The True Meaning of Sport
by Natalie Flemme, media analyst
In an earlier article on this site, Roland Barphe tried to explain the continuing increase in popularity of sports involving sticks and balls. His semiotic interpretation of these sports is that they were pageants of castration. If you're interested in why he thinks men want to watch pageants of castration you can consult his article. The explanation is quite ingenious.
Ingenious, but wrong. Roland committed the cardinal sin of the semiologist – he analyzed phenomena out of their context. Not me, though.
Roland writes as if professional sport had no commercial purpose. His explanation makes no reference to the commercial ends which sport serves – chiefly, selling commercials.
And what happens when you consider this commercial context? Well, try watching a baseball game on television. The standard shot used in a baseball game is one of the pitcher and batter, taken from centre field. These days, the teams have started enlivening these shots with advertisements on the fence behind the batter. The ads are on a roll, so they change frequently.
And what product are you sure to see advertised back there sooner or later? That's right – Viagra. Interesting, eh, since the batter is usually standing with his bat straight up in the air. The breaks between innings often include commercials for...Viagra.
Both baseball and the other important stick-and-ball sport, golf, take part in a commercial context of ads and commercials for impotence cures. Consequently the games are pageants of mighty sticks, not pageants of disappearing balls as Roland contends. Over the past fifteen years baseball has reverted to the home run as the chief source of entertainment, while golf has come to glorify the power hitter like Tiger Woods. Big men with big mighty sticks.
I doubt that most baseball fans are impotent, but I suspect that they fear impotence. So the fan base consists of insecure young men and the ever increasing population segment of tired middle aged guys. All watching displays of raised sticks. Which the pharmaceutical industry astutely sponsors.
But let's not forget our balls. One characteristic of baseball and golf is that the sticks show their power by making the balls fly. All your better psychoanalytic types interpret dreams of flying as expressions of a wish for a permanent erection, and the flying balls of golf and baseball are dramatized fulfilments of the same wish – the players' mighty sticks produce massive elevations.
The balls-only games of football and basketball use the same flight symbolism. Balls are flying all over the place. Basketball improves on the symbolism by having the players fly as well. The National Basketball Association owes much of its popularity to the development of the aerobatic slam dunk, in part thanks to changes in the rules to promote flying. Players fly toward the basket for what seem impossible distances – in fact, the best player of the 1990s was known as Air Jordan. Basketball, then, incorporates actual depictions of dreams of flying.
But what of our own sticks-only sport, hockey? Hockey sticks used to be down all the time in hockey, but since the 1970s players have been carrying them higher and higher. Well, who advertises during hockey games? Beer companies, that's who. The elevation of the sticks in hockey is a transparent attempt to calm fears of brewers' droop. Where baseball, golf, football, and basketball fans fear chronic impotence, Canadians worry about the acute variety.
As McLuhan observed, one of the unique characteristics of our time is the existence of an industry whose purpose is to attempt to exploit our psyches. So men's deepest and innermost fears end up making a success of as unlikely a commercial prospect as the playing of children's games by grown men.
Me? I like horse sports.
The True Meaning of Sport © Coolth, 2004, 2006
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