Sports Communications - Essay Example

SPORTS COMMUNICATIONS Sports are not only about winning or losing on the field. They are about months and years of training, expense, and sacrifice for the chance, often remote, of a few hours or a few seconds of glory. They are about fame and fortune: sports are big business around the globe, stakes are high, and competition is fiercer than ever before. Media The relationship between the media and sport has always been symbiotic. Newspapers developed sports pages to sell more papers; sports organizations welcomed publicity because it brought more spectators to the game. As radio and television gave national exposure to local teams, the amount of money available to club owners and "players vastly increased, turning professionals from often ill-paid journeymen into media celebrities" (Chandler, Joan 221). As jet air travel globalized sport, the distinction between the best amateur and the professional players became impossible to maintain; even the Olympic movement abandoned founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin's original devotion to amateurism. Still debatable is whether the quantitative change in the number of viewers of television has completely changed the quality of the sporting experience. Do children, for instance, deliberately emulate the petulant and violent player behavior they often see on television, ignoring the coaches who try to instill principles of fair play Do most coaches, at all levels, put winning before the health and welfare of their players Have international players become simply pawns in the hands of the media industry Or has television simply opened up electronic seats for fans and made it impossible for sportswriters and commentators to glorify people and events those fans can now see for themselves Has media money justified itself by providing training and competing opportunities for those who had previously been excluded from sports they could not afford to learn What is certain is that some sports have always been "more equal than others"; fans choose to what they will give their allegiance. The media can create or increase temporary interest in specific events, but unless what the media discuss or show is rooted in more than the event itself, interest evaporates. Swimming While a complex, rapidly developing sport may be expected to generate many internal problems, synchro's main controversy, "sport or theater," is generated externally, by media that are unwilling to consider as "sport" anything not meeting the "swifter, higher, stronger" standard. But even Sports Illustrated, despite normally less than flattering reviews, admitted in its report on the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, "Synchronized swimmers may look like cupcakes, but they're tough cookies, half the routine is performed upside down in a pool" (Dawn Bean 128). Its water-show beginnings still haunt it. The idea that water ballet is show, while synchronized swimming is sport, has been hard to sell to swimming officials, the public, and the media. Its acceptance into the Olympic Games came only after Lord Killanin, then chair of the International Olympic Committee, saw it for himself at the third World Aquatic Championships. "I am very impressed. I saw synchronized swimming for the first time today. It is a very elegant sport" (Dawn Bean 197). Synchro enjoys more popularity and acceptance as a sport in parts of the world outside the United States. In every Olympic competition, 1984 through 1996, it has been one of the first sports to sell out all audience tickets. Another issue is male participation. Interestingly, at the turn of the century competitions in the equivalent of figures were for males. Then the beautiful spectaculars of aquacades and films accented the female attraction. Early U.S. competitions included male championships, but they were never popular. Neither U.S. nor international rules prohibit male participation except for the Olympic Games and the World Aquatic Championships. Presently, male participation is greater in Europe than in the United States and Canada. Indeed, in 1991, the French national champion duet was a mixed pair and a junior male qualified, in 1996, to be part of the U.S. National Junior Team and will compete in competitions that allow males. Men are included in the U.S. masters program. Technology Sport and technology have been interconnected throughout human history. Hunting and gathering peoples created athletic games that employed the technological kits with which they wrested a living from the environment and engaged in warfare. Those cultures used spears, bows and arrows, and other such implements in some of their games and sports. Many of the original human athletic games employed familiar tools as basic ingredients in competitions. Technologies are not merely inanimate objects; they are also organizations of human energy designed to solve problems. The technological developments that sparked the agricultural revolutions that gave rise to the first urban civilizations also generated new sporting technologies. Ancient civilizations around the globe constructed monumental architectural sites for sports. Ancient Greeks built stadiums, hippodromes, gymnasiums, and palestras. Greek sports and Greek athletic architecture spread around the Mediterranean world. In the centuries that followed, Roman coliseums sprouted in the vast lands that fell under the sway of their empire. At least 1,500 years ago, Native peoples in the Americas built massive courts with stonewalls that served as the locations for ball games. In the Dark Ages, monumental architecture devoted to sports declined markedly in Europe and the Middle East. However, in medieval and early modern times Western cultures frequently organized sports around military technologies. Native American, Asian, and African cultures also cultivated martial skill through sports that used weaponry. Skilled artisans produced "tools" for other elite and folk recreations such as tennis, golf, and early forms of cricket, baseball, and football. The Industrial Revolution The technological dynamism of the Industrial Revolution radically changed the nature of society and sports. A wide variety of technological advances amplified athletic games and pastimes. The 19th century brought such innovations as the process for "vulcanizing" rubber, which altered golf, tennis, and other athletic balls and their games. New machines such as the bicycle created new sports and recreations. Athletes in industrialized nations became enamored of new and specialized devices that allowed for greater achievements and higher standards of play. That dynamic and evolutionary process produced the later "hi-tech" athletic shoe industry, a multibillion-dollar business selling the notion that technology does indeed enhance sporting performance. During the 19th and 20th centuries modern sport became a central feature in the mass cultures created by the new technological civilizations. Giant stadiums sprang up in industrial cities. The selling of sports and sporting equipment became a big business in which technological innovations often produced significantly larger market shares. The transportation and communication revolutions that underpinned the Industrial Revolution also transformed the sporting cultures of first European and North American nations and then those of much of the rest of the globe. The railroad facilitated the rise of professional baseball