Page 31 - Sport Culture and the Media

12 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

a sport. Essentially a sport is a repeatable, regulated, physical contest
producing a clear winner.
(Bell 1987: 2, original emphasis)

Such prescriptions of what ought to be called a sport are often contested, but
at both official and unofficial levels dispute is not so much over whether a
game contest has to be physical to count as sport, as about the physical status
of the activity that claims to be a sport. Thus, Bell (1987: 3) rules out chess as a
sport because ‘structurally, the physical element is irrelevant’ and dice because
‘winning depends, if honesty rules, on lady luck not an adept toss’, but admits
darts to the sporting pantheon despite its lack of ‘intellectual challenge or
a vastly demanding physical strain’. The strong sense of physically based
hierarchy in according the title of sport is made clear in the reluctant admission
that ‘For the purist, there is the problem of video [or computer] games. Alack,
it appears that, however crude the game, the winner, physically adept, is playing
a sport’ (Bell 1987: 3). The sports spectator, therefore, is witnessing a physical
activity predicated on the precise calculation of winners and losers, or, in the
‘unfortunate’ (certainly for sports marketers) absence of a clear result, stated
and measurable criteria for declaring a draw or tie.
The ‘practice’ of media – in terms of both production and reception –
is much less physically dependent. Film and television directors, camera
operators, music producers, writers and so on may require plenty of physical
stamina and, in some cases, an extraordinary ‘eye’ or ‘ear’, but, the question-
ably accountable area of awards aside, tend to be assessed on aesthetic rather
than physical, quantitatively measurable criteria (such as the influence of
writers rather than their ability in a head-to-head contest to put assessable
words on the page). As text reception activities, viewing and reading are, of
course, sensory and sensual activities, and can elicit physiological responses
(by provoking fear, sexual arousal, and so on), but they are hardly in the same
league (forgive the pun) as completing a marathon or knocking an opponent to
the canvas. While the value and status of different media texts is hotly disputed
– Milton versus Mills and Boon, or Verdi versus The Verve, etc. – the outcome
is rarely as self-evident as Brazil 3 Germany 0 or an individual world record in
swimming.
Similarly, sport and media, as organizational complexes, have different
reasons for being, personnel, skill requirements, relations with government and
non-government agencies, and so on. In short, ‘getting physical’ in sport and
‘making symbols’ in media might be expected to remain different cultural
pursuits with few compelling reasons to engage each other on a regular basis.
Yet, over the past century, the boundaries between these two institutions have
blurred sometimes to the point of near invisibility, and they have become so