Page 32 - Sport Culture and the Media

UNDERSTANDING SPORT AND MEDIA || 13

mutually indispensable that, as asserted in the Introduction, one is literally
unthinkable without the other (literally, because it is almost impossible now
to ‘imagine’ sport without the mind’s eye conjuring up replay, slow motion and
multi-perspectival images, accompanied by the inner voice of phantom sports
commentators). How did this intermeshing of sport and media occur? In search
of an answer, we must look to the great changes that have refashioned the
structure and rhythm of the lives of most of the world’s inhabitants – the rise of
capitalism and industrialism in general and the advent of mass consumption
and the commodification of leisure time in particular. To develop this argu-
ment, I shall first sketch in very briefly the twin histories of the institutions
whose convergence provides the rationale for this book.

The rise of sport

Most scholarly histories of sport (such as Guttmann 1978) trace the origins of
structured physical play in different societies and epochs, but argue that what
we have come to recognize as sport, like the nation-state or adolescence,
is of much more recent and specific origin. There are many ‘folk’ games still
played today in human groups organized around tribes, small to medium-sized
settlements, and even extending to the ‘urban villages’ of the metropolis. The
ancient Olympic Games are routinely judged to be the birthplace of sport, but
it would be historically fallacious to conceive of the development of sport into
its modern manifestation as arising out of a steady evolutionary process, the
origins of which can be traced directly to the ancient Greeks. This is not only
because the original, ‘ancient’ Games were discontinued for at least sixteen
centuries (according to Hill 1992: 6, terminating in either ad 261 or 393) until
revived in 1896 by the French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Coubertin, although
there had been attempted revivals in both Greece and England in the inter-
vening period. It is also because sport as a recognizable social and cultural
institution is not universal but emerged in a particular location (Britain) at a
particular time (early industrialization). There is a danger, of course, in pro-
posing such a foundational argument, of trying to clean up the messy origins
of contemporary sport and of failing to acknowledge its qualitative and
directional changes. Without wishing to ‘essentialize’ the diverse and chaotic
world of sport, it is nonetheless important to appreciate that the constituent
elements of what is now globally identifiable as sport became manifest in
response to a unique combination of historical factors, which, once established,
took on a logic and life of its own – an argument not unlike, perhaps, Max
Weber’s (1930: 182) thesis that an historically contingent meeting of Calvinism
and Protestantism created the ‘spirit of capitalism’, which, once it had taken