and college football in the United States, engendering rivalries between cities and colleges. Technologies were instrumental in transforming folk recreations into national pastimes. The development of national presses in industrialized nations made reading the sports pages a daily habit for millions of newspaper subscribers. New international media promoted sporting rivalries between nations. The re-creation of the Olympic Games in 1896, facilitated by communication and transportation technologies that allowed athletes from around the world to compete and spectators from around the world to witness the results, created one of the most important spectacles for modern global technological civilization. "Television has become a past time entertainment for the US citizens" (Rader, Benjamin 79). Soccer The association between hooliganism and soccer is also partly a function of the greater worldwide media exposure that the game receives. The media also tend to generate myth, which contributes to the public perception. For example, in the years up to the mid-1960s, the occurrence of soccer hooliganism in Central and South America, continental Europe, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland was regularly reported in the English press, together with statements to the effect that such behavior "couldn't happen in England." Spectator violence however, had indeed been rife at English soccer matches before World War I and never died out completely. Similarly, following the 1985 Heysel tragedy, in which 39 fans died at the European Cup Final in Brussels, it came to be believed globally that soccer hooliganism was a uniquely English "disease"; yet, the worst recorded hooligan-related soccer tragedy in modern times occurred at the match between Peru and Argentina in Lima in 1964, when more than 300 people were reported to have died. Although its incidence varies between countries and within countries over time, no soccer playing country has been spared hooliganism. Powerful groups with a commercial interest in spectator sports (e.g., sports organizations and breweries) may contribute to masking or distorting what is, in fact, a more serious incidence of sports spectator violence in North America than is generally acknowledged. Comparable interest groups in Europe, however, have not succeeded in similarly masking or distorting the problem of soccer hooliganism. Cool Runnings Cool Runnings is a 1993 film that charts the experience of a group of track-and-field athletes who failed to qualify for the Jamaican team going to the Seoul Summer Olympics. In a desperate search for Olympic glory, they discover a former U.S. bobsledder and coach living on the island who had once dreamt of taking Jamaican sprinters and transforming them into a bobsled team. Although he is a disillusioned drunk, the coach, played by the late John Candy, is convinced of the Jamaicans' desire for Olympic glory and sets about training them. Although lacking funding, official support, training facilities, and a bobsled, and with only three months to go before the start of the Games, the Jamaicans make it to Calgary. The film depicts their attempts to raise money, their first experience of winter weather, and their dogged attempts to learn how to bobsled. Despite the odds being stacked against them and opposition from the bobsledding fraternity, the Jamaicans qualify for the Olympic finals. By embracing their Jamaican identity and by sledding brilliantly in the second round, the team wins over their fellow bobsledders and the Jamaican Olympic officials and capture the world's imagination. The final run meets with disaster and the Jamaican sled crashes. From adversity, however, springs success. All the conflicts in the film are resolved and the Jamaicans are heralded as the true sporting winners. The film did much to promote bobsledding. Although based on real events, the film is largely fictional. The romance, however, was real. The Jamaicans who went to Calgary had never seen snow before; their first-ever run on ice was only days before their final qualifying run, and they really did raise their funding from such strange sources as T-shirt sales and the release of a reggae record. Some of the profits from the film were put back into the sport and the interest encouraged the Red Stripe beer company to sponsor the team. At the 1994 Winter Olympics in Albertville the Jamaicans finished fourteenth and ahead of traditional bobsled nations such as the United States, France, and Italy. Ben Johnson On Saturday, 24 September 1988, Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson set a world record in the 100-meter event at the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games before an on-site crowd of 70,000 and with an estimated 2 billion others watching via television. His time of 9.79 seconds was 0.04 seconds faster than his previous world record of 9.83 seconds set in Rome in 1987. By nightfall on Monday, 26 September 1988, Ben Johnson had been disqualified because of his use of anabolic steroids, specifically stanozolol, in what was to become the most controversial event of the Games indeed, some say, in the history of the Olympics. The international impact of Johnson's disqualification was evident in newspaper headlines around the world. "Fastest Junkie on Earth" (London Daily Star), "Drugs turn Johnson's medal into a piece of fool's gold" (Baltimore Sun), "CHEAT!" (London Daily Mirror), and "The fastest man in the world a doping sinner" (Germany's Abendzeitung). The impact of the Johnson affair was particularly dramatic in Canada. This may have been due not only to the nation's historical lack of success at the Olympics but, perhaps more importantly; the event had tarnished Canada's reputation as an honest, moral, fair-playing nation. Arguably, Ben Johnson had become the watershed of modern steroid use. Almost every subsequent scandal uses Johnson as the marker by which to measure its nature and significance. An intriguing question emerges concerning why Ben Johnson became the focal point even though he was only one of at least ten athletes disqualified for drug use at Seoul and the total number of disqualifications there were less than the 1984 Los Angeles Games. In addition to Canada's national embarrassment, it may have been the fact that the IOC had publicly stated its intention to crack down on cheating; it may have been the fact that the 100-meter final is traditionally one of the most prestigious events in the Olympics; it may have been the fact that Ben Johnson had broken a world record, beating his much more recognized U.S. rival, Carl Lewis; and perhaps it was due to the fact that the world had been deceived-a global audience had witnessed human history in the making only to have their collective memory betrayed. References Chandler, Joan. Television and National Sport: The United States and Britain. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1988. Bean, Dawn, ed. Synchro. CA: Leisure Press. 1992. Koppett, Leonard. Sports Illusion, Sports Reality: A Reporter's View of Sports, Journalism, and Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1981. Newcomb, Horace, ed. Television: The Critical View. 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press. 1994. Rader, Benjamin. In Its Own Image: How Television Has Transformed Sports. New York: Free Press. 1984. Whannel, Garry. Fields in Vision: Television Sport and Cultural Transformation. London: Routledge. 1992. Read More