Sport, Media and Mega-Events

Lawrence A. Wenner, Andrew C. Billings, Lawrence A. Wenner, Andrew C. Billings

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317397434
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Bringing together many of the most influential scholars in sport and media studies, this book examines the diverse ways that media influences our understanding of the world's most important sport events, dubbed sports mega-events. It sheds new light on how these events have been changed by the media, and have, in turn, adapted to media to further their brand's cultural influence.

Focusing on the central concept of "mediatization" – the permeation of media into all spheres of contemporary life – the book presents original case studies of major events including the Olympics, FIFA, rugby and cricket World Cups, Tour de France, Super Bowl, World Series, Monaco Grand Prix, Wimbledon, and many more. Written from a truly international perspective, this is a seminal work in sport and media studies that reveals the growing political, economic, and cultural influences of sport mega-events in contemporary society.

Sport, Media and Mega-Events is an essential text for any course on the sociology of sport, event management, sport marketing, or featuring a cultural, communication or media studies approach to sport.

PART I
Framing sport, media and mega-events

1
THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE MEGASPORTING EVENT

Media, mediatization and seminal sports events

Andrew C. Billings and Lawrence A. Wenner

Media coverage of sports is, by its very nature, ephemeral (Billings, Qiao, Conlin, and Nie, 2015). The temporary loss of the here and now is embraced when we consume mediated sports coverage as a welcome respite from the press of everyday demands (Morse, 1990). Yet, many sports fans recognize that contests that once seemed both urgent and critical often melt into the background in a week’s time and are summarily forgotten. The ubiquity of sports contests and the blur of discussions about them across the contemporary mediascape contribute to this liquidity; a new “big game” is seemingly always around the corner and newlyfueled anticipation routinely supersedes reflection about results that have quickly faded in our memories and become trivial in the annals of sporting record.

However, rising above ubiquitous sporting competitions that quickly fade as cultural amnesia are those holding promise to become seminal moments in lived experience and common culture. These are the events and championships that define a sport, solidifying one’s fanship, and serving as historical markers that bring order, meaning, and significance to the sports landscape. Very likely it is the relative discontinuity of such moments, when compared to those experienced with all other sports offerings, that makes them special (Roberts, 2004). Some sports offer singular championship contests to define such moments (such as the National Football League’s Super Bowl in the US) while others are compartmentalized through a series of annual events, such as the “majors” that mark excellence through achievement in the most important tournaments that mark the year’s calendar of competition in international golf or tennis.

With their ability to garner media attention and captivate the public in ways that everyday sport cannot, major sporting events have grown in cultural importance. Increasingly, they define significant moments inscribed in the collective cultural memory, resonating not only with rabid fans, but also for many less passionate about sport. Their appeal resides in transcending the ordinary and being recognized as extraordinary. While the memories of many avid fans of rugby or baseball may blur in recollecting everyday competition, they remain razor sharp in recalling significant moments in a pivotal Rugby World Cup play or what led to a Major League Baseball World Series victory. With constant retelling aiding firm etching into the cultural consciousness, such moments can become influential, under-girding understandings that casual spectators and fans alike bring to sport and the nature and meaning of competition.

It should not be surprising that the experiencing and interpretation of such moments, infused as they are with the potentialities of significance, can interact in compelling ways with one’s self-identity and values. Indeed, the uniqueness of this kind of experience may, in some part, explain why so many people have made rituals of consuming megasporting events. As these megasporting events and their audiences have grown, the idea that these larger, grander forms of sport indeed hold much broader cultural significance than everyday and more localized sporting competitions has become societally reified.

Situated thusly, the study of sport-based mega-events offers important opportunities to understand how sport interacts with the collective psyche of contemporary societies and cultures. Horne and Manzenreiter (2006, p. 17) make a strong case that “sports mega-events provide novel ways in which research into national and cultural identity, mobility, and individualization can be approached.” It has been made clear that such study can reveal diverse dynamics, from the convey ance of national power (Butterworth and Moskal, 2009; Chen, Colapinto, and Luo, 2012) to drama (Farrell, 1989) to shifts of mood (Knoll, Schramm, and Schallhorn, 2014) to the documentation of history (Roessner, 2014). Building on such inquiry, this book features an international group of distinguished scholars who interrogate key sporting mega-events in a world that is increasingly experienced through media.

