Page 137 - Sport Culture and the Media

118 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

sub-genre and textual relations, representing the sports world and situating it
within the wider world with which, often reluctantly, it must deal.
Media sports texts sometimes take on the quality of sub-cultural ‘anti-
language’ (Montgomery 1986), a lexicon and syntax that is an offshoot of the
‘tabloid-speak’ that selects aspects of popular speech. It then takes such liberties
with that speech it becomes sui generis – that is, unrecognizable as anything
other than itself (Chippindale and Horrie 1990). This specialist form of sports
discourse binds producer, reader and text by the force of its own conventions and
rules, but other textual forms are centrifugal rather than centripetal, opening
themselves and readers to matters somewhat wider than results, injuries and
transfers. There is a need, then, to analyse the ways in which sports mythologies
‘leech out’ into wider domains and are used to invest other subjects with popu-
larly digestible meaning, and also the manner in which the discourse of sport
incorporates elements of external discourses in interpreting events in the sports
world. In this way, sports texts and social ideologies, mediated through dif-
ferent institutions and discourses, can be seen to be in constant interaction, each
appropriating and relinquishing imagery and language in the unending process
of representing the social world. Given the cacophonic nature of ‘sportuguese’,
it is difficult to find a quiet, ordered space from which this somewhat abstract
project can be commenced. For this reason, we shall go straight to the most
overheated, parodied and reviled sports text of all, the ‘live’ sports commentary.

Live commentary, dead language

There is no other media sports text that is subject to greater ridicule than the
live broadcast (especially television) commentary, which describes for viewers
what they are seeing. There are some obvious reasons for this phenomenon:
sports fans who are skilled in ‘reading’ what is unfolding before them on the
screen resent intrusive, inexpert and mistake-ridden commentary. Yet, much
commentary is not aimed at committed television sports fans – they will watch
‘the match’ whatever happens. Some turn the television volume down to the
point of inaudibility and just watch the images, while others will choose their
audio commentary and switch media. Committed cricket fans, for example,
commonly mute the TV audio in favour of the more sedate radio commentary
(in the case of commercial free-to-air television avoiding loud advertising
announcements in the process). Some of the more hyped-up commentaries are
intended for those ‘unconverted’ viewers whose interest has to be stimulated by
communicating a sense of high drama in the events on screen. If television
sports commentators, then, are irritating a core audience while trying to lure a
peripheral one (sometimes with the kind of elementary explanation of rules