockey enforcer Tony Twist--when faced with what they considered attacks on their privacy and image. Placing each case in its historical and legal context, Fields examines how sports figures in the U.S. have used the law to regain control of their image. As she shows, decisions in the cases significantly affected the evolution of laws related to privacy, defamation, and publicity--areas pertinent to the lives of the famous sports figure and the non-famous consumer alike. She also tells the stories of why the plaintiffs sought relief in the courts, uncovering motives that delved into the heart of issues separating individual rights from the public's perceived right to know. A fascinating exploration of a still-evolving phenomenon, Game Faces is an essential look at the legal playing fields that influence our enjoyment of sports.

1

THE HISTORY OF CELEBRITY AND THE LAWS OF REPUTATION AND SPEECH

Celebrities and the media have a complex relationship. Both need the other to maintain their status: being a celebrity of significant stature without any media attention in the twenty-first century is difficult, if not impossible. At the same time, in our “Peeping Tom society,” the public seems fascinated by stories about celebrities. As legal scholar Lawrence A. Friedman argued, the twenty-first century has pushed the bounds of what has historically been considered personal information, of interest only to the person and close friends and family. In today’s society, very little is viewed as being off limits to the media when it comes to the lives of celebrities.1 Thus, media of all sorts have chosen to capitalize on the public interest in celebrities by giving us what we want, because almost all Americans in this modern world consume and retain information about celebrities, whether we want to or not. That said, the concept of celebrity, just like the status itself, is fluid and ever changing. Furthermore, the media and its role in building celebrity also fluctuate over time. The background to the relationship, the law, which mediates their disputes, is no more static than celebrity or media. The evolution of defamation, the rights of privacy, the right of publicity, and the First Amendment are key to the battle that celebrities face when trying to use the law to regain control of their image.

EXPLORING CELEBRITY AND ITS COSTS AND BENEFITS

In 1961 historian Daniel Boorstin offered a now-classic definition of celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness.”2 In many ways this definition remains unchanged after all these decades and is my own definition of celebrity generally. Celebrity sport figures can be different in that they are usually famous initially for their sporting exploits, whether for their great successes or great failures. But winning a major championship or making a spectacular play is not enough to make an athlete a celebrity; it is only enough to make that athlete a winner. On the flip side, crashing at a ski jump contest only gives the ski jumper fame when the ABC network television show Wide World of Sports showcases it weekly on the program’s opening reel for more than twenty years as the exemplar of the “agony of defeat.” To be a celebrity, the athlete must be known beyond the sporting world, to have name recognition among people beyond sports trivia buffs. The true celebrity sport figure must be famous for being who they are. Their name and image must be part of the cultural zeitgeist, and they must be present in cyberspace and dominate social media. In 2015 celebrities could be identified in part (but only in part) because they had a Wikipedia and Facebook page, a significant number of followers on Twitter, regular postings on Instagram, and enough fame to be known by only one name, like Tiger, LeBron, or Serena.3 In perhaps one of the most remarkable examples of the brightness of the celebrity spotlight, in July 2010 almost ten million Americans watched an hour-long television special on the sports network ESPN called The Decision, in which National Basketball Association (NBA) star LeBron James announced which team he would sign with as a free agent. The audience was one-third the size of the viewing audience for game seven of the NBA championships the previous month.4

In the late 1970s scholar/journalist James Monaco categorized celebrities into three groups—categories into which modern athletes can be placed, as well as a starting point for considering the social significance of and fascination with celebrities.5 The first group contained “celebrity-heroes” who gained their status through what they do rather than what they appear to be. He noted that few true (or actual) heroes exist, and he did not list athletes among them.6 Boorstin, in fact, warned that “our contrivance to provide substitute heroes finally produces nothing but celebrities.”7 In the sports world, however, some celebrities are heroes; for example, when Michael Jordan hit the championship-winning shot in the NBA finals in 1998, he was a hero to his fans. In 2001 sociologist Chris Rojeck called this “achieved celebrity [that] derives from the perceived accomplishments of the individual in open competition.”8 Sporting heroes, though, are lesser heroes than those who save lives or who take truly heroic and self-sacrificing actions to make life better for others, which is the kind of hero celebrity Monaco defined.

