Page 158 - Sport Culture and the Media

TAKING US THROUGH IT || 139

gone well in tune with the day’s midsummer ease and generous warmth.
We have been free to watch the game idly and give ourselves up with
lazy delight to the June charm and flavours of a field all gay with tents and
waving colours; and we have been free to observe the delicious changes in
the passing hour – the full flight of noon, the soft, silent fall to mellow.
(Cardus, 1, 2 and 3 July 1926, in Engel 1986: 84)

This pastoral, anti-metropolitan view of ‘real England’, with its allusions to the
Williams Shakespeare and Blake, provides a pre-television ‘word picture’ of a
sports event, fleshing out the descriptions of play by communicating ambience.
Cardus’s prose brings to the fore the ‘Arcadian backdrop to Englishness’
(Bracewell 1997: 8) rather than the modernist, performative details of bowling
and batting averages. Its lush vocabulary and almost exaggeratedly laidback
tone separates it not only from the more upbeat contemporary writing, but also
from the plainer prose and more hectic description of much of the sports
writing from its own period. This type of sports journalism has the ‘feel’ of
fiction and, indeed, problematizes the distinction between the fictional and the
factual, which, from the viewpoint of postmodernity, looks somewhat less
secure than it once did. As Foley (1992) has argued in reflecting on his ethno-
graphic study of youth and sport, positivist social science and realist journalism
both deploy ‘narrative devices’ borrowed from fiction in representing their sub-
ject, selecting disparate events and weaving them into a coherent story. Their
naivety and lack of reflexiveness, he argues, leads them to believe that the texts
they construct to describe reality do not also to a degree mediate and transform
it (because a representation can never absolutely correspond or stand for ‘the
thing itself’). This is a postmodern recognition of the pivotal role of textual
relations in which both writer and reader ‘produce’ the text in a social context
not entirely of their making. Here the print media sports text does not stand
alone as an ‘omniscient’ account of reality produced by a God-like authorial
figure with total vision but without the usual human failings. It is distinct from
‘the naive realism of new [and, no doubt, old style] journalism and the con-
scious fictionalization of literature’ (Foley 1992: 47). Indeed, the blurring of
conventional academic and fictive techniques has also become a feature of some
research-based writing on sport (Denison and Markula 2003).
Print media sports texts which ‘play off’ notions of the non-fictional and the
fictional, the objective and the subjective, the universal and the particular, the
real and the artificial, simultaneously take on the character of social science (at
least its cultural studies ‘wing’) and the form of literature sometimes described
as ‘faction’. A work like Don DeLillo’s (1997) novel Underworld, for example,
takes a real historical but heavily mythologized event, the ‘Shot Heard Round
the World’ in the dramatic 1951 New York baseball game between the Giants