Abstract
Repairing the Athlete’s Image will intrigue the multiple groups interested in the relationship between the media and the sports industry. Whether you are an educator, journalist, public relations practitioner, or in a position of responsibility within a sports organization, this text has something for you.
Edited by Joe Blaney, associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of communication at Illinois State University, Lance Lippert, associate professor of communication at ISU, and J. Scott Smith, a PhD student at the University of Missouri, Repairing the Athlete’s Image identifies examples where athletes, coaches, or organizations disgraced themselves and then sought to restore their image through words and actions. More than one-dozen case studies (almost all involving Americans) dominate the text.
Most of the authors who wrote the case studies employed Benoit’s image restoration theory as they reviewed attempts at image rehabilitation. Summarizing briefly, Benoit suggests individuals needing to restore a public image have a variety of strategies available. They include denial, evasion of responsibility, reducing the offensiveness of the act(s), planned corrective actions, and mortification. This book reinforces that none of these strategies is guaranteed effective in every situation and that more than one needs to be used when reputations are damaged.
My principal criticism of the book is that too many essays are thin, and therefore lack some combination of literature reviews, methodologies, identifiable research questions or hypotheses, or firm conclusions. This concern especially is evident in some of the initial chapters, which examine how selected athletes sought to salvage their professional identities after being linked to drug use or marital infidelity. For example, incorporating the first three chapters (all involving baseball players linked to steroids) into a single essay and including the missing items identified at the beginning of this paragraph would have made for a stronger presentation. At minimum, the strategies employed by the athletes and their effectiveness could have been compared, thus improving on the three standalone essays.
I found the essay titled “Celebrating Spectator Sports in America: The Centrality of Press Conferences and Media Interviews to Sports Image Repair” to be the most important. Written by Peter Smudde and Jeffrey Courtright, the chapter explores how press conferences and one-on-one media interviews must be employed by anyone attempting to re-establish a positive identity or brand. The chapter is limited to U.S. examples, so educators and others operating outside this country will have to determine how the strategies examined in this chapter apply to their audiences and cultural dynamics.
These authors (along with Michael Kramer, who explores how track star Marion Jones attempted to use an interview with Oprah Winfrey to repair her image) note one-on-one interviews will be interpreted by journalists and interviewers according to media norms. As Smudde and Courtright note, “The sports apologist seeks to get his or her main ideas across without saying something to detract from the message; the interviewer is looking for a good story to present with an interesting angle and gets to edit it for that purpose” (p. 377). Later, they state that “the competitive nature of the news business” and “a different agenda from each interviewer” place pressure on the subject to retain a consistent message (p. 384).
Kramer warns athletes to be careful in agreeing to the one-on-one interview. They expect the often collegial interplay between them and the journalists who cover them to continue, especially because “they often encounter deference and sycophancy in their dealings with sports journalists” (p. 70). Unfortunately (for the athletes), challenging and probing questions leave them vulnerable to straying from their intended message and undermining their credibility and attempt at image restoration.
To borrow from football, a bad one-on-one interview equates to fumbling the ball and costing your team an important victory.
An element to this book that deserved a more complete discussion is whether athletes are “coached” before taking part in a press conference or interview. Recognizing that these are men and women who devote hundreds of hours to practice for a game or event that can last mere seconds, mental and physical preparation for talking to the media seems mandatory. However, there are only hints that athletes prepped for any media interaction as they would for their sport—studying tapes, practicing (what they will say), learning about the opposition; in short, anything to deliver a “performance” that the audience will applaud and believe.
Setting my concerns aside, Repairing the Athlete’s Image is a text that deserves consideration for those of us in higher education who teach any kind of sports communications course.