C-Webb's celebrity

Examining the rules of the fame game

Sports Illustrated senior writer Phil Taylor touches on a Hot Button issue each Monday on CNNSI.com. After you read Phil's take, give us yours.

Anyone who is young, rich, good-looking and keeps company with a supermodel is neither deserving nor in need of sympathy, and Sacramento Kings forward Chris Webber will find none here. Most people, after all, would be thrilled if any one of those four things were true of them. It's not surprising then that Webber's rant about the media delving into his personal life -- specifically in a Sacramento Bee article about his relationship with Tyra Banks -- has been met with a national rolling of the eyes.

Give us a break, we're all thinking. Webber is just another athlete who wants fame only on his own terms, one who doesn't mind being well-known when it gets him the best table at a restaurant or a megabucks endorsement deal. But when it comes to our interest in his social life, he wants to be an ordinary Joe? It doesn't work that way, never has, and Webber has been a celebrity long enough to know it. Besides, if any of us were going out with Tyra Banks, we would not only accept the press attention, we'd be taking out full-page ads in USA Today to announce it.

And yet there were two sentences in Webber's post-game tirade last week that stand out. "I play basketball for y'all," he said. "I don't live for y'all." Those words suggest it's not so much the publicity about his private life Webber objects to as the idea that even his most intimate relationships are nothing more than grist for our entertainment mill, no more or less important in the grand scheme of things than his free-throw percentage. I have no idea what the nature of Webber's relationship with Banks is -- although it's hard to believe she's been going to Kings games just because she's a fan of C-Webb's jump hook -- but it's obviously meaningful enough to Webber that he doesn't want it trivialized by being turned into just another talk-radio topic. Watching me play is an acceptable diversion, he's saying. Watching me live is not.

I've dealt with enough athletes to know that instead of being flattered, they sometimes feel dehumanized by the public's interest in them, as if they're the main characters in a real live Truman Show. They believe we see them as entertainment devices, action figures that we bend and shape for our amusement. We expect them to perform for us in the game, and be cheerful and accommodating autograph machines afterward. They want us to know that they're real people who don't just exist to give us something to talk about in the car pool on the way to work or someone to gawk at in a restaurant.

The tendency is to believe that the obscene paychecks athletes like Webber take home eliminate their right to complain about any aspect of being a public figure, as if they've sold us the right to scrutinize every nook and cranny of their lives. Every time they so much as suggest their lives are less than perfect, we want to stuff their bank statements in their mouths. To some degree, that's understandable. An athlete can't say "Leave me alone" and "Pay my salary" at the same time, especially not when the salary has more zeroes than a Star Trek convention. It's also hard to reconcile Webber's chest-pounding, look-at-me behavior on the court with this sudden shyness away from it.

Contrary to popular belief, fame can be turned on and off, but only the public gets to flip the switch, as most of the Winter Olympians currently dominating the headlines are sure soon to find out. (Jamie Salé and David Pelletier, your 15 minutes are almost up.) Celebrities like Webber have a hard time coming to grips with that, because they're not used to having anything in their lives that's not in their control. We don't have to feel sorry for them if they sometimes forget the rules of the game, but we don't have to snicker at them, either.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Phil Taylor writes about a Hot Button issue every Monday on CNNSI.com.

The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.

 

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