Approaching media and sports mega-events

Media, in a very basic sense, makes things larger than life. This is true in the case of the sports mega-event as well. Much supported in the work of Debord (1967/ 1995), the commodified spectacle that the sports mega-event has become would not be possible without media. So wedded are the two that Horne and Manzenreiter (2006, p. 2) have observed that “an unmediated mega-event would be a contradiction in terms.” Thus, we begin our approach to the sports mega-event by drawing on two relevant concepts from media studies, the intertwined and complementary notions of the “media event” and “super media.”

Stimulated by the work of sociologists, such as Shils (1962), who were interested in how key cultural events served as rituals to affirm the social fabric through widely shared celebrations, the notion of the media event was conceptualized by Katz (1980; Katz and Dayan, 1985) and advanced in the book Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Dayan and Katz, 1992). Dayan and Katz note the rising significance of media in framing and experiencing important cultural events – from a Royal wedding to a Queen’s coronation to the funeral of American President Kennedy to the first lunar landing to the Olympic Games – and make a case that these cultural events have been transformed into “media events” that serve as “high holy days of communication” (ibid., p. 1). To participate, people depart from their routines to join in a collective media experience of special occasions. Dayan and Katz (1992) posit that the constituent qualities of media events serve to facilitate social integration by celebrating shared values and validating public rituals of affirmation, noting that these “great ceremonial events celebrate order and restoration” (ibid., p. 9). While the occurrence of two variants of media events characterized by Dayan and Katz – coronations and conquests – do not typically adhere to predictable calendars, the third variant – contests – are distinguished by being calendared media events. One of the most visible variants of the contest media event is, of course, the sporting mega-event. Archetypal of this genre are the Olympic Games, which are manufactured to celebrate “universal” values, from “‘globality’ or ‘one world awareness’” (Roche, 2006, p. 32) to pride of nation to good sportsmanship to appreciation of excellence.

With special attention on recurring aspects of media that writ large on the cultural fabric, Real (1989), broke important new ground in showing how the diverse multidisciplinary lenses of cultural studies had special relevance to interrogating the dynamics of the rising influence of what he called “super media.” Arguing that issues of personal identity and consciousness, of conflict and bias, of politics and policy, are more effectively articulated and understood through a cultural studies approach to the largest and most celebrated media artifacts, Real’s analyses focused not only on super media events, such as the regularized media spectacles of the Olympic Games or the Academy Awards, but also considered how super-sized media influence could be seen in the naturalized rituals and themes associated with those media products – blockbuster movies and television ratings hits – that most captivated public attention and the cultural zeitgeist. Real’s focus on super media continued a line of work that began with an influential earlier critical assessment of the cultural rituals and functioning of the Super Bowl (Real, 1975). Collectively, Real’s work on the intersection of super media with mass cultural events showed that sports were at the center of an increasing amount of mass events in the age of media. With their unique combination of predictable scheduling, unknown outcomes, and predilection for narrative hyperbole, Real recognized that sports mega-events were increasingly dominating the media event space, fueling interest in how sports mega-events edge aside other media events as sites for the creation and contestation of core cultural meanings – about identity, democracy, and the naturalized logics that undergird hegemony and the wielding of cultural power.

In key ways, Real’s (1989) book makes a case for a cultural studies approach to super media being a unique opportunity for “synthesis scholarship” (see O’Sullivan, 1999) that inherently bridges different epistemological perspectives that undergird a range of disciplines and fields of inquiry, a disposition that is embraced in the varied approaches seen in this volume. Real’s arguments also importantly countered a common truism about sports – that sports are a microcosm of society – by posing that the inverse was true as well – that society was a microcosm of sport – and that this would be most particularly evident in its grandest forms.

