Page 195 - Sport Culture and the Media

176 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

passions in public or quasi-public spaces can be governed and rationalized in
various ways. These include watching major sports events on large television
screens in clubs, pubs and bars (sometimes, as noted in Chapter 3, of necessity
because of the exclusive capture of major sports contests by pay TV) and in
designated ‘live sites’ created by the authorities in city squares and parks.
During the Sydney 2000 Olympics, for example, TV viewing sites were
strategically located near the main stadium and in various places in the central
business district (Rowe 2000b). Sports television out of the home, therefore,
creates new viewing experiences and new ancillary media sports texts, as
spectacular displays of fandom beyond the stadium attract media coverage, and
some sports fans seek to match the paying spectators present by dressing
and performing for the cameras. This distinction of the cash nexus may, it has
already been noted, be eliminated where a paying crowd assembles before a
large screen. As Boyle and Haynes (2003: 109), for example, have noted, the
leading Scottish football club Glasgow Celtic ‘beamed back’ six away matches
to the stadium in the earlier part of the 1999–2000 season to an average paying
audience of over 9000 per game. This viewership is larger than the crowds
physically attending many sporting events.
The ‘spectacularization’ of sport through television and the apparently
increasing desire of sports spectators to become integral components of the
sporting text itself intertwine the practice, mediation and experience of sport.
As Robert Rinehart argues:

. . . the games and sports themselves have become inseparable from their
atmosphere: the sport experience is not one that easily lends itself to
separating out ‘the sport’ from the totality of the ‘sporting experience’ ...
Furthermore, these sporting experiences . . . have themselves commingled,
so that each borrows from and is informed by the other.
(Rinehart 1998: 7)

In this blurring of sport and its experience, there is a corresponding breaching
of the boundary between performer and spectator. Marvin Carlson, after
noting the complexity and contestability of the concept of performance,
records the ethnolinguist Richard Bauman’s view that:

all performance involves a consciousness of doubleness, through which
the actual execution of an action is placed in mental comparison with a
potential, an ideal, or a remembered original model of that action.
Normally this comparison is made by an observer of the action – the
theatre public, the school’s teacher, the scientist – but the double con-
sciousness, not the external observation, is what is most central. An
athlete, for example, may be aware of his [or her] own performance,