Page 92 - Sport Culture and the Media

MONEY, MYTH AND THE BIG MATCH || 73

one (unconsciously) prescient passage in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism, Weber links all three institutions by stating that:

In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of
wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become
associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the
character of sport.
(Weber 1930: 182)
If Weber’s lifespan had stretched a few decades beyond the year of his death
(1920), he would have seen not only ‘the pursuit of wealth’ in the USA and other
capitalist nations given ‘the character of sport’, but also leisure pursuits like
sport take on the character of the pursuit of wealth. He would also have seen
sport appropriate many of the functions of established religion in increasingly
secular societies dedicated to the worship of the god of conspicuous commod-
ity consumption.
Irrespective of whether sport and its values are religious in the strict sense, in
broad economic terms (concerned more with profits than prophets, to use a
rather old pun) it is one of the key contemporary sites where the expression of
strong emotions is translated into the generation of substantial capital. Or,
more expansively, where (following Lash and Urry) aesthetic and informational
signs meet popular emotion (which sometimes looks like mass hysteria) in a
manner readily convertible into commodified pleasure. Media sport has, as we
have seen, a proven capacity to bring potential consumers to the marketplace in
numbers ranging from the respectable to the staggering. It is able at particular
moments symbolically to reconstruct disparate human groups, to make them
feel at one with each other (and perhaps, in the case of the Olympics and the
World Cup of association football, the world). When contemporary advertising
relies so heavily on making very similar items (such as sugared drinks,
cars with shared components and ‘re-badged’ computers) appear different,
sport’s capacity to stimulate emotional identification with people and things is
priceless. Sport can connect the past, present and future, by turns trading on
sepia-tinted nostalgia, the ‘nowness’ of ‘live’ action and the anticipation of
things to come. Furthermore, even when our human sports ‘subject’ is being
reflexively critical, rather than getting carried away by sporting affect, they can
take an ironic, playfully postmodern approach to it, mocking the mangled
language of sports commentators (like the satirical magazine Private Eye’s
‘Colemanballs’ section and book series), watching self-consciously bad-taste
sports TV programmes (like Australian rugby league’s The Footy Show) and
buying sports newspapers that are parodies of ‘straight’ tabloid reporting (like
Britain’s Sunday Sport). This chameleonic capacity of contemporary media
sport makes it a key aspect of the commodity cycle, its flexibility of form