Page 149 - Sport Culture and the Media

130 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

mentioned in Chapter 2, to the status of literary art. It is not, then, altogether
accidental that the first piece of writing mentioned in the foreword to The Best
American Sports Writing 1992 is a poem by David Rein called ‘A Baseball Player
Looks at a Poet’, which likens the criticism of sports performances to that
applied to ‘the act of writing’ (Stout 1992: ix).
In the absence of the capacity to give the direct sense of ‘having been there’
offered by television and still photography, the reader is presented with a mean-
ing frame which, in the language of economics, adds value (in this case cultural)
to the primary text (at its most basic, the statistical result of a game contest)
through secondary texts that occupy the infinite discursive space of debate
and analysis of what is known and what might be revealed. Print sports texts,
then, are not limited to accounts and treatments, however extended, of formal
sports events. Apart from what is generally available for scrutiny and open to
description is what is open to speculation and revelation. The revelatory print
sports text moves in the opposite direction to the ‘evidentiary’. Instead
of taking what is (at least in technical terms) publicly on view and, via the
mediation of the journalist, ‘translating’ it for consumption in the private
sphere, it takes what is hidden and then, again after being mediated, makes this
‘privileged’ information public and so available for private digestion. A further
form of print sports text is aware of the politics of sport, taking the sports
world as a sphere with its own relatively autonomous politics or relating its
internal politics to the wider domain of politics either directly (as in the state’s
involvement in sport) or indirectly (by seeing sport as a metaphor for politics).
Sports writing moves beyond straight reportage and insider gossip in this
instance and takes on a campaigning or petitioning role. The final mode of
print sports text I shall examine here may be conscious of its own position and
so reflexively aware that it is part of what is being discussed. Here the lived
experience of sport meets the aesthetics of sports writing. The text is about
sport but it is also a thing in itself – sports writing becomes literature and sport
becomes physical culture, even art.
These different modes of sports writing (there are no doubt other forms and
hybrids) can only briefly be illustrated and analysed here, but constitute a rich
vein for textual enquiry across different sites in the media sports cultural com-
plex. Working from the short digest form of print text upwards it is apparent
that, even within very strict word limitations, the text is set in play in a manner
that never allows it to be tied to the ‘bare facts’. If we take two fairly random
recent examples from very different newspapers – the much scorned British
tabloid The Sun and the highly prestigious New York Times – it is clear that
similar devices are used to attract the interest of readers and to provide an
‘angle’ for the interpretation of the sports event. In ‘Super Goals’, a 24-page
Monday Sun soccer supplement (sponsored by Ford), there are sports stories