Page 39 - Sport Culture and the Media

20 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

often – but regular public contests and, importantly for this book, television
scrutiny, have had a clear ‘disciplinary’ effect on sport.
As the discretionary income of the industrial proletariat increased, especially
by organizing through trade unions to wrest a little more of the capital surplus
from the bourgeoisie, the possibility arose of reclaiming and expanding that
capital surplus by packaging and selling spectator access to those sports that
could attain the requisite, pleasurable ‘high-combat tension’. Nineteenth-
century entrepreneurs (in the case of the first cricket tours these were often, not
too surprisingly, publicans – to the extent that Cashman (1994: 71) describes
them as ‘the first cricket administrators, [who] viewed cricket as an extension
of public-house entertainment’) created the conditions for a sports business
in much the same way as other leisure pursuits became paying concerns.
They relied on supplying services that were attractive to consumers – and
made to seem even more so by lively advertising and promotion – but
which could be accessed only at a cost. This viewing fee was set at a level that
reflected the ‘scarcity’ of what was to be watched and the superiority of the
perspective on proceedings. In this way, sport became another component of
the burgeoning entertainment industry, which, as Goldlust notes, has over the
past two centuries supplanted so much uncommodified, self-reliant leisure:
The successful growth of spectator sport was premised on a set of well
established entrepreneurial principles that applied throughout the ‘enter-
tainment’ industry. As determined by the organisers, a price, or a range of
prices was fixed, the payment of which entitled any member of the public
to be admitted to a venue in which the performance or event would take
place. The venue, be it a circus, vaudeville house, concert hall, theatre,
cinema or stadium, was physically constructed in a manner that limited
the potential audience to a finite number of paying customers who, from
variably privileged vantage points – depending on the price they were
prepared to pay – could experience that performance or event. Through
the construction of some form of physical barrier or boundary, those
unwilling to pay the cost of admission or unable to gain entry to the venue,
because all the legally sanctioned audience space was already committed,
were excluded.
(Goldlust 1987: 73–4)
The ease with which sports contests could be enclosed and ‘screened’ for paying
customers varied with the nature of the sport: it was much harder, for example,
in large, open-air football, cricket and baseball grounds than for roofed boxing
or wrestling buildings and tents. It was also more profitable to set up permanent
venues in the large, population-dense urban centres than to rely on travelling
sports exhibitions, where transport and sustenance costs were high and venue