Page 159 - Sport Culture and the Media

140 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

and the Dodgers (an event that coincided with the Soviet Union’s second-ever
nuclear test). It weaves into its narrative a close, journalistic description of
the play and an aestheticized observation of the setting, using real people (like
Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and J. Edgar Hoover) and invented characters,
melding the fictional and the non-fictional in a manner that threatens to make
the distinction redundant. This approach is demonstrated by the following
passage:
Not a good pitch to hit, up and in, but Thomson swings and tomahawks
the ball and everybody, everybody watches. Except for Gleason who is bent
over in his seat, hands locked behind his neck, a creamy strand of slime
swinging from his lips.
Russ says, ‘There’s a long drive’.
His voice has a burst in it, a charge of expectation.
He says, ‘It’s gonna be’.
There’s a pause all around him. Pafko racing toward the left-field corner.
He says, ‘I believe’.
(DeLillo 1997: 42)

This short extract from a very long American novel evokes the excitement of
the spectator (who is a radio journalist) and could be an orthodox sports report
were it not for some extraneous elements that signify it as literary (such as
the description of Gleason’s condition). This ‘factional’ piece, nonetheless,
indicates how many sports reports do, indeed, resemble fiction in their selective
assemblage of facts, invention of quotations and setting of the scene.
I make this point in closing the section to avoid too neat a taxonomy of the
print media sports text. We have examined various examples of modes of
sports writing located in different ‘organs’ of the media, and it is clear that rigid
constraints of content, form, function and length exist which govern the pro-
duction and reception of many such texts. The presentation of highly technical
information, use of formal and informal language that only the initiated can
easily decode, and a repetitive, easily recognizable style make the reception
of sports stories into an habituated pairing of the familiar author (the
sports ‘hack’) and the implied reader (the sports ‘nut’). In Chapter 2, we noted
criticisms by some sports journalists themselves of the rather limited scope
of sports texts and various attempts to break out of this writing strait-jacket.
But there are also elements of sports culture that can be found in places
which are not acknowledged as sporting – for example, in what might be called
‘secondary media sports texts’ where the language of sport as metaphors and
similes permeates non-sporting discourses (including politics and business).
Hence, when a political reporter describes a minister as having ‘a safe pair of
hands’ or a business reporter represents an attempted company takeover as a