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Power Play Sport, the Media and Popular Culture Second edition Raymond Boyle and Richard Haynes Edinburgh University Press For Noelle, Lauren and Liam (RB) For Susan, Alice and Adam (RH) © Raymond Boyles and Richard Haynes, 2009 First edition published by Pearson Education Limited, 2000 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13 pt Stempel Garamond by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3592 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 3593 1 (paperback) The right of Raymond Boyles and Richard Haynes to be identifi ed as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Contents Preface v Acknowledgements x 1 Sport, the Media and Popular Culture 1 2 All Our Yesterdays: A History of Media Sport 19 3 A Sporting Triangle: Television, Sport and Sponsorship 43 4 Power Game: Why Sport Matters to Television 66 5 Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Media Sport and Stardom 86 6 The Race Game: Media Sport, Race and Ethnicity 107 7 Playing the Game: Media Sport and Gender 122 8 Games Across Frontiers: Mediated Sport and 144 National Identity 9 The Sports Pages: Journalism and Sport 164 10 Consuming Sport: Fans, Fandom and the Audience 184 11 Conclusion: Sport in the Digital Age 204 Bibliography 223 Index 240 Sport, is of course one of the very best things about television; I would keep my set for it alone. (Raymond Williams, The Listener, 1 August 1968) GOLFONOMICS: The Ball Game that became the richest Sport on Earth. (The Independent, 19 September 2008) Sport needs, attracts, and must deal with money and power and the backers will always be looking to buy or take their share of the glory. How are we to police the line between the realms of power and play, economic space and social space? The production and consumption of modern sport clearly is political, albeit with a small ‘p’. (David Goldblatt, ‘Taking sport seriously’, Prospect, No. 141, December 2007) Preface THE MEANING BEHIND THE SPECTACLE: Giant scrolls? Human kites? An army of drummers? Clifford Coonan decodes the symbols of the ceremony China used to tell its story to the world. (The Independent, commenting on the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games, 9 August 2008) A decade of change: media sport 2000–8 The increasingly central role that sport plays in public life was clearly evident in the UK during August 2008. In the light of Team GB’s Olympic success, sporting media stories were everywhere, and sig- nifi cantly often in mainstream broadcast, print and online news cov- erage. At these moments the already increasingly porous boundaries between sports news and news news disappear completely. Sports such as cycling, not normally given an extensive media profi le, found itself and its stars, such as triple gold medal winner Chris Hoy, being centre stage in the media spotlight (‘Golden Hoy: the Scot who made Olympic History’, the front page splash in The Herald, 20 August 2008). There were numerous news stories that focused on the politics of sport. These included the debate about whether Team GB should have an all British football team at the 2012 London Olympics. The Prime Minister at Westminster Gordon Brown, a Scot, having given much political thought to defi ning ‘Britishness’, advocated such a move. He clashed with Alex Salmond, First Minister and leader of the Scottish National Party government in Edinburgh, who argued against such an arrangement, going further to suggest that Scotland should have its own distinct team at the Olympics. Two other Scots, Sir Alex Ferguson, manager of Manchester United, and Sir Sean Connery, promoting vi Power Play his autobiography at the Edinburgh book festival, were pulled into the wider media and public debate. Other political stories around in August 2008 included the impact that the success of the Beijing Games might have on China’s growing position within the world economy. While stories relating to the likely impact that the London Games in 2012 may have on the arts and cultural heritage industries that will see National Lottery money diverted to the Olympics began to reappear again following what appeared like an cessation of hostilities during the 24/7 media coverage of the Beijing Games. The summer of 2008 had also seen those perennial footballing under- achievers Spain triumph at the European Football Championships held in Switzerland and Austria. This was accompanied by much discussion of the so-called ‘new Spaniards’ who were, if we were to believe media coverage, setting aside traditional nationalist rivalries to unite behind the Spanish national team (‘Spain revels in new spirit of unity as foot- ball team heals division’, Observer, 29 June 2008), while on the tennis courts of London and Beijing, Spain’s Rafael Nadal’s success at both Wimbledon and the Olympics helped showcase the growing global sporting image of that country. In the UK, by way of contrast, tennis player Andy Murray’s Wimbledon tournament saw the British media increasingly fi xated about the need to label the tennis star as Scottish and/or British (or more accurately a Brit), all of which led one media commentator, Alan Ruddock, to note: It confi rms that the British media is, in reality, a London media, or at the very least an English media. The label [Brit] represents annexation, not appreciation, and confi rms the prejudices of those who believe that London’s editors have no knowledge of, or interest in, affairs outside the centre. (Observer, 6 July 2008) Elsewhere in the global sporting landscape, the trajectory of sport- ing development and success increasingly refl ected the wider shifts in international economic and political power relations. While India and China, both enjoyed staging successful high-profi le sporting events in cricket and the Olympics, the sport of golf was being hit hard in the US by the credit crunch, but found itself thriving in the emerging economic powerhouse countries of Russia, India and China. What all of the above serve to illustrate is that since the publica- tion of the fi rst edition of Power Play in 2000, sport has become even more a central component of mainstream popular culture as well as economic, political and public discourse. We would argue that a more Preface vii commercially focused, demand-led, 24/7 media system has helped to facilitate the seemingly insatiable appetite for particular sporting dis- courses. These trends are not without paradox. While sports – and foot- ball in particular – have entered the mainstream media lexicon, more and more live sport is only available on pay-TV platforms. Despite this, events such as the free-to-air Olympics break through this barrier and are widely amplifi ed if they carry what the media defi ne as ‘good news stories’. More and more mainstream news coverage is devoted to carrying sporting stories and the stars that the media sport industries work so hard to create, and the media management and PR industries work so hard to sustain and extract a commercial value from. And yet despite this change, taking sport seriously remains some- thing of a challenge. David Goldblatt (2007) has argued that a healthier sporting culture would be achieved if sports were accorded the same seriousness given to the performing arts, and subject to the same levels of ‘transparency, sustainability and democracy that we expect in public life’ (Goldblatt, 2007: 37). While this may be true, there is also evidence, almost ten years on from the publication of the fi rst edition, that talking seriously about sports’ cultural position and the role the media play in this process happens in a much more sustained and discursive manner than has ever been the case, certainly within a UK context. When cultural critic Germaine Greer in a column on the arts can argue the case for why sports matter, things have clearly evolved. She notes how: Sport is perhaps the best way to demonstrate how culture works to enliven and leaven daily experience. We know that the Aztecs played ball games, and the annual ceremonial games were of crucial importance in the cultural life of the Mesoamerican peoples. Our reasons for risking bank- ruptcy in staging the Olympics Games are cultural. But sport does not simply bring people together; it also divides them, sometimes with mur- derous effect. What is more important is that, when well-managed, the battle on the pitch is a stereotyped outlet for aggression and confl ict; this symbolic warfare inspires acres of newsprint, much of it better written than anything on the comment pages. (Guardian, 24 March 2008) Such examples of a critical intervention in the discourses that sur- round media sport, while still rare, are more common than they were a decade ago, from Beckham to Rooney, from Andy Murray to Lewis Hamilton, discussions about the relationship between sport and national identity, sexism in sport, sports corruption and the economics viii Power Play of media sport and digital sports rights are all topics that seep into mainstream areas of journalism. It also demonstrates the extent that sport, more than at any other time in its history, has been explicitly pulled into the orbit of com- merce and business. Sport, and the media themselves, are now integral components of what are often called the entertainment or cultural industries, despite sport’s strange exclusion from the UK government’s offi cial defi nition of the increasingly ubiquitous ‘creative industries’.