Athletes Gone Wild: When Our Love isn’t Enough

by Peter Stenson

Greg Oden became the latest athlete whose naked self-portrait made its way from hands of a girlfriend to the hands of all the rest of us. Yes, you could say that this may be an embarrassing moment, his most exposed-self available at the click of a mouse. But I assure Oden has nothing to be embarrassed about.

Let me reiterate – nothing.

Santonio Holmes is catching the fever!

The thing that I can’t seem to comprehend is how does Oden keep getting injured, landing funny and off balance, when the man has three legs?

Oden isn’t the only one. Yes folks, there is a fever sweeping the sports nation, and it’s going to take a heck of a lot more to cure than a little cowbell. Recently a nice little shower scene number of Super Bowl Forty-Three hero Santonio Holmes surfaced on the Internet. Before that it was Cleveland center fielder Grady Sizemore flexing into the mirror. Tea anyone?

But what do these self-portrait mirror shots have in common? Why do athletes feel the need for naked self-expression? Why not hire a photographer to class the photos up a bit? How has the eruption of social networking sites aided this phenomenon? Is today’s athlete the most self-absorbed we’ve ever encountered?

Just like everything in life, the origins of this mystery reside in the annals of Greek mythology. We all know the story of Narcissus, the young man who was the psychical embodiment of beauty, whose fate was to fall in love with his reflection in a lake. Forever lost in his own dreamy eyes, unable to love anything beside his own image, his own self.

Extrapolated to the modern athlete, it is no large jump to see Sizemore, Oden and Holmes under the same light. The mirror is their lake. Through the act of self-encapsulation of their perfect bodies, they are doomed to a similar fate. To be more in love with themselves than anything else.

Perhaps I’m jealous. My abs look nothing like Grady’s and my…well, you get the idea.

The athlete as a self-obsessed narcissist is by no means a new idea or phenomenon. Athletes have been posing naked forever, from Olympians modeling for statues to Jim Brown rocking the afro-down-below in Playgirl. But times have changed. The globalized world makes everything connected, everything at the masses fingertips, everything in real time. Let’s just say Oden is feeling down because his knees are like those of an eighty-year-old man, so he gives that ego a little booster through a cell phone shot of his glorious manhood. You see? It’s easier now than ever. Although he claimed the photo was meant for a specific someone, deep down he had to have known it would get out. And like Narcissus, who dreamt of the world loving him as much as he loved himself, Oden too, at some level, probably longs for the same thing.

We are in a culture that celebrates the most mundane action of our heroes. This is not new, but never before in history has it been so easy to access this information. We follow what our favorite athletes are eating for lunch, when they had a good nap, when they took a satisfying number two. We eat it up, their lives, their experiences, their self-love, their number two. We feed their lake, make it brighter, make it illuminate their beauty even more clearly.

It’s us folks, who are the mirror that this sex texts are meant for.

Knowing this, I still wrote this article. I still searched for the pictures. I still feel emasculated next to the photographs. So what does that make me? I don’t know but I’m thinking about singing up to become one of Grady’s Girls.

To vie the photos of Grady, click here:

http://www.bustedcoverage.com/?p=22946&pid=534

To view the photos of Santonio Holmes, click here:

http://cache.deadspin.com/assets/resources/2008/04/steelerdong.jpg