The Sports Celebrity's Decline, Revisited

Discussing the decline of celebrity some factors seem to have relevance across that whole range of activities which make celebrities of individuals. One is the transformation of media culture--in particular the way in which contemporary life became hyper-mediated, and the associated media culture fragmented, with the combination at once leaving would-be celebrities forced to promote themselves to such a degree that they are far too overexposed to retain the control of their image so important to maintaining their mystique even as they are still close to being lost in the crowd, while the revolution wrought by social media and reality TV may be said to have cheapened the idea of celebrity itself. Other factors are more particular to specific kinds of celebrity, such as that of the movie star (whose standing declined as the theatrical experience waned, the "Age of Movies" passed, the franchise overshadowed the performer), or the supermodel (representing as the supermodel did a fantasy of old-fashioned luxury, elegance, beauty with new-fashioned lucre, freedom and sexiness, it derived additional vibrancy from the early days of the digital age, but palled with the arrival of harder times, and the rise of the "Influencer").

So does it also go with the sports star. As already remarked even here, the erosion of the audience for sports has been part of that, and so too the diminution of the bridges between the sports world and the rest of entertainment. Morning workout shows, for example, were such a bridge, and so too was the filling of "special guest star" spots on TV shows, and the way that sports celebrities so often parlayed their success into "fitness expert" status with its attendant opportunities providing celebrity endorsements, and all that could follow from them. Exemplary of this might be the career of six time Ms. Olympia bodybuilder Cory Everson, whose public profile extended far beyond the practitioners and audience for the sport, with her gigs on Bodyshaping and Gotta Sweat on ESPN, her books like Flex Appeal, her appearance on shows like Home Improvement, and her involvement with the promotion of brands like Reebok and goods like FlexTrainer--and all this enabled and supported, like the acting career that saw her amass a not inconsiderable list of credits in shows like the syndicated action-adventure series' Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Tarzan: The Epic Adventures, and films from Double Impact to Natural Born Killers, and the extent to which, rather than just endorsing other brands "Cory Everson" became a brand name herself, promoting on the QVC home shopping network Cory Everson-branded goods like the Cory Everson Solutions line of weight loss products and fitness equipment like the Cory Everson 15-in-1 Body Sculpting Bench.

Today the workout shows no longer exist, TV is much less inclined to use special guest stars in the old episodic way, the market for selling fitness advice to the masses has been taken over by a multitude of "influencers," and advertising generally is less drawn to the celebrity endorsement, not least because their stars shining less brightly than they once did their endorsement would not mean as much as it once would have. Of course, there were other factors in Everson's particular prominence, like the comparative novelty of female bodybuilding at the time that got her and colleagues like Rachel McLish a good deal of attention (this was the era of the Pumping Iron II documentary), and frankly the pin-up/sex symbol status Cory Everson, among many other female bodybuilders (like Ms. McLish) acquired. (Saying it all is how in one photo shoot for Muscle & Fitness magazine Everson playfully dressed up as a succession of film icons and sex symbols from the past--Jane Russell in The Outlaw, Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, a leopard print-bikinied Jayne Mansfield, Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C.. Meanwhile that same appeal was certainly very relevant to many of her TV appearances, as her three episodes as Atalanta on Hercules demonstrate, "Ares" perhaps the first and certainly one of the very few occasions in which an actress, let alone an Everson-grade pin-up, wore a thong through a whole hour of over-the-air television--and allowed the audience to enjoy the fact so thoroughly--in a costuming choice that was to also inform her appearance as Mara in Tarzan.) However, those factors also put the change in perspective, given how along with the waning of public attention to sports the institution of the sex symbol declined, certainly across the culture broadly, but especially as a factor in a career like Everson's--partly because of how female bodybuilding's standards changed, embracing an extreme muscularity less consistent with a Cory Everson-like appeal, but primarily because of how feminist concern for women's sports has become very inimical to a female athlete's gaining attention that way (such that today's bodybuilding magazine is rather less likely to feature any shoot like the one described above). The result is that the media-pop cultural ecosystem in which Cory Everson became a Big Name has simply ceased to exist--and a good many persons who remember Ms. Everson's name well would probably have a very hard time naming anyone who won the Ms. Olympia title since.