Meet the Prof: Bryan Denham, Charlie Campbell Professorship in Sports Communication

October 27, 2020

Meet the Prof: Bryan Denham, Campbell Professorship in Sports Communication

Dr. Bryan Denham holds the Charlie Campbell Professorship in Sports Communication at Clemson, where he is currently in his 22^nd year of teaching. Dr. Denham received the 2019-2020 award for Excellence in Research – Senior Scholar in the College of Behavioral, Social and Health Sciences. He has published approximately 70 refereed journal articles and book chapters and also served for three years as Chair of the Department of Communication.

Dr. Bryan Denham

1. What part of your sports communication research are you most excited about?

Much of my scholarship has focused on the media, policy and health dimensions of substance use in sport and society. I published a study in Communication and Sport two years ago addressing the doping scandal at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, focusing specifically on how news of the scandal unfolded in the United States. The New York Times has long been considered a “legitimator” of news in the U.S., and sure enough, little coverage of the situation appeared prior to the point at which Grigory Rodchenkov, head of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency, fled Russia. As shown in the documentary Icarus, he spoke to the New York Times in May 2016, shortly after arriving in the U.S. Although there had been some excellent documentaries produced in Europe, featuring whistleblowers Vitaly Stepanov and Yuliya Stepanova, U.S. news media did not get involved until the “newspaper of record” did so. The revelations proved embarrassing for Russia, and in fact a report from the U.S. National Intelligence Council stated that Russia had launched cyberattacks during the 2016 election year partially as a retaliatory action for high-profile doping allegations. I had the opportunity in 2019 to attend a conference in Colorado called Play the Game. It was the first time the group had met in the U.S., and it featured the Stepanovs, Bryan Fogel, who directed Icarus, representatives from the World Anti-Doping Agency and U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, and many other prominent people in sport. There was a lot of discussion of doping, match fixing and others issues in sport. The conference was a great experience.

I also study issues involving race and ethnicity in sport and recently published a study in the Sociology of Sport Journal addressing the capacity of sports participation to heighten awareness of racial issues in society. In 1954, a scholar named Gordon Allport argued that superficial approaches to reducing racial prejudice often failed due to an absence of contact among people. He suggested that sports participation stood to reduce prejudice, notably when members of differing races and ethnicities were members of a team pursuing a collective goal. There needed to be contact among people and something for which the members of a team could collectively strive. I analyzed data gathered from 12^th-grade students as part of the annual Monitoring the Future study, conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan, and found some support for the contact hypothesis. On the whole, White participants in sports in which members of racial minorities also competed seemed to have heightened awareness of issues involving race and ethnicity. Athletes in sports with less diversity – baseball, for example – did not show such patterns. To some extent, one can observe support for the contact hypothesis in many of the athletic programs at Clemson.

2. Discuss the development of sports communication at Clemson.

Clemson has been a leader in the development of sports communication curricula. When I came on board in 1999, I taught a sports communication class as a special topics course. That class became COMM325, Sports Communication, and the department gradually began to add courses such as Public Relations in Sports and Sports Media Criticism. We added a minor and then one of the few majors in the nation. Additional classes addressing topics such as sport in society, social media, and athlete-coach communication have also become part of the curriculum. When I started teaching at Clemson, studies about issues in sports communication had been published in scholarly journals, but few schools had developed coursework for undergraduates. We began teaching our courses, as did a limited number of other schools, and now such classes have become popular nationwide. We also offer a sports media course in the department MA program. The Robert H. Brooks Sports Science Institute has been able to fund two graduate students with sports communication interests each year.

3. What is your personal connection/passion to sports?

A soccer coach instructs his boys youth soccer team.

I grew up playing all kinds of sports – baseball, basketball, indoor soccer, outdoor soccer. We lived across the street from a school with soccer fields, baseball diamonds and a basketball court. We were also near St. Louis, which is one of best sports towns in the nation, especially in baseball. Checking box scores and reading sports pages was a daily ritual. The Major Indoor Soccer League had also emerged in those days, and the St. Louis Steamers drew large crowds at the old Arena. Those games were fun to attend. Fast paced with quite a few players from the St. Louis area. Sports were certainly a major presence, and there were lots of athletes to emulate.

