Page 139 - Sport Culture and the Media

120 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

. . . the studios were crowded with people only too willing to give their
opinions, to analyse what they had seen and to argue about anything and
everything. Sometimes they were left with egg on their faces.
(Wolstenholme 1998: 184)
No doubt, these sport-specific terms could be substituted for those of other
sports, and their followers would similarly complain of the linguistic aridity of
their sport’s ‘television newspeak’. Here the ‘craft’ of professional sports com-
mentating is felt to be threatened by the untrained practitioner just as the sports
journalists quoted in Chapter 2 believed that their occupational credentials
were being compromised by the ghosted columns of ex-players. That ‘the
studios were crowded with people’, however, reflects the expansion of TV sport
in terms of the time devoted to it and its audience reach. The aforementioned
film Bend It Like Beckham (see Chapter 6), it might be observed, opens with a
scene involving real-life television sports ‘pundits’ that affirms the place of this
growing cast of cliché-spouting ‘summarizers’ in the popular interpretation and
articulation of sports culture.
It could be argued, however, that making fun of television sports commenta-
tors (who are not usually print journalists by profession) has itself become a
popular sport. As mentioned in Chapter 3, the London-based satirical magazine
Private Eye for many years ran a ‘Colemanballs’ column and anthology book
series named after the veteran television sports commentator David Coleman,
but covering the solecisms of other sports commentators. In ‘postmodern’
fashion the main ‘offenders’ may become cult heroes, with, for example, the
British motor sport commentator Murray Walker having his own dedicated
‘Quotes’ page of ‘walkerisms’ on the Internet, containing many examples of
deathless prose by means of which ‘he often entertains viewers not by describ-
ing the drama on the track, but by his litany of literal backfires. Few other
sports callers are so renowned, and yet so acclaimed for their mouth running in
sixth gear while their brain remains in reverse’ (Jellie 1998: 3). By selecting some
entries in the Murray Walker Quotes Page, the pleasurable appeal of recording
errors can be discovered. For example:
1. Mansell is slowing down, taking it easy. OH NO HE ISN’T! It’s a lap
record.
2. And that just shows you how important the car is in Formula One
racing.
3. I know it’s an old cliché, but you can cut the atmosphere with a cricket
stump.
4. As you can see, visually, with your eyes.
In this short catalogue of mistakes, there is a gross miscalculation of per-
formance (1), an unfortunately banal summation (2), a curious malapropism (3)