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On January 26, 2020, former Los Angeles Lakers superstar Kobe Bryant passed away suddenly in a helicopter crash. Drawing on theoretical frameworks of racial and gender politics in the U.S. context, and media framing, we conducted a textual analysis of mainstream news media’s framing of “Mamba Mentality” in the immediate aftermath of Bryant’s death. Across the 119 articles retrieved for analysis, we found Mamba Mentality consistently framed in four ways: a performance standard, both mental and physical; a symbol for overcoming adversity; a commodity; and a legacy/ethos. While mainstream media was complicit in absolving Bryant of his 2003 sexual assault allegation, the allegation was folded into his complex celebrity identity, which ultimately legitimized his Mamba Mentality persona as strong, tough, and able to overcome any obstacle that stood in the way—regardless of the cost. Our findings implicate how a celebrity athlete’s life is valued by contemporary media, and how media portrayals represent historical underpinnings of identity politics and oppressive practices, in line with structural and systemic violence in American society.

Much like the nation as a whole, the development of football in China has accelerated at unprecedented rates in recent years. The investment toward, participation in, and consumption of the sport has surged in the years following the Chinese Communist Party’s implementation of major 2015 reforms intended to (1) develop the domestic professional football league, (2) grow the sport’s popularity among the country’s 1.4 billion population, (3) increase youth participation, (4) develop the national team to be the best team in Asia, and (5) aggressively bid for a men’s FIFA World Cup. Despite these significant levels of State and private investment theretoward, there are still significant concerns within the Chinese and international media publics about the footballing nation—specifically as related to the performance of the Chinese men’s national team. In this article, we present a comparative analysis of Chinese- and English-language news media representations that frame how east and west media publics might “read” various aspects of Chinese football (commercial, cultural, ideological, etc.). In so doing, we identify and analyze major themes which, as popularized in different popular media contexts, articulate the men’s national team’s performance to broader (inter)national anxieties about the state of football and the geopolitical trajectories of the People’s Republic.