Page 143 - Sport Culture and the Media

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sportspeople’s. These do not always involve high-pitched, emotional expres-
sion. The aforementioned British comedy programme, They Think It’s All
Over, takes its name from a cool piece of improvisation by Kenneth Wolsten-
holme, who commentated for the BBC in its coverage of the 1966 World Cup
Final (the only time to date, it is my melancholy duty to report, that England
has won the Jules Rimet Trophy). In the final moments of the game its result
was in doubt, with only a single goal separating England and (then West)
Germany until a last-minute England goal made the outcome certain. As the
goal was scored, Wolstenholme’s memorable words were ‘Some people are on
the pitch. They think it’s all over . . . it is now’. The cool detachment and
thespian timing of Wolstenholme’s comment enhanced the sporting moment,
although his own reflections attest both to the multiplicity of its uses and its
unconscious genesis:

...fourteen words which have stuck to me ever since. I have even described
them as my pension because they have been used so many times by so
many people, yet quite honestly I cannot remember ever saying them. But
then, the excitement of an occasion can do strange things to the
memory...
(Wolstenholme 1998: 128)

The ‘art’ of sports commentating may, then, be as mysterious as Ian
Wooldridge’s (1998: 8) claim that Wolstenholme ‘ad-libbed five words into a
microphone at Wembley that were destined to be re-broadcast more times than
Winston Churchill’s “We shall fight on the beaches” exhortation’. By such
means sports commentary can become part of the national estate, with the
former Director-General of the BBC, John Birt, giving a suitably preservationist
justification for the revival of the commentary by stating that ‘he wanted to
bring the famous words to the notice of the younger generation’ (quoted in
Wolstenholme 1998: 186). The commentator himself has felt his most famous
statement to be ‘Sadly . . . over used’ (p. 186), but the media sports cultural
complex has logged his words for deployment on-demand in numerous, diverse
contexts.
McHoul, May, Birt, Wooldridge and Wolstenhome are all describing the
extraordinary power of sport – one which would be unique were it not for some
instances of intense national identification in times of war or disaster – to
encourage a literal identification between ‘actors’ and ‘non-actors’. More
even than in the cases of ‘subcultural’ music or ‘projection fantasy’ film, the
performances of sportspeople are appropriated by sports fans as ‘ours’. Live
broadcast commentary on major international sporting events is consummately
aware of this power, and in this way media sports texts can be seen to be actively
engaged in the task of recruiting audiences (especially for advertisers) by first