Cognizant of this, Eastman, Newton, and Pack (1996) argued that the manifestations of “media events” and “super media” within the sporting realm were of such recurring importance that they deserved more specific attention. They termed these “megasports,” which have archetypically been defined as sporting events for which consumers set an appointment on their sporting calendars. As it is quite evident that most sport spectators do not attend sport mega-events in person, megasport calendars tend to mirror media calendars. Holding a place on calendars, fans of golf set aside the second weekend in April for the Masters and tennis buffs set aside late June and early July for Wimbledon’s fortnight of competition.

In tandem with this work anchored in media studies, the production and functioning of sport spectacles increasingly garnered attention from a diverse group of scholars concerned with the socio-cultural and political-economic impacts of sport (see most recently Gruneau and Horne, 2016). Much of this work grows from foundational work by Roche (2000). In situating the cultural significance of sport spectacles, Roche characterized “megaevents,” a broader term encompassing and dominated by “megasports,” as “large-scale cultural (including commercial and sporting events), which have dramatic character, mass popular appeal, and international significance” (ibid., p. 1).

Roche posed that inquiry about the sporting mega-event was important from a variety of perspectives. Such research could be driven by interest in:

1 the personal (megasport as rite of passage);

2 national historical (megasport as venue for national storytelling/“truth” telling);

3 cultural historical (megasport as advancement of high culture); and

4 sociological (megasport as rendering of cultural values/priorities).

In this, Roche (2000) makes a strong case for broadening study of the sporting mega-event to include inquiry that looks well beyond sporting competition to the political and economic structures and forces that embrace and enable them. He notes that:

Mega-events can be seen as having at least a two-dimensional character as tourist events (in the realm of global tourist culture and the global tourist industry/cultural economy) and also as media events (in the realm of global media culture and the global media industry/cultural economy). From each of these perspectives, megaevents represent temporal and spatial “localisations” of potentially globally relevant global cultural activity and flows (of people, information, and images).

(Roche, 2000, p. 27)

Roche’s (2000) work stimulated considerable debate about the priorities and characterization of work focused on the sporting mega-event. For example, Real (2013) notes distinct offsets of perspective embraced by those who approach high-profile sporting events in variant ways, including “mythic ritual,” “spectacle,” “mega-event,” “behavioral reaction” or “game” (ibid., p. 34). Others, such as Roberts (2004) argue for the necessity of focusing on the role of media as central to an event’s “super-sizing,” noting that a mega-event must inherently involve a mass conveyance of discontinuity with other events, transmitted to an audience of billions rather than millions, something possible only with the demand and com mand media attention.

Studies throughout a recent edited volume by Gruneau and Horne (2016) also recognize the centrality of media to understanding the sport mega-event. In focusing on how the effects of globalization play out in everyday lived experience with sporting mega-events, much evidence shows how integral new media strategies that engage social communication have become to consuming and interpreting these events. In this environment, Gruneau and Horne argue that sporting mega-events “have become normalized as seemingly natural features of the rhythms of modern life, an unfolding horizon of festivals of modernity, anticipated like the changes of the seasons” (ibid., p. 1).

Yet, as media-aided social communication transacts in communities of diverse character, from localized groupings of family and friends to interest-based communities that feature members with shared dispositions from across the globe, their role in sense-making about sporting mega-events can be complex and far-ranging. Recognizing this, Gruneau and Horne (ibid.) argue for systematic case study of such events to better understand how sporting logics can cross national boundaries in ways that transcend the partitions created by “imagined political communities” (Anderson, 1983, p. 6). For Gruneau and Horne, essential issues are at stake.

The critique of sporting mega-events has become an important aspect of globalization because it provides a transnational social and political space for public discussion that exceeds the boundaries of nation-states. This lends itself to greater opportunities to evaluate mega-events from multiple standpoints of global justice, postcolonial aspirations,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Part I Framing sport, media and mega-events
• Part II Megamediasport event studies
• Index