The latest issue of the online journal FlowTV has just been published. It is a special issue on ‘Sports Media Tensions and Transitions’ and it includes my short article entitled ‘Sportv: Beyond the Sport Event’. This is the opening paragraph:
This issue of Flow was prompted by a recognition that sports media has not to date attracted the kind of critical and scholarly attention that has been paid to other forms such as news, drama, soap operas, or reality television. The invitation to contribute highlighted a number of issues including fan experiences, sports in different media, social media and sports, the professional-amateur interface in content provision, and historical and contemporary discourses and representations of gender, race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity. All of these are important and worthy subjects in what is undoubtedly a woefully under-studied area. And yet all of these suggested topics focus on the sports event, with the implicit assumption that ‘sports media’ equates exactly to coverage and discussion of sports events, no more, no less. In this brief article I want to question this assumption, to open up the category of ‘sports media’ – and more precisely, sports television – to explore the diverse range of sports-related programming and content that has been almost completely overlooked by scholars of the media, and television studies in particular. I call this range of content ‘sportv’, and I argue that far from being marginal or invisible, it is a quintessential form of television. ‘Sportv’ includes but is by no means restricted to event coverage.
Other articles in this issue, with first paragraphs:
Harper Cossar ‘Sports Media: Tensions and Transitions’
“Film study creates the game plan, in which you’re trying to out-think or out-maneuver the other guy. … You need to have options for every move or countermove, and you identify your best options by studying film. That way, in each situation, you’re reacting rather than deciding.” — Mike McCarthy, Green Bay Packers head coach1
At FLOW’s 2008 conference, I convened the roundtable discussion “Televised sports and its contexts.” The contributors approached sports from a variety of perspectives. Some addressed aesthetics and style, while others questioned sports’ vivification of race/gender/class issues. Some proffered historiographic queries with regard to sports’ importance in the overall scheme of TV history, and others addressed the “lowbrow” reputation of sports such as mixed martial arts. All of these lines of inquiry pointed toward one ultimate direction: sports on TV is not studied heavily by media scholars. But it should be.
Heather McIntosh ‘HBO, Sports Documentary, and Women’s and Girls’ Soccer’
“It’s not TV. It’s HBO.” With that slogan, premium cable channel Home Box Office attempts to distinguish itself as better than other channels on television through its programming. With in-house and contracted productions, the documentary division covers a broad range of social, cultural, and political issues such as the Iraq War, the Katrina devastation, and Alzheimer’s disease. HBO’s sports division also creates its own programming, which includes Bryant Gumbel’s Real Sports, Joe Buck Live (“A New Sports Show with a Fresh New Spin”), and Got No Game with Paul Mercurio. The sports division, too, creates documentaries, including Reverse of the Curse of the Bambino and Assault in the Ring.
Jacob Dittmer ‘Football’s New Forms’
The new media age is upon us and a major benefactor in the world of professional sports is the National Football League. True, the NFL has long been the darling of broadcast television with the Super Bowl still regarded as one of the most-watched (global) media events. Beyond the sport’s success in broadcast there has seen a surge of new forms of fandom due to new media’s role in fantasy football and video games (in particular Madden NFL). These forms have enabled fans/users to increase their weekly intake of NFL to preposterous levels. Fans now engage in their own games of control and ownership over the sport by participating in online communities. Convergence media as espoused by Jenkins1 is certainly illustrated with football as an example of the mediated form. Today, the fan can receive stats and fantasy football updates on their mobile phone. Fans can take any team to a Super Bowl in a video game’s alternate reality. In terms of sheer numbers, fantasy football participation has grown by nearly 10 percent a year2 with an estimated market of 27 million players3 . The success of the Madden game franchise is equally staggering with an estimated 70 million units of the game’s various incarnations sold worldwide in the game’s 20-year history.4
Markus Stauff ‘The Faces of Athletes’
While sport is often defined as, for example, the public display of physical exercise, in media sports we encounter equally often the public display of emotions. The visibility of the face is one of the decisive differences between the reception of sport in the stadium and in the media. Already in the 1960s the integration of faces of players, as well as those of the fans in the stadium, during the NFL broadcasts was thought to open the sport, defined as the realm of masculinity, to a female audience. It is no wonder then, with the realm of masculinity under pressure, that the esteem of faces and their expressions is observed with disapproval. The emphasis on the face is thought as a commercial media strategy that distracts us more and more from the real nature and meaning of sports. At the same time, emotions are often said to be one of the core features of sports; even more, sports is considered one of the last resorts of emotions and also the guarantor of authentic emotions that are not restricted by social norms of behavior. The face, then, is at the heart of sports’ cultural representation as it is at its margins, ambivalently connected to all that is thought to lie beyond true sports: advertising, star cult, personal biography, and so on. I want to argue that the display and interpretation of facial expressions are – not unlike statistics – part of the many different ways of knowledge production that not only embellish but also constitute modern sport and its particular political potential.
