ABSTRACT
When media scholar Sut Jhally deconstructed the material and cultural factors involved in the evolution of the “sports/media complex,” he bracketed the case of specialty sports magazines from his analysis in order to develop the thrust of his two primary arguments. This chapter returns to Jhally’s bracketed case to deeply analyze how specialty sports magazines sold both the media technology to subscribers and the sporting audience to advertisers through sports with constructed fables of manliness, thereby constituting the complex whereby sports would become dependent on the media to distribute and finance a spectacle-product that relied upon the sports manhood formula.
