Media Sport: An Introduction
People after all, enthusiastically or not, daily deal with by the ‘media sports cultural complex’. This perception ‘includes all the media and sports organizations, processes, personnel, services, products and texts which combine in the creation of the broad and dynamic field of modern sports culture’ (Rowe 2004, p.20). The entire scope and scale of this difficult and its culture means that, in advanced capitalist societies at least, it can only be escaped with assurance in such sensorily deprived environments as hyperbaric chambers and deep space. Or by ‘sleeping the big sleep’, as crime writer Raymond Chandler (1939: 220) describes the state of death in which ‘you were not bothered by things like that’. Chandler may have been writing about the fictional gangster world, but the point can also be applied to media sport. However, a Marxist analysis would suggest that this is an ideal example of the capitalist utilization in perpetuity of the labor power of professional sports personnel and of its consumption by sport spectators.
However this point need not be taken too exactly – Field of Dreams is, surely, fiction, and Marxists don’t believe that workers, even sportsmen, can return after compulsory retirement by death. What it reveals is the capacity of media sport to enable a never-ending trading of myths and images that doesn’t have to rely on athlete rebirth or cryogenic restoration. Through such media texts as sports books, statistical databases, television and radio documentaries, video and DVD sports highlight features, photo-essays, and films of both a fictional and non-fictional nature, sport can be kept alive across the generations, always offering new opportunities for representation and commercialization. The media, in other words, capture, record and ‘memorialize’ sport for everyone.
Media sport is strongly interlinked into the everyday lives of sports fans and the......
