Beer, Babes, and Balls: Masculinity and Sports Talk Radio

4. The Jim Rome Show: “Myspace. om” For Men

4 4th Inning THE JIM ROME SHOW “Myspace.com” for Men In this chapter I look more closely at sports talk radio’s content in terms of the constructions of masculinity that it represents. My textual analysis forms something of a bridge between my analysis of the production of sports radio (discussed in the preceding section) and issues surrounding consumption (covered in Section III). Specifically, I conduct a textual analysis of The Jim Rome Show, the most popular nationally syndicated sports radio program. I have chosen The Jim Rome Show due to its widespread popularity and particularly because it employs a unique language each weekday on the three-hour radio program that lends itself to a fascinating textual analysis. According to cultural studies scholar Alan McKee (2003), textual analysis is making “an educated guess at some of the most likely interpretations that might be made of that text” (p. 1). The textual analysis McKee describes is a method whereby scholars attempt to understand the likely interpretations of texts (films, television programs, radio programs, magazines, books, clothes, advertisements, etc.) made by people who consume them. How do we as media researchers discover the likely interpretations of a text? In order to attempt to make sense of a text (e.g., a music video or a television advertisement), the first and most important aspect to remember is context. There is no way that we can attempt to understand how a text might be interpreted without first asking: interpreted by whom, and in what context? McKee (2003) suggests that in order to interpret a text, one should look at its genre—the codes used to communicate between producers and audiences by following particular rules of meaning. McKee suggests that the codes and rules of speech of a text produce specific meanings that help shape one’s identity (e.g., race, class, and gender). In addition to studying the genre of a text, McKee suggests that the text needs to be analyzed in the wider public context in which that text is circulated— what is happening in the larger political and social environment at the time the text is produced or consumed. This chapter specifically examines how the mainly male audience of sports talk radio might make sense of the codes, messages, and themes on The Jim Rome Show. I will explore these messages and codes using the framework of Dell Hymes’s (1972) idea of a speech community—a community that shares particular rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech that help create group identity. Specifically, this chapter will examine how the communication patterns of The Jim Rome Show produce a certain kind of a group male community (Tremblay and Tremblay, 2001). To further this analysis, I will examine how the show’s messages, especially those concerning manhood, are located within the wider social context about what it means to be male in contemporary society. Prior to my analysis, I will provide a brief biography of Jim Rome and the history of his show. The following section will furnish background about the show’s significance and parameters. JIM ROME: HIP SPORTS TALK RADIO HOST According to sportswriter Ashley Jude Collie (2001), Jim Rome is the “hippest, most controversial, and brutally honest voice” (p. 53) in mediated sports. In addition to his nationally syndicated radio program that airs on more than 200 stations, the forty-two-year-old hosts ESPN’s Jim Rome Is Burning, a weekly one-hour television sports talk show (and his second show on ESPN). Rome began his radio career broadcasting University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) basketball games. After graduating from UCSB in 1986 and serving seven nonpaying radio internships, Rome earned a local weekend job at XTRA 690 in San Diego, a powerful 77,000-watt station. The clever fashioning of a streetwise persona, his raspy voice, staccato delivery, and fiercely independent opinions separated him from the talk-radio crowd and he soon moved into hosting a primetime radio show. Eventually , his popularity earned him a television spot on ESPN2 Talk2, a cable show that Rome hosted in the early 1990s. Rome’s reputation of aggressive masculinity with unassailable expertise and authority was embellished in 1994 on the set of Talk2 while interviewing NFL quarterback Jim Everett. During the interview, 54 Beer, Babes, and Balls Everett knocked Rome off his chair after Rome taunted Everett by calling him “Chris” (i...