Monaco then classified a second subcategory of celebrities as “stars” who gain their status for what and who they are rather than for what they have accomplished. An athlete such as former tennis star Anna Kournikova, who signed lucrative endorsement deals and whose actions on and off the court were closely covered by even nonsporting media, despite never winning a major singles championship, would be an example of a star.

Kournikova might also fall into Monaco’s third category of celebrity: quasars who are celebrities for what the public thinks or assumes they are. Despite her lack of singles championships, Kournikova alone received one-third of the coverage of all of women’s sport in British tabloids in the summer of 2000.9 Such invasive media coverage likely meant that many Kournikova fans were fans of the Kournikova they constructed and not necessarily fans of the actual Kournikova. When fans or media take control of the image of a quasar, celebrities lose control, to at least some degree, but they often gain in celebrity status.

In 2006 Ellis Cashmore, professor of culture, media, and sport, argued that all celebrities lose control of their image, collapsing Monaco’s distinctions about the degree of celebrity. Referring to the work of Michel Foucault, Cashmore argued “celebs must surrender themselves to life in a kind of virtual Panopticon,”10 a space in which the celebrity is constantly under public surveillance. With that surrender comes a loss of control yet, almost paradoxically, an increase in visibility and thus in celebrity status. The circle of exchanging power and control for celebrity status in the twenty-first century can be a rapid one, and with the presence of the 24/7 media cycle, reality television programming, social networking sites, and other forms of mass communication, almost anyone can enter the Panopticon of celebrity, at least briefly. The challenge is for longevity, maintaining celebrity status long enough to reap the rewards and move beyond that simple fifteen minutes of fame that artist Andy Warhol, in 1968, predicted everyone in the future would enjoy.

If the cost of sporting celebrity is the loss of control of one’s image, reputation, and privacy, one major benefit is the financial reward both from the sporting field and the endorsement arena. On the one hand, this gives some degree of power to consumers, who can decide with their money whom they will support; if athletes behave badly, they might lose endorsements, much as football player Michael Vick did in 2007 when he was charged and later pled guilty to dog fighting and animal cruelty. The more than 165,000 messages sent to Nike through the Humane Society helped persuade the company to suspend Vick’s endorsements.11 On the other hand, endorsement deals can also allow the celebrity to help craft his own mediated image through commercials, such as the 1990s Hanes commercials starring basketball legend Michael Jordan, several of which included Jordan’s family and emphasized his commitment to family.12 Endorsements, for however long they last, can vastly augment an athlete’s income and image.

Cashmore recognized the tie between consumer and celebrity when he argued that the purpose of celebrity might be to keep consumers spending. He explained this by suggesting “we don’t buy to possess the same kind of products as celebrities so much as to be more like them.”13 Sport Studies scholars David Andrews and Steven Jackson acknowledged the cash value of celebrity as well as the iconic role celebrities play when they defined celebrity “as a product of commercial culture, imbued with symbolic values, which seek to stimulate desire and identification among the consuming populace.”14 Therefore, from a commercial and sociological standpoint, the image of the celebrity athlete has great value, but that value must be protected—otherwise, the celebrity athlete cannot benefit from his or her image.

Loss of control of one’s image and economic value are not the only costs of celebrity. Some deranged members of the public believe that the celebrity “belongs” to them, and this can be far more dangerous to the celebrity than any misrepresentation or loss of an endorsement. One example of the dangers of a fan believing that he had a personal relationship with an athlete resulted famously and tragically in the stabbing of tennis player Monica Seles in 1993. Seles, the top-ranked women’s tennis player at the time, was seated during a changeover at a match in Germany when a fan of her rival Steffi Graf came down from the stands and stabbed her in the back. He apparently thought that by removing Seles from the field, Graf would regain the number-one ranking. Many other athletes, including figure-skating champion Katarina Witt, have avoided physical harm yet have suffered the psychological stress of persistent stalkers.15

The link between sport figures and celebrity is not a twenty-first- or even a twentieth-century phenomenon. Scholar Barry Smart argued that W. G. Grace, the great cricket player of the second half of the nineteenth century, was one of the first celebrity athletes. Utilizing C. L. R. James’s work, Smart maintained that by transforming the game of cricket and endearing himself to cricket fans as a popular culture icon of the era, Grace was a celebrity. Smart suggested that Grace was not alone. From reports about British soccer players in the late nineteenth century, the players were better known than local politicians and even received ovations on the street loud enough to “turn the head of a Prime Minister,” which suggested they were celebrities.16 In the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, heroes of the Golden Age of Sport, including Babe Ruth, Red Grange, and Jack Dempsey, held similar celebrity status. Smart ascribed the growth of communications methods and the increase in advertising opportunities with helping to give rise to the modern sports agent; he credited Christy Walsh, a former sport reporter who worked as the agent for Babe Ruth, with transforming Ruth’s celebrity sport-figure status into an economic powerhouse. Ruth endorsed products ranging from sports equipment to shoes to cars, and he earned appearance fees for speeches and other public appearances.17 In short, Ruth capitalized on his fame in many of the ways a twenty-first-century athlete does.

