Page 145 - Sport Culture and the Media

126 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

watched by ‘half the world’s population’ (quoted in Tomlinson 1996: 595),
commentators, with their combination of scripted and spontaneous utterances,
are able to call on the grandest myths of all – those which pertain to universal
humanity, and the capacity of the Olympics to promote global ‘peace, harmony
and progress’ (the theme of the 1988 Seoul Olympic opening ceremony). Yet, as
we have seen, commentators are also in the business of making sure that their
audiences differentiate between their compatriots and the other branches of the
great human family whom they fervently hope will lose. This universalist–
partisan balancing act is a difficult one to perform, and helps to explain the
somewhat schizophrenic quality of much media sports discourse, as live com-
mentators try to temper their often hysterical and ‘one-eyed’ support for an
individual or team with a more even-handed appreciation of the skills of their
opposition. To return briefly to McHoul’s reflection on Lawrie Lawrence, the
cry ‘We won! We won!’ could be all-inclusive only if every potential division
was denied, leaving us with the heartwarming but improbable meaning that
‘humankind’ was the winner. Such sentiments are, in fact, rarely heard outside
the more platitudinous pronouncements of commentators during mammoth
broadcasts for major sports events. Or beyond the utterances of sports officials
like the IOC’s Juan Antonio Samaranch, whom Tomlinson (1996: 597) quotes
as describing the 1992 opening ceremony in his native Barcelona as ‘the greatest
festival of our contemporary society’. We should also not forget the transpar-
ently disengenuous claim by commentators that sport or a particular sport ‘was
the winner today’ when made after an unsatisfactory result in a sports contest.
Solace after a major sporting loss can be found, then, by retreating to the
universal and high-minded values that much of the time are discarded in the
search for passionate, loyal media audiences. For an English fan, for example,
tennis is always the winner at Wimbledon, because almost certain loss awaits
their country’s players.
Broadcast commentators, however, get criticized not only for their technical
failings and banalities, but also for bringing political issues (usually inadvert-
ently) to the surface. For example, when in January 1998 the British television
soccer commentator John Motson remarked in an interview that he sometimes
had difficulty differentiating between black players when clustered on the pitch,
there were angry allegations that this was a ‘replay’ of the old racist saying that
‘they all look the same to me’. The sheer, relentless availability of media sports
texts like live television and radio commentary, as in the case of the sports
celebrity scandals discussed in Chapter 3, also facilitates often heated debates
about racial and ethnic stereotyping, gendered denigration and exclusion, the
celebration of violence and aggression, discrimination against those who are
elderly or not able bodied, and so on. The riposte during such popular debates
is often that too much is being read into an offhand or joking remark, or that