The sports and pop culture story of the century is happening right now and most people in America haven’t even heard of it. Imagine if an NBA superstar, former Most Valuable Player who had been to the Olympics and the NBA finals was caught up in an incred
The sports and pop culture story of the century is happening right now and most people in America haven’t even heard of it. Imagine if an NBA superstar, former Most Valuable Player who had been to the Olympics and the NBA finals was caught up in an incredible sex scandal. He has been living with a woman for over a year, video clips are all over the web of them kissing and canoodling at his home and in the locker room for months. Then tragedy strikes, in the middle of a competitive playoff series, police break into his home and arrest his girlfriend on eight counts of fraud and robbery. Even better, once she is in police custody it is revealed that she’s known to have up to 10 aliases, sports an engagement ring from the MVP player and is pregnant with his child. Upon hearing this news, the same superstar leaves the country to spend his summer "training" for the upcoming season and can’t be bothered to comment on the case. Amazing story, isn’t it? Now imagine that the player is a white man, and the woman is Black.
The events described above are playing out right now in the lives of Dallas Mavericks star Dirk Nowitzki and his onetime fiance Cristal Taylor who has been in jail for weeks having been cut off from the NBA superstar after her arrest at his home. This story has all of the elements to make it the next Kobe Bryant, Pacman Jones, Terrell Owens level story that transcends sports press and becomes the hot topic in gossip magazines, E! entertainment network and even a back page of Newsweek. Yet it’s received little or no mainstream coverage, and sports outlets like ESPN have all but ignored it. It’s not difficult to imagine that if an African-American athlete that skipped the country and left his white fiance and baby momma in jail that the coverage would be vastly different.
At a basic level, the coverage of athletics and entertainment in America is a reflection of the main audience that these forms of entertainment serve. More specifically, advertisers crave the dollars and attention of middle-class white Americans and chose to report or not report on stories that appeal to that portion of our society. The fears, desires, concerns and fantasies of middle-class white America drive reporting, especially in sports, and therefore reporting on large physically elite Black men and their scandals is much more comforting and agreeable to this group than something that might offend their own sense of racial and class hegemony. When you add in sex, any discussion of out of control Black male sexuality, especially from athletes, is fair game regardless of how little of an actual story exists.
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