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Sport played a significant part in the growth of television, especially during its emergence as a dominant global medium between 1960 and 1980. In turn, television, together with commercial sponsorship, transformed sport, bringing it significant new income and prompting changes in rules, presentation, and cultural form. Increasingly, from the 1970s, it was not the regular weekly sport that commanded the largest audiences but, rather, the occasional major events, such as the Olympic Games and football’s World Cup. In the past two decades, deregulation and digitalization have expanded the number of channels, but this fragmentation, combined with the growth of the Internet, has meant that the era in which shared domestic leisure was dominated by viewing of the major channels is closing. Yet, sport provides an exception, an instance when around the world millions share a live and unpredictable viewing experience.

In the last ten years academic research has turned its attention to analyses of masculinity, and, increasingly, such analyses are examining the tensions within and between masculinities. The concept of a crisis in masculinity has become an element of public discourse. The macho-ization of male culture in the 1980s, and the emergence of new laddism in the 1990s could be seen as aspects of this supposed 'crisis'. This paper examines these issues through analysis of the representation of sport stars and in particular the ways in which their stories are narrativized. It analyses the ways in which sporting excellence can be narrated in terms of maverick individualism. It suggests that events around the 1998 World Cup were framed in terms of tensions between the hedonism of the new lad lifestyle and the disciplined needs of national football success, and that in the process a disciplined masculinity was re-asserted as against dysfunctional new laddism.

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