Media Sport Stars

Beyond irrationality and the ultras: some notes on female English rugby union fans and the ‘feminised’ sports crowd

“…The issue of female "entitlement" to their own personal histories as fans, the changing nature of the meaning of spectator sport for younger female sports fans raised in a period suffused with the vortex of celebrity (Whannel, 2002), and the intimate and visceral seductions of traditional sports spaces and sports heritage for some female spectators, offer themselves as potential channels for future research and we are beginning to address some of these issues ourselves. It will be important to examine questions of empowerment and resistance around the existence and performance of women spectators in different sports to soccer and the one we have briefly considered here, rugby union.…”

‘Like a Hawk among House Sparrows’: Kauto Star, a Steeplechasing Legend

“…9 Whannel argues that sporting icons are a focal point for practices of identity construction and consumption. 10 According to Fishwick, 'We simply must have [them] … They give us blessed relief from our daily lives which are frequently one petty thing after another'. 11 Continuing this, Holt and Mangan argue that sporting icons and heroes concentrate the general public's 'vicarious excitement', thereby compensating for the drawn out monotony of everyday life.…”

Manufacturing Memories and Directing Dreams: Commemoration, Community, and the Closing of Maple Leaf Gardens

“…"One of the central significances of sporting heroes is precisely the way in which they are available for articulation within discourses about the state of the nation." 21 Indeed, as will become clear-especially through the use of Benedict Anderson's notion of the "imagined community"-the building of and belonging to a "nation" was essential to the commemoration of MLG and the inauguration of ACC. Not only did these telecasts accumulate and sell audiences, they legitimated these efforts by bringing together a community and crafting its unifying message.…”

“…26 Sport television, however, is what Gruneau, Whitson, and Cantelon label a "constitutive event," which enables "the transformation of a live event (e.g. a hockey game) into a television event {Hockey Night in Canada)'' 21 This constitutive power can have important ideological implications. As Silk notes, the host feed of the Malaysian broadcaster at the 1998 Commonwealth Games "attempted to construct a particular version of 'the collective memory' and a preferred sense of national identity.…”

“…In the case of Ali, this reinscription, which Whannel attributes in part to the ways that Parkinson's disease "has slowed and limited Ali's own speech," has allowed Ali to be depoliticized and "has achieved what the white establishment could not do-it has silenced him." 94 Although the context was different, the presentation of Maple Leafs stars from the past at the MLG closing can also be read as a reinscription. For many viewers this was the first time they would have seen (or perhaps even heard of) the older Leaf alumni.…”