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

6. In the Jungle with the “Clones”

6 6th Inning IN THE JUNGLE WITH THE “CLONES” In previous sections, I have examined the texts and industry of sports radio. Now I turn my attention to the third major area of cultural studies analysis: audiences. In cultural studies, the term “audience” refers to the people who attend a particular play, view a film or television show, read a novel, or listen to a radio program. The audience is also used in a broader sense, referring to people who are exposed to media culture. In a sense, the term “audience” is exchangeable with “society,” for it is used to refer to the many ways in which mass media/popular culture relates to the wider social world. From this perspective, all citizens of a society make up a potential audience for a media product. In this chapter (and the subsequent two chapters), I will be considering mainly the listeners of The Jim Rome Show to examine some of the ways they interpret and make meaning of sports talk radio texts. There are many ways to research audiences. The first set of methods involves observing audiences, focusing on ethnography (or fieldwork ). Other related methods include asking questions of audience members through individual or group interviews. Other researchers have used questionnaires to examine the ways audiences consume a media artifact. In this chapter, my audience analysis is based on a series of semistructured interviews with fans of sports talk radio conducted at various sports bars throughout the United States. There are inherent challenges in researching radio audiences. In particular, it is difficult to access a radio audience for participation, observation, and dialogue. Sports bars served as ideal sites for my research because many of the patrons who frequent these establishments are avid listeners of The Jim Rome Show and other sports radio programs. In addition, since it is a primary site for male bonding, the sports bar is an extension of the environment created in sports talk radio where similar social practices and discourses are evident (Wenner, 1998b). Given that my research is limited to a small number of participants and that the audience members I interviewed may not be representative of the North American sports radio audience, the results are not necessarily generalizable. My hope is that my findings will promote insight into what the recent dramatic growth of sports talk radio signifies in terms of men’s changing identities and gender relations.1 I am particularly interested in exploring the pleasures associated with listening to sports radio, the imagined community that is created through sports radio, and the meanings that listeners make of some of the more contradictory and progressive moments of The Jim Rome Show. While my analysis found little evidence of active resistance to the masculinist ethos of sports talk, I discovered some ambivalence in the way men (and some women) interpret sports talk radio, suggesting a certain uneasiness with more hegemonic forms of masculinity. This analysis yields a view of contemporary masculinity as fragmented, ambivalent, and influenced by consumer culture and neoliberal discourses. INTERVIEWING THE “CLONES” I started exploring the complex relationship between audiences and texts by hanging out in sports bars and interviewing listeners to The Jim Rome Show. These interviews took place between July, 1, 2001, and September 2, 2001, in sports bars in Sacramento, Tampa, Las Vegas, and Fresno. I conducted semistructured interviews with eighteen people who described themselves as fans of The Jim Rome Show. The average age of the participants was thirty-two. Ten were Caucasian , three were African American, three were Latino, and two were Asian American. Sixteen of the subjects were male and two were female , all identified as heterosexual.2 Twelve of the men were married and the two women were single. Thirteen of the interviewees, including both women, identified as “white collar” and were working in some area of business or sales. Three subjects were truck drivers and the other two were construction workers. Twelve of my subjects had college degrees. Conducting research as a sports fan in the highly masculinized space of a sports bar produced some interesting ethical dilemmas, including 112 Beer, Babes, and Balls issues of power relations and gender. Free and Hughson (2003) discuss the issues of gender blindness and other research dilemmas in their analysis of recent ethnographies of male soccer subculture (Armstrong , 1998; Giulianotti, 1999). The authors critique Armstrong and Giulianotti’s research as omitting...