Ali and the Modern Sports Era

One of the best things about living in DC is the ease of access to a plethora of great monuments and museums. Yesterday, I went to the Newseum, which navigates the history and importance of journalism and news reporting in the US. It’s a great museum; tons of information presented in a sleek yet comprehensible fashion all housed in a cool building.

One of my favorite galleries focused on sports journalism. The exhibit traced the evolution of sports journalism and the effects that emerging technologies have had on how we receive our sports news. The display also featured case studies of particularly important moments and personalities in sports history. One of the best focused on Muhammad Ali. As anyone who has ever read about him knows, Ali was a loud, in your face, confident (arrogant?) man who had plenty of personality to spare.

He was also a man whose life was centered around controversy. This was not just the result of the less than popular political stances that he took. It was also because Ali represented a new kind of athlete. Sure, there were sports personalities that came before him—Ruth, Gehrig, Jack Johnson etc—but Ali was markedly different. Ali was unapologetic in his image of himself and never held back when it came to talking trash. Thus, the way in which the press treated him was revealing with regards to how the country felt and reacted to Ali. The establishment favored a quieter, more reserved athlete and preferred to focus on the team and its struggles in the vacuum of the diamond or ring. The new school, however, appreciated how sports and an athlete’s emotion could relate to and comment on current events such as Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement. How you felt about him was a litmus test to see if you were part of the old-school—the establishment—or the new school: those who appreciated and saw what Ali had to offer. Indeed, Howard Cosell came to represent the new school.

Moreover, Ali came about at the crux of the 20th century modern sports era. This allowed him to take advantage of new technology and the new reporters that came with it as a way to craft his public image. Effectively, Ali shepherded in the concept of focusing on the individual and his story, not just the amalgam of a team’s collective efforts—although this certainly continued.

Where are we now, in 2008, in terms of where sports journalism sits? Certainly technologies such as HDTV and web 2.0 have ushered in exciting ways to report on and digest sports news. But the trend that Ali started—the rise of individual personalities—is still sloping upwards, as evidenced by the ever-popular athlete-as-sponsor model. I wonder if the tipping point is just on the horizon.