King Kaufman's Sports Daily
"Beer, Babes, and Balls": Inside the "Neanderthal" -- but sometimes surprisingly liberal -- world of Jim Rome and sports-talk radio.
Read more: Sports, Radio, Gay Culture, Feminism, Gay Rights, King Kaufman, Sports Daily
Dec. 12, 2007 | "Beer, Babes, and Balls," David Nylund's study of sports-talk radio, doesn't exactly look like an academic book. The paperback cover has two of the three titular elements: A football, a baseball and a basketball appear to soak in a huge glass of suds.
Could be a clue that a babe isn't pictured. Then there's the subtitle: "Masculinity and Sports Talk Radio." Nylund is an assistant professor of social work at Cal State Sacramento with a Ph.D. in feminist cultural studies. His dissertation, which became this book, studied how sports talk relates to contemporary ideas of masculinity.
"You can't judge a book by its cover," he says. "I sell tons of copies just bringing it to sports bars with drunk guys, but it's a pretty feminist analysis."
It's a bit academic and fairly rough sledding in places -- "I'm going to do an Esquire magazine piece to dumb it down a bit," Nylund says -- but it's an interesting read. The book is part of the SUNY series on Sport, Culture, and Social Relations, which also produced "In the Game," Eric Anderson's book about gay athletes, discussed in this space two years ago.
Nylund argues that sports talk, though much of it is, as he puts it, "Neanderthal," plays an important role in the lives of the men who are, almost exclusively, its listeners and callers -- a group that includes Nylund, a Detroit native who calls himself a passionate fan of that city's teams.
"Sports radio does appear to have a communal function and is a particularly interesting site to study how men perform relationships and community," he writes.
He argues that talk radio provides what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called a "third place," in contrast to home and work, a usually sex-segregated place where men "engage in male camaraderie."
That is: Male bonding. It's a role once played by public meeting places such as pubs, cafes and main streets.
Nylund pays particular attention to Jim Rome, not just because his is the most popular sports-talk show but also because Rome places so much emphasis on defining masculinity, and does so in ways that are, at times, unusually liberal for his field.
In order to find members of sports-talk radio's scattered, invisible audience to interview, Nylund had to spend a lot of time in another such place, sports bars. Coincidentally, he was spending his lunch hour in a Sacramento sports bar when we spoke by phone this week.
