Page 42 - Sport Culture and the Media

UNDERSTANDING SPORT AND MEDIA || 23

would have regarded as ‘nations who work themselves into furies over these
absurd contests, and seriously believe – at any rate for short periods – that
running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue’ (Orwell 1992:
38). Sometimes the consequences of such heightened emotion can be fatal, as in
the 1994 ‘revenge’ murder of Colombian footballer Andres Escobar, who was
summarily executed outside a bar by an enraged fan after Escobar had scored
the own goal that precipitated his team’s exit from the World Cup finals.
Probably the most famous direct linkage of sport and military combat is the so-
called ‘soccer war’ in 1969 between El Salvador and Honduras, where border
tensions were touched off by riots following a soccer World Cup qualifying
match between the countries. Not only has the entwining of national and
sports culture tightened in many countries and spread to others, but also the
possibilities of exposing all of the globe’s citizens to such ‘symbolic representa-
tions’ of national progress and international competition have grown with the
institutions of sport and media.
Just as it was in Britain that the social institution and cultural form of sport
first emerged, it was the British state, through its public broadcaster the British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), that pioneered the use of great sporting
occasions as festivals of nationhood, so that ‘broadcasting would produce a
new form of national event: in extending major occasions of state and of sport
throughout the land it would make a royal wedding a nation’s wedding’,
and demonstrating ‘the centrality of the BBC’s sport coverage of notions of
Britishness and national identity’ (Whannel 1992: 20, 21). Other countries
quickly appreciated this symbolically unifying power of national and,
especially, of international sport, so that great sporting moments like the Super
Bowl in the USA, the Melbourne Cup in Australia, the FA Cup Final in the UK,
Hockey Night in Canada (Kidd 1982; Gruneau and Whitson 1993) and global
media mega sports events like the Olympics (Larson and Park 1993) and the
soccer World Cup (Sugden and Tomlinson 1998), have become orgies of both
nationalism and commodification (‘commodified nationalism’, perhaps).
Apart from the state political usages of sport – most notoriously, as Orwell
noted above, Adolf Hitler’s attempt to use the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games as a
vehicle for the assertion of Aryan supremacy – the overall cultural significance
of sport cannot be underestimated. For example, most of the historical
accounts of sport drawn on above reproduce the inequality of its gender order,
with women athletes and spectators rendered more or less invisible or marginal
(Hargreaves 1993a, 1994). Yet there is a powerful ‘herstory’ in sport: a series of
tales of women who have fought for the right to play sport, be paid properly
for it, supported by sponsors at the level of their male counterparts, wear what
they choose while competing, secure appropriate media coverage, and so on
(Blue 1987; Guttmann 1991). If culture is the ‘stuff’ of everyday life – the frame