Page 209 - Sport Culture and the Media

190 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

form and re-form across the media sports cultural complex that we call ‘the
audience’ (Ruddock 2001; Balnaves et al. 2002) has to be held together for long
enough to register with advertisers, sponsors, sports organizations and govern-
ments. Given the stringent demands of these ‘stakeholders’, nothing can be left
to chance and no screen sport can just rely on its assumed intrinsic appeal.
What we have seen is something not altogether surprising given the nature
of sports mythologies and the reliance of the popular media on narrative –
the deployment of different styles and genres to transform what could be the
‘spartan’ act of sports viewing into a luxurious wallowing in spectacle. In the
process, the ‘real’ events on screen are coupled with the ‘fictional’ elements of
story telling and myth making. As Cunningham and Miller (1994) point out, a
key element of this narrativizing impulse is, as in other entertainment forms,
the creation and promotion of sportspeople as celebrities. Hence, it can be said
that ‘TV sport is an individualizing genre, announcing, auditing and ending the
careers of stars’ (Cunningham and Miller 1994: 77). That television is a visual
medium gives it a huge advantage over its rival, more flexible electronic medium
– radio – in that the viewer to an extent mimicks the everyday encounters of
individuals, searching their gestures for meaningful signs of character and per-
sonal history. In accentuating the specific character traits of athletes, though,
the collective aspects of sport (especially uncomfortable questions of society
and politics) are often strategically played down (Hilliard 1994; Benedict
1997). Thus, while national or city teams routinely have group traits ascribed to
them by television commentators (tough, flamboyant, sneaky, and so on), the
simplest and most direct way of developing drama through character is to focus
closely on single sportspeople. It is not a very long step from creating sports
stars through television to their appearance (as either themselves or another
character) on film and then to film stars playing them on the big screen. Feature
films that are not documentaries or biographies are moving media sports texts
that obey a different logic to live action in starting with the ‘fictional’ (or fictive)
and working backwards to the ‘real’ practice of sport.

Screen of dreams

We have noted above how actual sports action, when caught on screen, is
invested with the quality of dramatic fiction. What happens, then, when
sport appears on screen as fiction? If ‘unscripted’ screen sport already has
recognizable actors, plots, sets, and so on, then its fictional counterpart might
be expected to develop these into an even more structured and mythologized
cultural entity that operates in the space between the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’.
Fictional moving media sports texts are subject to different imperatives than