Page 140 - Sport Culture and the Media

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and a ‘virtuoso’ double tautology (4). Recording and circulating them is not
only, as here, a ‘cyber parlour game’. Comedians find rich material for parody,
as in the case of the Australian radio show This Sporting Life and its television
offshoot (a series of which was broadcast by British regional television), hosted
by the spoof sports commentators ‘Rampaging’ Roy Slaven and H.G. Nelson,
while British television shows like They Think It’s All Over are named after
and pick over fragments of sports commentary. Novelists (and part-time
sports writers) like Martin Amis also apply their dialogically attuned ears to the
synthetic speech of sports commentary, as in the case of the ‘sportuguese’
monologue by the protagonist Keith in London Fields, who, when asked in a
pub to recall a recent football match, immediately falls into familiar, received
speech patterns in ‘incanting’ sentences like, ‘A draw looked the most likely
result until a disputed penalty broke the deadlock five minutes from the final
whistle’ (Amis 1989: 91). That a section from Amis’s novel was reproduced in
the Faber Book of Soccer dedicated to the documentation of ‘good soccer
writing’ (Hamilton 1992: 2) indicates the degree to which caricatured media
sports texts now flow freely out of the mouths of broadcast commentators
through the patter of comedians and popular speech onto the pages of news-
papers and blackly satirical novels. On occasions, television sports commenta-
tors like Murray Walker engage in self-parody (like ‘I don’t make mistakes, I
make prophecies which immediately turn out to be wrong’, quoted in Jellie
1998: 3) in an increasingly elaborate self-referencing and reproducing system of
quotation and caricature.
Ultimately, parody tips over into pastiche, as it becomes increasingly difficult
to establish the ‘original’ that is the source of all the fun. Media ‘sports speak’
admirably qualifies, then, as a premier instance of what Baudrillard (1983) calls
‘simulacra’ (copies of copies whose ‘master’ was long since lost in a blizzard of
reproductions) or of what Jameson (1984) describes as the postmodern product
of the ‘logic of late capitalism’ (an endlessly playful dissolution and recom-
bination of the boundaries of genre and style). Media sports texts can be seen
in this way as reflective and partially productive of a wider shift towards what
can be called, in rather ugly neologisms, the ‘ironization’ of culture and the
mediatization of advanced capitalist, postmodernized societies. To put it more
plainly, the media sports cultural complex generates texts which, while they
may be intended initially to be serious and focused on a sporting phenomenon,
can be rapidly appropriated and used for quite different purposes. Further
evidence of this trend is presented in the following discussion of sports print
texts, with renditions (straight or warped) of media sports speak appearing not
only in the professional media, but also in the amateur and semi-professional
sports fanzines (especially emanating from British soccer; see Chapter 2)
published by supporters.