Book Review: Repairing the Athlete’s Image: Studies in Sports Image Restoration, edited by Joseph R. Blaney, Lance R. Lippert, and Scott J. Smith

Abstract

Repairing the Athlete's Image: Studies in Sports Image Restoration. Joseph R. Blaney, Lance R. Lippert, and Scott J. Smith, eds. Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2013. 415 pp. $85 hbk.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. …