Award-winning columnist Tom Archdeacon — an old-school storyteller in a brand-new venue — writes about sports, the city, southwest Ohio and anything else that catches his fancy… or yours.Home > Blogs > Through the Arch > Archives > 2008 > March > 28
Friday, March 28, 2008
LeBron As King Kong — All Wrong!
You know how they say a picture is worth a thousand words?
Well, sometimes a picture is just a picture.
As for Orlando Sentinel and ESPN.com columnist Jemele Hill and radio talkmeister Screamin’ Stephen A. Smith, I think you two are seeing something that’s not there.
Then again, contrived controversy does get you noticed on the blogosphere and bump those on-air ratings. Or, is there something else going on here all together — some kind of jealousy by one P.O.’d black woman — as Skip Bayless, another over-blown, look-at-me talk show type, suggested to Hill.
The point of contention is the April cover of the fashion magazine, Vogue. It’s the Shape Issue: “Secrets of the Best Bodies” and it features Cleveland Cavs superstar LeBron James and supermodel Gisele Bundchen.
James — dressed in black workout gear and letting loose with that same mouth-open scream you’ve see him do so many times after a rim-bending dunk — is dribbling a basketball with his right hand and has his left arm draped loosely around the waist of the smiling Bundchen, who’s wearing a slinky, form-fitting green dress.
Hill called the cover “distasteful” and compared the image — shot by the much-acclaimed photographer Annie Leibovitz — to that of King Kong imposing his will on Faye Wray.
“Maybe the point was to show the contrast between brawn and beauty, masculinity versus femininity, strength versus grace,” Hill wrote. “But Vogue’s quest to highlight the differences between superstar athletes and supermodels only successfully reinforces the animalistic stereotypes frequently associated with black athletes.
“A black athlete being reduced to a savage is, sadly, nothing new. But this cover gave you the double-bonus of having LeBron and Gisele strike poses that others in the blogosphere have noted draw a striking resemblance to the racially charged image of King Kong enveloping his very fair-skinned lady love interest.”
I think this is a racist take by Hill herself — painting James as some big ape — but she found support from Dr. John Hoberman, a University of Texas professor and author of the controversial book “Darwin’s Athletes: How Sports Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race.”
“It’s a great, great issue that Vogue has made trivial,” Hoberman told Hill. “It’s exploitative. It’s going for the primitive, racial emotion as opposed to something tasteful and edifying.”
And Smith parroted some of those thoughts and more on his daily radio show Friday.
Maybe I’m a Neanderthal or simply naive — and I do realize that Hill as a young black woman and myself, a white Baby Boomer, probably see things differently — but I didn’t have the same initial thoughts she did when I first saw the cover.
This was before the firestorm hit, and to me it seemed pretty natural for a Shape Issue that both would be wearing the clothes they wear on the job.
James is a super-amped, in-your-face athlete and that’s how he looked. He doesn’t seem to be holding Bundchen against her will. In fact, she’s smiling as if she’s having a good time.
That’s what prompted Bayless to ask Hill on air whether she was bent out of shape because LeBron was on the cover with a white woman.
Hill denied that — said something like that could not be further from the truth. But you can’t deny that some black women — like some white men — have the same adverse reaction when they see a black man and white woman arm-in arm.
Now if you want to grill the folks at Vogue on why they haven’t had more black women on the cover of their magazine — something like three in 114 years — I’m all for that.
But to think that James was duped here — or to paint him, as Hill does, as a guy who is uneducated on the plight of blacks — is unfair and biased in its own assumptions. Few athletes control their image or associations more than he does .
He told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that he was pleased with the cover: “Absolutely. It was good.”
As for the controversy, he slapped it aside the way he does a lazy lay-up by an under-sized, opposing guard:
“Everything my name is on is going to be criticized in a good way or a bad way. …Who cares what anybody says.”
The way I see it, things could have been worse.
He could have been in pinstripes and wearing a Yankees cap.
