Decoding the Curse:
The Racial Subtexts of the New Face of Madden Football
by David J. Leonard and C. Richard King
Ladies and Gentlemen, we are pleased to announce this year’s cover for Madden 2012: Peyton Hillis. Who? Peyton Hillis. No, not Peyton Manning. He’s a great player, but didn’t have his greatest year in 2011. Right, the running back. No, not Walter Payton (RIP). Not Sweetness; not Gary Payton; Toby Gillis, or any other sport celebrity that might immediately come to mind.
Peyton Hillis, drafted in the seventh round of the 2008 NFL by the Denver Broncos, had a break out season after being traded to the Cleveland Browns and stepping up to replace the injured rookie Montario Hardesty. He rushed for 1,177 yards and scored 11 touchdowns in the 2010 NFL season, becoming a cult hero for many fans.
Following in the footsteps of Eddie George, Michael Vick, Ray Lewis, Donovan McNabb, Shaun Alexander, Vince Young, Brett Favre, Larry Fitzgerald, Troy Polamalu and Drew Brees, Hillis will become the latest NFL player to appear on the cover of this flagship game. Unlike his predecessors, Hillis is neither a perennial star nor a household name. His selection, however, speaks volumes about sport celebrity, new media, and old racial politics.
In a canny marketing campaign, EA Sports teamed up with ESPN to stage its own “March Madness,” a 32-person bracket that allowed fans to select the athlete to be featured on the cover. This system played to national fantasies about meritocracy and free democracy. The Bleacher Report described the approach in the following way: “Each player will go against an opposing player to see who gets the most votes. The one who gets the most votes will move on to the next round and face another player. The selection process with go under those terms until a winner is chosen. Be sure to vote each week for your favorites to find out who will be on the Madden 12 cover.” After successive rounds that saw several potential NFL stars, including Adrian Peterson and Drew Brees, lose their bids to appear on the cover, voters were left with two choices, Peyton Hillis and Michael Vick.
At a certain level, the differences between these two men wrote the narrative itself: Vick, the former first-round pick who has long dazzled fans with his brilliance on the field; Hillis, a relative unknown drafted in the seventh round out of University of Arkansas; Vick, the odds on favorite, against Hillis, the underdog, seeded tenth in the bracket, who had already beaten Matt Ryan, Ray Rice, and Aaron Rodgers; Vick, whose legal troubles made him a media pariah; Hillis, described as “the common man.” Yet, each also fit into the media’s narrative obsession with redemption with Madden affording Vick the opportunity to solidify his comeback and Hillis the chance to prove himself.
In the final vote, Hillis dominated Vick, securing 64% of the vote. While it may be tempting to see the results a mere popularity contest, they say more about the significance of race today than the appeal of individual athletes.
At a certain level, it is easy to think about Vick’s loss in the final (he had won in previous rounds) as confirmation of the difficult path toward redemption for contemporary black athletes. Like Vick’s persistently low-q score, Hillis’ annihilation of Vick suggests that he may be branded forever as a convicted felon, thug, dog fighter and gangster. It demonstrates that whereas whiteness in a sporting context continues to reference the hard-working, cerebral hero, blackness exists as “a problematic sign and ontological position” (Williams 1998, p. 140). In this regard, Vick is unable to transcend the scripts that limit his public identity. As such, many fans took to the Internet to confirm that this was a referendum on Vick, underscoring that he did not deserve the cover because of his past behavior. For example, the following was posted on ESPN.com:
Vick is scum! Vick's dog fighting was the least of it. Vick killed thirteen dogs by various methods including wetting one dog down and electrocuting her, hanging, drowning and shooting others and, in at least one case, by slamming a dog's body to the ground. He forcibly drowned a pit bull! Can you imagine the struggling dog in his hands, drowning?!?! What kind of person does this? A sick, evil person, who is now free in society. Vick also thought it "funny" to put family pet dogs in with pit bulls to see them ripped apart. Is this a man you think should be free to roam in society? He didn't make a mistake. He did this for five years! He is the scum of earth. Think of what's in his brain? He is beyond evil. If a person had done these same things to a human, we would say that they are beyond help, and would never be allowed back into society, but if you do it to a dog, then rehabilitation is fast and easy, and all is forgiven and forgotten very quickly. He's healed? Is he eff !!!!
Many others followed suit, taking this as an opportunity to further punish and discipline Vick for his past. Yet, to reduce Hillis victory to the disdain for Vick/unredemptive possibilities for transgressive black bodies is to ignore the broader issues at work here.
