Page 96 - Sport Culture and the Media

MONEY, MYTH AND THE BIG MATCH || 77

therefore, should be more fully reported on public interest grounds) or ‘sport’
(that is, more subject to broadcast restriction as just another form of enter-
tainment). These issues continue to preoccupy the broadcast media and sports
professionals because the entire economics of the media sports cultural com-
plex turn on the careful rationing, packaging and sale of media sports texts in
different markets. Hence, the idea of the global media sports spectacle is at its
heart quite illusory: the images that appear to be so freely released have been
subject to extraordinarily stringent pre-selection and control, and the sanctions
taken against those who breach such arrangements (by, for example, implying
official Olympic endorsement when it has not been negotiated and paid for)
powerful indeed. High-end, especially ‘live’ broadcast sport appears to be in
plentiful supply, but it is, in fact, subject to careful rationing and, as is discussed
later in the chapter, would be controlled and harboured even more by highly
concentrated commercial interests were it not for intervention by the state in the
public interest.
The Summer and Winter Olympics, however, occur only over four-year
cycles, which leaves large gaps between orgies of Olympic viewing, although
after 1992 these were staggered at two-year intervals to ensure that the world
did not have to wait so long for its Olympic television ‘fix’. Other great media
sports events – international tournaments like the soccer, rugby, and cricket
World Cups, world championships in sports such as athletics and swimming,
and major annual competitions with international involvement like Wimbledon
in tennis or the US Masters in golf – have important places on the sports
calendar, but they are by their nature intermittent and out of the ordinary.
Filling television schedules is a constant task that cannot wait for the next
global media sports spectacular. The ‘bread and butter’ of sports television,
then, is annual competition within nations.
NBC had become accustomed to its position as the main sports network and,
not coincidentally, the top rating network overall, having the rights to such
major US sports as American football, basketball and baseball to supplement
its Olympic fare. Yet in 1998 it found itself ‘frozen out of football for the
first time in 33 years’ (Attwood 1998: 39). Given that American football is the
most important television sport in the USA, with broadcast rights valued
in 1998 at US$2.25 billion a season, the scramble for broadcast rights to it is
vigorous to say the least. This contest takes place over rights to a game that is
barely played, understood or watched in other countries (although not for
want of trying; see Maguire 1999), thereby revealing the pre-eminence of the
USA as a media sport market in its own right. As noted above, their direct
economic value is almost overshadowed by the image of being a ‘winner’
(analogous to that of breaking a world record while winning an Olympic gold
medal). As Attwood states: