ABSTRACT
Looking back, what was most puzzling was how long it took for many, including myself, to catch Real’s long bomb. There were exceptions, of course (and Bryant and his colleagues were notable repeat offenders). Yet, as I have observed elsewhere (Wenner, 1989b, 1998b), the late 1970s and early 1980s saw remarkably few published studies that considered media and sport. In the academic culture of the time, the topic of sports media carried risks to undermine the credibility of the untenured. To put it another way, the “popular” was not yet popular, and there was a fear factor in approaching sport. Sport in media studies and the media in sport studies both faced disciplinary discrimination. These areas were often viewed as “not ready for prime time” and their legitimacy needed proving. The disciplinary biases paralleled the common perception in journalism that the
sports pages were the toy department of the metropolitan daily newspaper, a place where “real” journalism was not done. Similarly, in communication studies, sports were seen by many as deserving of a place at the margins as they were more “frivolous” than the discernably “serious” social effects agenda of an increasingly scientized discipline’s own quest for place in the social science community. Undoubtedly, conflated fears of scholarship infused with fanship lurked beneath the surface. While sports could be put in the toy department of media studies, media played that role in sports studies. Sport studies had its own disciplinary issues that conspired against media inquiry. Its quest for legitimacy moved from being a sidelight in the often academically maligned physical education to a similar position in the area’s scientized recasting as kinesiology. In the first instance, adding media to the mix would be adding insult to injury (in terms of a seriousness to bolster disciplinary credibility), and in the second instance, media inquiry drifted further away from the core science aimed at understanding the body in movement and exercise.
