Emma Smith – Supplemental Post #1


After reading Boycoff’s article on Kaepernick, I became interested in the reading of sports stars as celebrities.  As a big sports buff myself, I’ve idolized sports stars since youth but have only seen or heard of a handful reaching A-list stardom.  Some star in terrible movies while others' stardoms are more intermingled with politics, like Kaepernick's.  I’ve compiled a list of sports stars turned “celebrities” with links for some of them.  I guess I want to know if you all similarly consider these sports stars celebrities or not? What might elevate some sports stars over others?

Comments

  1. Celeste OonFebruary 8, 2024 at 6:36 PM

    Celeste Oon - Supplemental Post #2

    Hi Emma! Thanks for opening this discussion. You know, it is interesting to think about the ways in which sports stars move through celebrity spaces. I definitely consider athletes as celebrities in their own right, though to different degrees. I see them as distinguishing themselves first within their own craft by being skilled at sports, but then by transcending the arena of sports and entering into other industries. Like you pointed out, some big name athletes act in film/TV and win awards for their performances. I guess my question is, at what point does the sports star become less associated with sports, and more with other aspects of stardom? For example, is Dwayne Johnson a wrestler that acts, or an ex-wrestler-turned-actor? I suppose a lot of this has to do with chronology and activity, such as what the person is currently and actively participating in. But are there any cases where a piece of work an athlete did reached such prominence that it surpassed their sports career? (Besides scandals!)

    Going back to the idea of skill for a moment, I think “athlete” is a type of celebrity that is most often attached to the idea of skill, because it is quantifiable via statistics. Whereas you cannot exactly measure how talented an actor is—perhaps by the number of awards they have won, but that would of course be a terribly flawed metric—you technically can measure the performance of an athlete, which is popularly correlated with their skill and talent. Even a quick search on the NFL page will pull up the stats for its players (https://www.nfl.com/stats/player-stats/), who are scored in categories such as their percentage of completed passes, the amount of interceptions thrown, and so on. Though the system itself is flawed as a way of measuring talent, sports statistics represent one of the most comprehensive systems that quantifies and data-fies what would otherwise be subjective opinion. Though this is contained within the arena of sports, and does not speak to why athletes may be considered celebrities in other industries, I think it presents an interesting case study as to how celebrity is measurable in specific contexts.

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  2. ninsFebruary 15, 2024 at 5:39 PM

    Nins supplemental post #3
    Ooh I love how you opened up the conversation to ask if sport stars could be considered celebrities— This was just on my mind as lately these video clips from a tv show have been showing up on my TikTok for you page that I’ve been getting into— and I just found out that the show is a Netflix adaptation of Colin Kaepernick’s real life story! I think I’m going to start it soon after reading his article and participating in all our conversations around it. I think sport stars have an ability to become celebrities in the same sense that Youtubers can become celebrities— the field in which they start out don’t launch them immediately into stardom but there’s potential for that to happen. Like Youtubers, sport stars can be launched into stardom through “graceful” or “disgraceful” manners— For example since Colin Kaepernick was launched into fame through so much political discourse, he accumulated “disgraceful fame,” but being associated with a Netflix documentary-series places him in the light of “graceful fame.”

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