ABSTRACT
As so often happens with scholarly writing in the area of media studies, opportunities for critique and analysis present themselves in the most unexpected ways. In the present case, my perusal of periodicals for my studies into football yielded an unexpected result. In the open stacks of the library at Arizona State University I found a specialist magazine that examines professional boxing. What was remarkable about this magazine was not the cover that touted a ‘classic’ bout between the ‘Golden Boy’ Oscar De La Hoya and Félix Trinidad (a fight in which De La Hoya suffered his first professional defeat), but what someone had scrawled across the image of De La Hoya: a common three-letter epithet typically used to question and defame the masculinity and heterosexuality of males in the US.
