Page 136 - Sport Culture and the Media

4 T AKING US THROUGH IT : THE

‘ART’ OF SPORTS C OMMENT A TING

AND WRITING

Some work in Britain analysing sports writing in the Sunday newspapers
and the language used to report on football matches and football
hooliganism, points to its lexical and conceptual poverty. With some
exceptions the language, even when compared with usage in the rest of
the media, is notoriously stereotyped.
(John Hargreaves 1986: 151)

Introduction: the world of sports speak

In Part I, most attention was paid to the question of how media sports texts
get made, by whom and under what conditions. Suitably equipped with an
appreciation of the forces and processes of varying magnitude that go to pro-
duce media sports culture, it is important also to understand something of
how its texts are structured, the forms that they adopt, and the ways in which
those texts work in connecting sport’s producers and audiences. This task
involves the alternately pleasing and infuriating process of deeply interrogating
the wild allusions, frantic imprecations, melodramatic narratives and hysterical
outpourings that comprise much of the dauntingly extensive and intense culture
of media sport. Of course, there is no ‘typical’ sports text as such, but rather
a jumble of genres and subjects that can be said to fit under the rubric of
sport because they have some connection (often tenuous) with its mythologies,
organizations and personnel. Such texts are visual and aural, printed and
spoken, taking the form of ‘live’ commentary on television, radio and the Inter-
net, structured segments of news bulletins, brief ‘updates’, lengthy newspaper
feature articles, descriptive reports of games, ‘insider’ slices of gossip, serious
novels and ‘cheapskate’ (auto)biographies, and so on in bewildering variety and
profusion. Each media sports text creates and adheres to its own rules of