ABSTRACT

In a culture obsessed with celebrity, sportmen and women are some of the highest profile figures. We are fascinated by sport stars' lifestyles, love lives, and earning power. Sport Stars investigates the nature of contemporary sporting celebrity, examining stars' often turbulent relationships with the media, and with the sporting establishment.
Through a series of case studies of sporting stars, including Diego Maradona, Michael Jordan, Venus Williams and David Beckham, contributors examine the cultural, political, economic and technological forces which combine to produce sporting celebrity, and consider the ways in which these most public of individuals inform and influence private experience.

chapter |19 pages

Introduction

Sport celebrities, public culture, and private experience

chapter |16 pages

Michael Jordan

Corporate sport and postmodern celebrityhood

chapter |15 pages

Excursions into Otherness

Understanding Dennis Rodman and the limits of subversive agency

chapter |19 pages

Andre Agassi and Generation X

Reading white masculinity in 1990s' America 1

chapter |17 pages

America'S New Son

Tiger Woods and America's multiculturalism 1

chapter |15 pages

From “child's play” to “party crasher”

Venus Williams, racism and professional women's tennis

chapter |22 pages

Postmodern Blackness and The Celebrity Sports Star

Ian Wright, “race” and English identity

chapter |14 pages

Evil Genie or Pure Genius?

The (im)moral football and public career of Paul “Gazza” Gascoigne

chapter |13 pages

The Spectacle of a Heroic Life

The case of Diego Maradona

chapter |23 pages

Gretzky Nation

Canada, crisis and Americanization

chapter |14 pages

Hideo Nomo

Pioneer or defector?

chapter |17 pages

Global Hingis

Flexible citizenship and the transnational celebrity 1

chapter |13 pages

Nyandika Maiyoro and Kipchoge Keino

Transgression, colonial rhetoric and the postcolonial athlete

chapter |12 pages

Imran Khan

The road from cricket to politics

chapter |14 pages

Brian Lara

(Con)testing the Caribbean imagination

chapter |14 pages

Cathy Freeman

The quest for Australian identity