Long before basketball star Michael Jordan became immortalized by his namesake Air Jordan basketball shoes, retired tennis stars René Lacoste and Fred Perry created their own lines of sporting gear. Lacoste, a Frenchman who won the French Championships in 1925, 1927, and 1929, was nicknamed the Crocodile, and his signature logo was a miniature crocodile on the crest of his shirts, which began selling in 1933. Perry, an Englishman who won the Wimbledon singles title in 1934, 1935, and 1936, followed Lacoste’s path and lent his name to a line of tennis clothing he helped design in the early 1940s. Both clothing lines were still in existence long after the men’s deaths in 1996 and 1995, respectively, although the marketing of each line had moved away from sportswear toward more casual wear. Lacoste and Perry provided a model for late-twentieth-century athletic apparel giant Nike to follow when it began signature lines of clothing for athletes such as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods.

Sporting celebrity intensified both in terms of the number of celebrities and in terms of their economic, social, and sometimes political power throughout the twentieth century. The rise of sporting celebrity can be partly credited to the increase in the sheer number of media outlets and to their need to broadcast something. Excluding internet and print publications and focusing only on television stations, the increasing numbers of sport-centered media outlets have risen almost beyond imagination. In 1979 ESPN began broadcasting on cable television; it was the first television station to focus on sports all day, every day. By 2014 one satellite television distributor offered multiple sports packages: league passes give access to all professional games in that league, a regional package offered thirty-five additional channels with constant sports coverage, and an international package covered foreign sporting events. Those options did not include the almost twenty other sports channels that come with various tiers of program packaging. By giving athletes, coaches, agents, and sometimes owners, constant exposure, the media helped to feed their celebrity status—status that could result in cash.

In today’s society, even before athletes achieve success in the professional realm, they can cash in on their celebrity exposure. In 2005, when golfer Michelle Wie turned professional just before her sixteenth birthday, she signed endorsement deals with Nike and Sony worth an estimated $10 million.18 She did not win her first professional golf tournament until 2009 and would not win her first major tournament until 2014. Nike and Sony had offered the young woman endorsement deals not simply because the companies thought she would be a good golfer but because she had already established herself as a media darling who was able to attract crowds whenever she played. Those endorsers hoped that Wie’s celebrity would cause those crowds and those who saw her through the media to purchase the products she endorsed. The fact that she did not actually win any tournaments in the early years of her career was less important than her potential as both a golfer and a celebrity.

With cash and celebrity status comes at least a certain degree of power as well. Scholar P. David Marshall argued that “within society, the celebrity is a voice above others, a voice that is channeled into the media systems as being legitimately significant.”19 Some celebrity athletes such as boxer Muhammad Ali have used their voices for political purposes. Ali refused to enter the military after being drafted in 1967 because of his personal and religious opposition to the Vietnam War. After the Justice Department denied his claim to be a conscientious objector, he was prosecuted, lost his heavyweight title, and was banned from professional boxing for three years. His consistent opposition to the war cost him in terms of public support.20 Years later he would regain his popularity in American society and was chosen to light the torch at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia, revealing how fickle celebrity can be.

Perhaps learning from what Ali lost by speaking his political mind, Michael Jordan chose not to endorse Harvey Gantt, an African American politician who was running for the North Carolina U.S. Senate seat in 1990 against the conservative Jesse Helms. Helms had...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 The History of Celebrity and the Laws of Reputation and Speech
• 2 Lies, Libel, and Football: Coaches as Public Figures
• 3 Stop the Press: A Baseball Legend and Biography
• 4 Super Bowl Icon or Marketing Tool?
• 5 Owning a Face: Publicity and Advertising
• 6 Art versus Image: The First Amendment versus the Right of Publicity
• 7 What’s in a Name? Comic Books and Hockey
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index