But I also had orthopedic issues from the start, with quite a few shoulder dislocations and finally surgery on both. Like many people, I started lifting weights through rehabilitation and found a few lifts that I could do pretty well. I competed in a few meets – one at the famous Muscle Beach in California. I was able to parlay the weightlifting experiences into some training articles for popular magazines, getting involved with the industry side of sports communication. I still study magazines, although they have become thinner and thinner in recent years. Some have gone entirely online.

4. What lessons/advice do you give to students you teach/mentor?

In graduate school I took a sport psychology course as an elective and learned a great deal. Athletes who find success often immerse themselves in the training process by establishing a series of short-term attainable goals; this allows them to avoid anxiety associated with broad unwieldy goals that invariably involve factors beyond their control. Learning to focus on the pursuit of personal excellence instead of broad outcomes usually results in better sport performance. John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach at UCLA, was a proponent of these ideas, as was Pat Summitt, the highly successful coach of the Lady Vols at Tennessee. As Coach Wooden wrote, “Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable.” Coach Summitt added that “Hard work breeds self-respect.”

For graduate students and budding academicians, lessons in sport psychology can prove valuable. As an example, one can worry a great deal about publishing scholarly journal articles – achieving outcomes – that are sometimes beyond the control of the scholar. One does not know who the referees for an article will be, nor does one know whether an editor will make a favorable decision. If one sets small attainable goals throughout the process of researching, writing and then submitting a research project, then he or she will be more apt to experience success. No one likes to experience rejection, of course, but it often presents an opportunity to improve a project based on constructive feedback.

For undergraduate students, many of whom aspire to work in creative fields, my advice is to seek out as many different experiences as possible – and read and write as much as possible. I was fortunate to attend a great journalism school at Indiana University in Bloomington. I then headed for Southern California and eventually enrolled in an MA program at Cal State Fullerton. That was a great experience. I had the chance to spend some time in the Little Saigon area of Westminster as part of a journalism practicum and interviewed a gentleman named Yen Ngoc Do, founder of the Nguoi Viet Daily News. He had been a correspondent during the Vietnam War and had seen a lot. But on the lighter side, I also enjoyed being a tourist in Hollywood and Beverly Hills and would sometimes venture down Sunset Boulevard to the research library at UCLA. After graduating from Cal State Fullerton, I traveled back across the country and completed my doctorate at the University of Tennessee. I am thankful for all of those opportunities and the diverse and enriching experiences they provided. Traveling to Europe was also an enlightening experience, and a highly recommend students take advantage of study-abroad programs. The Department of Communication at Clemson offers some excellent programs, although the Covid pandemic resulted in some cancellations.

A boxer wears a mask to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Photo courtesy of Katerina Kerdi from Unsplash.

5. How has Covid impacted sports/sports communication? 

I actually believe sports may have impacted Covid as much as Covid has impacted sports. The U.S. has not performed well in this pandemic, and our demand for nonstop entertainment and immediate gratification bears some responsibility. People in other nations have made the sacrifices necessary to get the pandemic under control, and for several weeks we were headed in that direction. Then came increases in the politicization of what is fundamentally a public health issue. Masks and personal protective equipment became politicized, and disinformation took hold.

In college and professional sports, the pandemic has shown that decisions based on science and careful reasoning may be overruled by shouting and demands that teams take the field. Yet, the recent World Series and NBA Championships saw some of their lowest television ratings ever. At the college level, one major conference returned just in time for the recent surge in Covid cases. The U.S. accounts for about 4 percent of the world’s population but 20 percent of Covid cases as well as 20 percent of Covid deaths. We should be doing much better. It will be interesting to see how – or if – 2021 shapes up.

To learn more about Dr. Denham’s  research projects, check out these Clemson University Newsstand pieces.

Patent Medicines

Anabolic Steroid Hazards

Sochi Winter Olympics Scandal

Dietary Supplement Issues