Stephen Brauer ‘The Dual/Dueling Sides of TO/Terrell Owens’
Throughout his career as a wide receiver in the NFL, Terrell Owens has used the media spotlight to generate publicity for himself. 1 His usual means of doing this, outside of some of the outlandish comments he has made directly to the press, has been through his celebrations following a touchdown reception. A few of these moments include the time he used a Sharpie to autograph the ball and handed it to a “fan” sitting in the stands (who happened to be his financial adviser), once when he set down the football in the endzone as a pillow and comically pretended to take a nap, and the time he grabbed a fan’s bucket of popcorn and dumped it into his helmet.
Brett Hutchins and David Rowe ‘Broadcasters Under Pressure’
Television broadcasters are experiencing the first genuine challenge to their hegemony in the transmission of popular sports events and reports for many decades. Their dominance is arguably traceable to the BBC’s nation-building sports broadcasts of the mid-1920s and to the 1939 Gillette-sponsored World Series broadcasts that were followed by a sales increase of their razors by 350 per cent. TV’s hold on sport was enhanced by the incredible ratings success of the American Super Bowl, an event initiated in 1967 that quickly evolved into a model for television sports media events, and by the summer Olympic Games, particularly after the 1984 Los Angeles Olympiad, with its emphasis on sponsorship, product licensing and ‘showbiz spectacular’ opening and closing ceremonies. The challenge to television broadcasting is being posed by telecommunications operators and digital media companies who are increasingly major players in global professional sport. Indicators of altered market conditions are, for example, evident in Europe, Asia and Australia. Recent deals have seen France Telecom’s Orange purchase IPTV and mobile rights to French Ligue 1 football, and Singtel (controlled by the Singapore Government) acquire the internet rights for Italy’s top tier domestic association football (soccer) league, Serie A. In Australia – popularly mythologised as a sporting nation – the dominant telecommunications company, Telstra, holds exclusive online rights to three of the most popular spectator sports, Australian football, rugby league and V8 Supercar racing, all involving multiple-year deals valued in the tens of millions of dollars. The financial muscle of the telecommunications sector underlines the fact that broadcasters should be worried about the contestation of their historical dominance of the media sport market. Again using an Australia example, telecommunications carriers reported annual revenues of AU$25.2 billion in the 2006-07 financial year, approaching four times that of broadcast and subscription television broadcasters (AU$6.9 billion). 1
Ethan Tussey ‘Foam Finger Cubicle: Selling ESPN 360 as Workplace Media’
Before he passed away in late June of 2009, Billy Mays had established himself as cultural icon of the infomercial genre. His energetic manner and booming voice provided just the right amount of exaggerated sincerity that has proven irresistible to the YouTube remix community. Mays’ resonance with “technologically savvy multi-taskers” was undoubtedly the reason that ESPN selected him to be their official spokesperson for their online sports video service ESPN360.1 In a series of advertisements that began airing in December 2008, Mays self-consciously employs his brand of histrionics to argue that advances in streaming internet video technology have created a “revolutionary” moment for sports fans. The rhetorical appeal of these advertisements is designed to expand the venues of the sports media from the living room and the stadium to the cubicle, and in the process, transform the meaning of sports fan activities.
Fred Mason ‘XFL @ MSNBC.COM: Reflecting on a Moment and Looking to the Future’
Through the winter of 2001, I followed messages posted to MSNBC’s online bulletin board system (BBS) devoted to the XFL. It proved a difficult task due to the volume of traffic, and by the time the league’s only season came and went, I had downloaded over 3000 postings threaded through different topics. I originally planned to assess what sense football fans were making of the hyper-mediated broadcast style of the XFL. A large percentage of posts were concerned with media issues, as fans intelligently discussed many aspects of the overall broadcast package. Some of the further uses of the BBS surprised me, with a group of about 60 participants spending significant amounts of time following discussions that often verged far off the topic of football, into such things as other sports, national politics, family life and personal issues. In the days before Facebook and MySpace, back when we still questioned whether an “online community” was a possibility, I became enamored with the idea that we had a new technology allowing people both to come together, and to discuss and challenge the dominant forms of media and the way it presented things. Since then, social networking is a reality and we often hear of the emancipatory possibilities of Web 2.0. Meanwhile, after further years of teaching and researching the sports media, I’ve become more skeptical of the perspective that new technologies will offer “freedom” to the consumer, especially in regard to sport. Here, I want to look back on the XFL and MSNBC.com’s XFL BBS, with a view to seeing what the relatively recent past might tell us about the future of sport and the media.
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