Page 30 - Sport Culture and the Media

1 UNDERS T ANDING SPORT AND MEDIA:

A S OCIO-HIS TORIC AL APPROACH

The world of sports in the age of mass media has been transformed
from nineteenth century amateur recreational participation to late
twentieth [and early twenty-first] century spectator-centered technology
and business.
(Michael Real 1998: 14)

Introduction: when two worlds collide

Before launching into an extended analysis of how media sports texts are made
and interpreted, it is necessary to have an historical and sociological under-
standing of the relationship between the institutions of sport and media. There
is, after all, no necessary reason why they should be connected in any but the
most perfunctory of manners. The practice of sport, in the first instance, is
physical play: it is an embodied experience, demanding movement, the cor-
poreal manipulation of time and space, and often the hard clash of bodies
against other bodies or against immobile hard surfaces. In fact, it is this bodily
aspect of sport that prevents game contests like chess and Scrabble from being
fully recognized as sports. Most conventional definitions of sport stress that,
whatever else happens when we are in the presence of sport, whole bodies or
their selected parts are in motion (or, in the case of sports like shooting and
archery, exhaustively trained to minimize it). A conservative but, in terms of the
analytical sports literature, representative approach like that of J. Bowyer Bell
separates sport and other playful activity in a straightforward way:
Certainly, all sports are games but equally certainly not all games are
sports. War games or diplomatic games are matters of analogy, not sports
events. Sports are play in a closed universe, seemingly isolated from
society’s other activities. More to the point, some play is a game, not