Page 212 - Sport Culture and the Media

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others. Sport has (as we have seen) extraordinary affective and connotative
power, making many people feel deeply moved, and encouraging them to
translate sporting values and measures of success and failure to other spheres.
Hence, not only are sport and sports metaphors deployed in advertising, but
they can also be used readily as the vehicle for the fictional handling of many
pivotal social issues.
If we take a very different film to Chariots of Fire like Jerry Maguire, the
‘cut throat’ world of US sports agents provides a very effective setting for an
exploration of the ethics of capitalism, the need for balance between working
and personal lives, and the nature of alliances (economic and friendly) between
Black and White. In the film, Jerry Maguire (played by Tom Cruise), a successful
and ruthless sports agent, momentarily penetrates the amorality of his occupa-
tion and embarks on a brief crusade to restore more altruistic values to the
duties of representing athletes in contract negotiations. Instead of chasing
more money and clients, he decides to safeguard their interests by limiting the
number but improving the quality of his business relationships, even making
room to consider the broader health of sport itself. By the time he ‘comes to his
senses’, realizing that his newfound and publicly expressed ethical commitment
was no more than a passing fancy, he is sacked from his firm and abandoned
by most of his clients (including those who had professed their unshakeable
loyalty to him). Cut adrift by his usual class allies, Jerry Maguire is supported
only by Dorothy Boyd, a single mother from a working-class background
(played by Renee Zellweger) with whom he becomes romantically involved,
and Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr), an African American footballer with
a rather uncertain career trajectory who keeps demanding ‘Show me the
money!’ Ultimately, Maguire becomes successful through the ascendancy of
his once doubtful but loyal client and saves the marriage that he has placed in
jeopardy, which, as Miller (1997) points out, is somewhat unusually represented
as more fragile than his client’s own conjugal relationship – the Black family
generally shown to be in crisis because of the lack of commitment of the Black
male.
A pivotal scene in Jerry Maguire is when his client appears to have broken
his neck during an important football match, only to become a sports celebrity
through the degree of showmanship he displays as he rises from his prone
position to ‘milk’ the applause of the crowd. Sport is shown, finally, to be about
‘caring’, commitment, forging alliances between unlikely people of different
race and class in the pursuit of dual successes in sport and commerce. Hence,
the tension between capitalism and sport is resolved by reassuring the audience
that ethical and humane business practice in sport brings more rather than
less financial success, while also guaranteeing that sport is never reduced to
mere capital accumulation. The relationship between new capitalist and old