Page 210 - Sport Culture and the Media

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those which operate in the non-fictional. Miller (1996) suggests that more atten-
tion should be given to documentary and instructional films (for an example,
see Robbins’s (1997) discussion of the basketball documentary Hoop Dreams.
These texts, however, are not discussed in any detail here because I am inter-
ested primarily in representations that take the audience further from sport
as a formal institution in order to see it anew. For media texts regarded as
‘actuality’, the drive is to get up as close to the sporting subject as possible,
to reveal its ‘reality’ in ever more finely grained and multi-perspectival detail.
Once the veracity of the action appearing on screen is established, it is possible
to build up the fictional and mythological qualities that turn sport from a series
of physical manoeuvres into a meaning-laden cultural practice. In the case of
fictional works, it is necessary to move in the opposite direction – from the
invention of a fictional world to the ‘truth’ of sport and human existence. As in
the case of photographic images and literary texts, the treatment can vary
widely from a focus on sport above all else to deploying sport as a means
of reaching a large audience in the service of theme, narrative, character and
mise-en-scène. I am more concerned here with films such as The Loneliness
of the Long Distance Runner (1962), This Sporting Life (1963), Rocky (1976),
Raging Bull (1980), Chariots of Fire (1981), Field of Dreams (1989), White Men
Can’t Jump (1992), Jerry Maguire (1996) and Fever Pitch (1997) in which sport
is integral, rather than those in which it is incidental. An example of such an
incidental use of sport on film is the scene in Men in Black (1997) where the
baseball crowd in Queens, New York, is seemingly so caught up in the sports
action that the only person to see a spaceship flying overhead is a transfixed
outfield catcher searching the night sky for a descending ball. Many films use
sports stadia as locations because of the narrative possibilities of large crowds
(usually a desperate search for a ‘needle in a haystack’ and/or a threat of
carnage). Others feature prominent sports stars like O.J. Simpson in the Naked
Gun (1988) series, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Flying High (1980) and Michael
Jordan in Space Jam (1997). But bona fide fictional sports films put sport and
the social relations and mythological constructions that surround it at the heart
of the film (Bergan 1982; Rowe 1998).
When we set about reading a sports film, the same questions apply as to
the analysis of any text: what is its message at manifest and latent levels, to
whom does it hope to appeal, why has this subject and this approach to it been
selected? Some of these questions may seem deceptively simple to answer. For
example, it is obvious that sport will be chosen as a subject for film because
sports fans constitute a ready-made and willing audience for such films. Yet
if sports fans are so eager to conduct a pursuit of the ‘real’ in and through
media sport, how tolerant will they be of a Hollywood studio or any other
production house using sport to ‘tell stories’? Sarris (1980: 50) is unequivocal on