Page 147 - Sport Culture and the Media

128 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

journalists) is, as we saw in Chapter 2, galling for them and often rather unfair
(especially when journalistic colleagues take an unduly snobbish view of the
‘toy department’). Ironically, though, public scepticism about the sports media
is also a buffer against those media exercising undue ideological power. This is
not to argue that all media sports texts are ‘reactionary’ and all criticisms of
them ‘progressive’, but rather that resistance to the cult of the sports media
expert is also something of an assertion of popular power against one of the
most efficient and extensive factories of meaning and value yet devised. If the
sports television commentary gabbled by the man (usually) with the bad hair,
the pocket vocabulary and the messy private life (reported with much glee by his
news journalist colleagues) is hard to take altogether seriously as an efficient
vector of dominant ideology, so, too, is much of what appears under the banner
of print sports journalism. Which is not, of course, to say that sports writers
lack a large (sometimes compulsive) readership or that what they produce is not
also a source of pleasure (sometimes cruel) for what it informs about sport and
disfigures in language.

On the page, off the air

Sports texts, as I have argued, have many forms, functions and readerships
(see also Rowe 1992). The traditional sports report is intended to bear wit-
ness to what has occurred for those who were not present. At the most basic,
denotative level this is an uncontroversial (if, depending on the result, by turns
exhilarating and depressing for those who care) statement that, for example,
Crewe Alexandra drew 0–0 with Burnley in Division Three of the English
Football League at the Gresty Road Ground before a crowd of 2816 cold, wet
masochists. Not much human intervention is needed here: a few units of data
are ‘sent down the wire’ or entered into a computer database, producing a text
that has little more cultural resonance than the shipping or stock market reports
(hence the invention of the Zybrainic Sportswriter discussed in Chapter 2).
Except that, just as those anonymous units of information have much greater
importance and depth of meaning for the seafarers and ‘desk jockeys’ who
depend on them for their livelihood, the relevant sports fan will not only invest
these facts (which must be unimpeachably accurate) with significance, but also
expect more information. Thus it is unlikely that many followers of sport will
be satisfied for long with a simple news digest format.
Beyond the bare outline of what occurred lie questions that break down and
elaborate what is known in summary form. How exactly did it happen? Which
were the pivotal moments? Who should be exalted/demonized? What was the
atmosphere like? The written sports report text, therefore, unlike the more