Celebrity Philanthropy

Philanthropic projects typically require labor, materiel, money, and publicity. Money and publicity, of course, are often required to make up for shortfalls in labor and materiel, and to a large extent money is important because it can buy publicity, while publicity is essential in raising money (and, secondarily, labor and materiel). Celebrities tend to have access to both money and publicity, so it is not surprising that many of them undertake, or get roped into, philanthropic projects.

This department looks at sport celebrities engaged in both sport-related and sport-unrelated projects, as well as non-sport celebrities engaged in sport-related projects. This is an untidy category because celebrities may be involved in other departments as well: a good example would be the Hillary Model, whose eponymous hero (Sir Edmund Hillary) was a world-class celebrity.

What justifies this specific category is the use of media in achieving project goals. When Ed Hillary needed project money, he tended to rely on either personal appeals to sponsors or on fundraising efforts by the staff of his organizations. His projects generated an enormous ripple effect through the moral example: people like Greg Mortenson and Tony Freake responded on a personal level to what they had read or heard about Hillary's work. Other celebrities, like Bill Gates, can implement their projects without media involvement: they throw money at a problem, and things happen. But sports celebrities have spectators and fans, and they generally (but not always) leverage that fame to achieve their objectives.

For most people, the term sport celebrity probably conjures up names like Michael Jackson, Tiger Woods, and other professional participants. We are including in this department two atypical special variety of sport celebrity: the celebrity sport amateur and the celebrity fan. President Obama (basketball, golf) and Bob Hope (golf) would be two examples of celebrities who have a notable affinity with sports at an amateur level. As for fans, the Rachel Maddow story below is should become a textbook example.