At one level, the arrival of Hillis illustrates the celebration of whiteness and nostalgia for a different era in sports. It represents a moment where sports fans symbolically took the sport back. He was the underdog who miraculously beat Michael Vick. This evident in comments like this: “Peyton Hillis is a monster! Who doesn't want a white guy at running back in the NFL, goes back to the old days of football.”
In reading website comments and reviewing various commentaries, it becomes clear that many fans find in Hillis an opportunity to reengage the NFL through what Joe Feagin dubs the “white racial frame.” To this constituency, following C.L. Cole and David Andrews (2001, 72) take on the NBA in the closing decades of the 20th century, Hillis offers football fans in the 21st century a “breath of fresh air for an American public ‘tired of trash-talking, spit-hurling, head-butting sports millionaires.’” He provides a racial time machine to an imagined period of sports where (white) male heroes played the right way; he is constructed as a clear alternative to “African American professional basketball players who are routinely depicted in the popular media as selfish, insufferable, and morally reprehensible” (Cole & Andrews, 2001: 72).
At another level, Hillis’ victory can be read as something of a triumph for the backlash against racial justice and for the usefulness of sincere fictions in a society of spectacle. When asked about whether or not other players used race as part of trash-talking Hillis stated: “Every team did it. They’ll say, ‘You white boy, you ain’t gonna run on us today. This is ridiculous. Why are you giving offensive linemen the ball? All kinds of stuff like that you hear on the field, but I use that to my advantage. I kind of soaked it in, ate it up a little bit, because I enjoyed it.” Despite his focus on racially-based trash-talking, the media discourse pivoted, focusing on reverse racism and systemic racism.
In “Racism Alive and Swell in NFL,” LeCharles Bentley, a former NFL center, argues that Hillis, who isn’t the prototypical “chocolate bruiser” is the latest victim of the color bar of the NFL. “Apparently a white running back who struggled because he was pigeon-holed as a fullback isn't as valued as a black running back with multiple knee injuries. This is eerily similar to the early years in the NFL when black players struggled with typecasting but kept their mouths shut for fear of being labeled a ‘troublemaker.’ The argument here is simple: Not only did Hillis face difficulty in securing a job because of prejudice, but compared to backs like Knowshon Moreno and Correll Buckhalter, among others, he received little recognition and media exposure despite his success. And while Bentley links the positional segregation to a larger history of anti-black racism, the linear narrative offered reinforces that idea that the tables have turned and now it is white players that suffer because of racial stereotypes.
Similarly, Josiah Schlatter, takes up this question in “Was Peyton Hillis subjected to reverse racism for being a white running back?” He thinks so,” gives voice to the problems faced by Hillis because of race. Focusing on “racist linebackers,” and while arguing that the racial epithets directed at Hillis are little more than trash-talking, the premise/title of the argument reinforced the idea behind the discriminated white athlete. Add to this, many of the comments focused on the double standards and how racism directed at African Americans would never be tolerated. It was yet another example of how the system was rigged against white men. In a world that purportedly privileges and benefits black athletes, the recognition afforded to Hillis represents a victory for the white minority in football. Indeed, many of the online comments celebrating Hillis and his victory underscore Kyle Kusz’s findings in his monograph, Revolt of the White Athlete: white masculinity is framed as battered, besieged, and belittled by the media, black athletes, and the masses; this marginal position affords white men an alternative space in which to recapture the center under the cover of victimization as it encourages the formulation of romanticized identities and seemingly revolutionary images that counter progressive reframings of race, gender, and sexuality.
This past season, Derron Synder took up the debate surrounding white guys in the NFL, interrogating the arguments put forth by caste football, a website connected to the white nationalist movement. He noted the pride white players in the NFL evoke in white fans in oddly empathetic terms:
Nonetheless, I understand why some white folks lament the NFL's lack of white halfbacks, receivers and defensive backs while championing the select few that exist. That's kind of like black folks complaining about the NFL's lack of black quarterbacks while cheering on the handful who make it. I certainly also understand the sense of pride that (white) New England Patriots halfback Danny Woodhead generated with his breakout game against the Miami Dolphins on Monday Night Football. Likewise, I understand why (white) New England Patriots receiver Wes Welker fosters the same feeling. I'm sure that Woodhead and Welker are inspirations to every young (white) football player who is being conditioned to believe that certain positions at the major-college or NFL level are beyond his capabilities.
C. Richard King is the Chair of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman and the author/editor of several books, including Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy and Postcolonial America.
David J. Leonard is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman. His next book (SUNY Press) is on the NBA after the November 2004 brawl during a Pacers-Pistons game at the The Palace of Auburn Hills He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums.
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