Being a tabloid star takes more than talent
As Manziel, Bouchard and Woods prove, fame won’t get you far if you can’t back it up
As Johnny Manziel was putting in a pretty good effort in a losing cause against the Ottawa Redblacks Saturday evening, word came that former Alouette Duron Carter had been released by the Saskatchewan Roughriders — and that Als GM Kavis Reed was interested in reacquiring the bad-boy receiver-turned-cornerback.
As usual these days, at least some of the drama of Carter’s release took place on today’s version of the National Enquirer. That’s Twitter, where Carter informed us that he might not go on playing football, preferring to travel the world to find something where he can be himself. (Funny, we could have sworn that’s what he’s been doing all along — but what do we know?) Carter and Manziel could be a marriage made in tabloid heaven: they are both large talents who come with considerable baggage — but in today’s social media equivalent of the supermarket tabloids, baggage is simply a ticket to the headlines.
Take Genie Bouchard. When her fellow Canadian tennis player Françoise Abanda complained early in the Rogers Cup about the attention paid to Bouchard, she had a point: that attention is out of all proportion to what Bouchard is achieving at this point.
But Abanda’s complaint also revealed a lack of understanding of today’s celebrity world. Obviously, Bouchard’s Instagram presence and her status as a swimsuit model has much to do with the attention paid to her — but so, perversely, does her spectacular rise and fall. She was the promising youngster, then she was very near the pinnacle of her sport when she made the Wimbledon final in 2014.
Then Bouchard betrayed her occasional churlishness in various ways and when her game came unglued, that much-loved tabloid narrative of the fallen idol was complete. Her on-court success vanished, but the fascination remained.
Tiger Woods, on a much larger scale, has gone through much the same process. Woods was once the most famous athlete on the planet, seen as a paragon of marketing and majors. Then he was the chronic philanderer whose wife took a golf club to the back window of his SUV.
Now Woods is back, playing better than he has in years while the fanboys in the golfing media pant over his every move and analyze everything, even the way he walks from one tee to the next.
It’s important to say that being great at what you do doesn’t make you a tabloid hero. Simona Halep might be the first great player of the post-Serena era, but her tabloid profile is pretty much zero. Ditto Sidney Crosby in hockey, Mike Trout in baseball and Steph Curry in basketball. All outstanding athletes who remain humble, down-to-earth and (as much as possible) out of the public eye.
It must be said also that tabloid fame is morally neutral. Just because you’re hot on Twitter and Instagram doesn’t make you a bad person. The relentlessly self-promoting P.K. Subban does no end of good works off the ice, as does Crosby. Subban draws attention to everything he does, Crosby does his best to keep it quiet — but the result is the same, and the beneficiaries of Subban’s largesse aren’t complaining about his style.
Subban is probably a first in hockey. Before him there was Sean Avery, who had that tabloid way of getting our attention. But Avery was a no-talent jerk, where Subban’s talent is as huge as his growing fame.
If you’re going to sustain your fame in the merciless world of big-time sports, you need to be able to back it up. Cristiano Ronaldo, for instance, is as big a tabloid star as you can find, but even those among us who are sick of his whining and diving admit that he’s one of the two greatest soccer players of his time.
Keeping your name in the headlines, however, requires constant effort, especially if you’re going to accomplish that feat without hitting the police blotter. If all else fails, you can always date Lindsey Vonn — or Subban, for that matter.
It’s the way the world works now. You can’t blame the athletes for that. The tabloid athlete is a relatively new phenomenon — part talent, part huckster and (more often than not) part train wreck. The first tabloid athlete on our radar was probably Bruce Jenner, who was hyping himself even during competition at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. Never had we seen an Olympic athlete in such a hurry to convert gold to gold. From the start, Jenner was a man who would do absolutely anything for publicity.
Nor can you be just any old athlete and have an Instagram profile that is off the charts; even Bouchard had her share of success at her sport on her way to fame and fortune. It would be great to see her contending in the majors again, however, and a return to the top of her sport won’t hurt her standing in the Instagram/tabloid world.
If you don’t believe me, see Woods, Eldrick.
The first tabloid athlete on our radar was probably Bruce Jenner.