Match Point

This chapter focuses on the celebrity status of the tennis player John McEnroe, both delving into the most relevant aspects of his career in the context of the sports culture and examining the different forms of narration and representation shaped by his icon in his post-career phase, thanks to his universally undisputed charm. Many media have been deployed to construct McEnroe’s star image, both on a popular, artistic, and prestige level: published material (such as volumes on McEnroe, biographies, autobiographies, illustrated books and so on), cinema (fiction films and documentaries), television (TV shows and specials, that were created over time also thanks to the importance of the mediatization of athletes’ biographies and past champions mythologization), and audiovisual and digital media (his most epic tennis moments on YouTube, for instance).