Page 156 - Sport Culture and the Media

TAKING US THROUGH IT || 137

Medals opened with a call to ‘Save the Olympics, Before It’s Too Late’. Within
two years, the breaking of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics corruption
scandal (Guttmann 2002) provided multiple opportunities for sports and other
journalists to expose the often-sordid inner workings of the Olympic ‘family’.
But, while performing a no doubt valuable and traditional media role, those
engaged in sporting exposés tend to confine themselves to problems in sport
that need to be fixed according to highly idealized standards (sport as ‘a source
of beauty and purity’), to leave the relationships between the sporting and other
worlds relatively unexplored, and to take a rather unreflexive and unself-critical
view of the activity of writing about sport. The final type of sports writing
and text to be discussed display a more acute consciousness of the cultural
(re)production and change in which they are implicated. They also have a pro-
pensity to extrapolate from the experience of sport to wider human experience.
At this point, sports journalism enters the more refined realm of sports
literature.

Literary moments

These ‘aesthetic’ texts deploy the full toolbox of literary devices to invest sport
with new meaning and sports writing with new status. They can be found in the
newspapers and magazines that tolerate or promote literary style, in novels,
poems and short stories that take the subject of sport as a point of departure
for the exploration of ‘existential’ themes. It is this form of writing that is
usually to be found in edited sports anthologies (like Aymar 1994; Coleman
and Hornby 1996). Matthew Engel’s (1986) The Guardian Book of Cricket, for
example, selects articles published in that newspaper since 1826, describing
the ebbs and flows in their quality in the same manner as literary critics
characterize the fortunes of literary movements:

And it seems to me that soon after 1968 Guardian cricket writing may have
entered a second golden age. There was some vintage stuff in the paper in
the early 70s: Arlott in his pomp, Cardus firmly back in the fold for his
last years, wit and craftmanship from Eric Todd and Brian Chapman, the
young Blofeld and the first brilliant flashes of Keating. After Cardus died,
Ian Peebles, for all too short a period before his own death, contributed
a series of quite scintillating essays. The paper had a good war during
Packer, just as it did during D’Oliveira – and bodyline.
(Engel 1986: 15)
This ‘great tradition’ of English cricket writers, it is pointed out above, had
handled some of the major sporting controversies of their day that also touched