Sports Journalism and Women Athletes: Coverage of Coming Out Stories by William P. Cassidy

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sports Journalism and Women Athletes: Coverage of Coming Out Stories by William P. Cassidy Michael Tsai (bio) Sports Journalism and Women Athletes: Coverage of Coming Out Stories William P. Cassidy Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, ix + 127 pp. ISBN 9783030305253, $59.99 hardcover. Building on his incisive study of how journalists reported the coming out of two American male professional athletes (Sports Journalism and Coming Out Stories: Jason Collins and Michael Sam), William P. Cassidy has turned his attention to how the media covered the coming-out stories of prominent female athletes Billy Jean King, Sheryl Swoopes, and Brittney Griner in his latest book Sports Journalism and Women Athletes: Coverage of Coming Out Stories. Cassidy's 2017 examination of how American print media reacted to the public announcements by NBA veteran Jason Collins and Michael Sam (a standout collegiate defensive end drafted by the NFL's Los Angeles Rams) offered fresh insight into the breadth and depth of reporting and analysis devoted to the events over their initial thirty-day coverage cycles. In content analysis of some 248 print stories, the author found that, contrary to the perception of sports sections as the "toy departments" of daily newspapers, sports journalists dug deeper than presenting facts, reached beyond official sourcing, and addressed social issues outside the traditional boundaries of sports coverage. In the new book, Cassidy acknowledges previous analysis of media coverage of LGBTQ athletes from a perspective of cultural hegemony—thereby accounting for the vast disparity between overall coverage devoted to men's and women's sports as well as perceptions about the comparative impact and newsworthiness of male and female athlete coming-out stories—and expands the conversation utilizing the same media sociology approach he applied to his analyses of the Collins and Sam examples. [End Page 113] Cassidy's book is meticulously researched and firmly grounded in established theory and practice. In the first of four chapters, the author lays out the justification for his examination, citing the traditional lack of coverage of women's sports, the unique challenges faced by women in professional sports, and evolving media coverage of lesbian athletes. In King, Swoopes, and Griner, Cassidy selected three very distinct subjects whose coming-out stories effectively span the history of out lesbians in professional athletics. The chapter devotes the most space to explaining the unprecedented circumstances surrounding King's public disclosure that she had engaged in a years-long affair with hairstylist Marilyn Barnett, a response to a lawsuit Barnett had filed against King that revealed their relationship. As Cassidy notes, "When King was outed in 1981, it marked perhaps the first time journalists were forced to directly discuss lesbian athletes in sports" (2). The extended history lesson on King, which documents the range of positive and negative reactions and representations in the press and the issues they raised, establishes a baseline for the examination of Swoopes's more contrived and significantly less controversial coming out (via a 2005 story cowritten with LZ Granderson for ESPN's website and magazine), which coincided with her newly signed endorsement deal with Olivia, a travel company marketed to lesbian clients. While Swoopes's announcement received generally positive coverage, Cassidy observes that much of the reporting and commentary either questioned the significance of the story (given the widely held assumption that many female athletes are gay) or reframed the story as a set-up for the question, "How much harder would it be for a male athlete to come out?" By the time Griner came out eight years later, the reaction from the media seemed to be a collective shrug of indifference. While it is true that King, a pioneering feminist icon whose fame and popularity transcended her involvement in sports, and Swoopes, who ranks among the most dominant WNBA players of the generation next to Cynthia Cooper and Lisa Leslie, had higher profiles when they came out, the physically imposing Griner was a Wilt Chamberlain-like presence in college basketball and one of the few female basketball players to regularly garner highlights on ESPN's SportsCenter before becoming the overall No. 1 pick in the 2013 WNBA draft. The muted reaction was largely attributed to Griner's own understated...