Game Faces: Sport Celebrity and the Laws of Reputation (Sport and Society) - Softcover

Fields, Sarah K.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252081730 ISBN 13: 9780252081736

Verlag: University of Illinois Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sarah K. Fields is an associate professor in communication at the University of Colorado—Denver. She is the author of Female Gladiators: Gender, Law, and Contact Sport in America.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Game Faces

Sport Celebrity and the Laws of Reputation

By Sarah K. Fields

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Sarah K. Fields
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-252-08173-6

Contents

Acknowledgments, xi, 
Preface, xv, 
1 The History of Celebrity and the Laws of Reputation and Speech, 1, 
2 Lies, Libel, and Football: Coaches as Public Figures Butts v. Curtis Publishing (1967), 19, 
3 Stop the Press: A Baseball Legend and Biography Spahn v. Julian Messner, Inc. (1967), 43, 
4 Super Bowl Icon or Marketing Tool? Montana v. San Jose Mercury News (1995), 61, 
5 Owning a Face: Publicity and Advertising Newcombe v. Coors Brewing (1998), 81, 
6 Art versus Image: The First Amendment versus the Right of Publicity ETW v. Jireh Publishing (2000), 101, 
7 What's in a Name? Comic Books and Hockey Doe v. TCI Cablevision (2003), 119, 
Conclusion, 139, 
Notes, 149, 
Index, 181, 

CHAPTER 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. 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." 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. 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.

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. 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. Boorstin, in fact, warned that "our contrivance to provide substitute heroes finally produces nothing but celebrities" 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." 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. 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," 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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Illinois Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0252081730
• ISBN 13: 9780252081736
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 216
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande