Sociology of Sport Journal, 1992, 9,323-339

Deep Fan:
Mythic Identification, Technology,
and Advertising in Spectator Sports

Michael R. Real and Robert A. Mechikoff

San Diego State University

The relationship between the media sports fan and the sporting event closely
parallels the position of the ritual participant acting out a mythic celebration.
Such identification between the viewer/participant and the event has been
characterized as "deep play" by Geertz (1973). However, this fan experience
in the modem era is shaped not just by human face-to-face interaction, as
was Geertz's famous Balinese cockfight; instead, a specific media technology
and commercial advertising provide the structure through which the public
accesses media sports. This study examines grounded data on audience size
and composition, advertising, commercial infrastructure and incentives, and
other institutional aspects of the political economy of mass-mediated sport.
What do cultural and ritual theory contribute to our understanding of the
mass-mediated sports experience of today's "deep fan"?
Historically and culturally, the relationship between the media sports fan
and the sporting event closely parallels the position of the ritual participant acting
out a mythic celebration. Such identification between the viewer/participant and
the event exists at consciously articulated individual levels and as "deep play"
(Geertz, 1973) in which numerous complex threads of cultural, psychological,
and historical identification unite the spectator and the event. The importance of
mass media for fan interaction with sport today has prompted Guttmann (1986)
to call for a "shift in methodological gears" to the study of "mediated specta-
torship" (p. 127). This fan experience, however, does not exist in a social or
institutional vacuum. Media technology and commercial advertising serve as
constraints that shape aspects of the mythic experience of the Olympics, the
World Cup, and other major spectator sports events.
The ritual identification of fans with major sporting events and players has
both empirical and mythic dimensions. Wenner and Gantz (1989) have carefully
examined television fan responses varying with viewing context and major sport,
drawing from previous studies and interviewing 707 respondents by telephone.

Michael R. Real is with the Dept. of Telecommunicationsand Film, and Robert A.

Mechikoff is with the Dept. of Physical Education, San Diego State University, San Diego,
CA 92182-0171. Request reprints from Dr. Mechikoff.
 In addition to such consciously articulated motives and contextual variables, there
are "out of consciousness" dimensions of the fan experience, dimensions that
can be examined through classical anthropological analysis of myth and ritual
(e.g., Cassirer, 1944, 1946; Malinowski, 1948) and through more recent cultural
interpretations of ritual texts and activities (e.g., Bennett & Woollacott, 1986;
Fiske, 1982,1987;Turner, 1977). Recent work in audience interpretationof media
texts foreground the activity of the reader or "fan" in shaping the meaning of
the experience (Ang, 1990; Fiske, 1989a, 1989b; Radway, 1984). This study
brings together the experience of the fan with the shaping influences of technology
and advertising, examining the deep play at work in media sports spectating.

The Transnational Scale of Fan Participation

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The largest number of people ever in human history to engage in one

activity at the same time are the television viewers watching the Olympic Games
and the World Cup. The international soccer federation, Federation International
Football Association (FIFA), called the 1990 World Cup "the biggest media
event in history" with a cumulative television audience of 26 billion viewers
(cumulative for all 52 games) in 170 countries (Los Angeles Times, July 17,1988,
p. D-3). The final of the 1986 World Cup in Mexico attracted 500 million viewers
to watch Diego Maradona pass to Jorge Burruchago for the final goal to bring
Argentina a dramatic 3 to 2 victory over West Germany. Even more viewers
watched Germany's revenge in Italy in 1990.
The World Cup matches, like the Olympics, can reach more than a billion
viewers around the world. The opening and closing ceremonies from Barcelona
may have reached half the human race via television. As a result, in addition to
their profound anthropological significance as global rituals, the World Cup and
the Olympics are watersheds in the evolution of communication technology and
commercial advertising. What is the role of technology in these events? What
place do advertising and commercialization have in this lucrative sport/media
complex?
The fan's consciously articulated motives and activities, combined with
the deeper mythic dimensions, constitute the full meaning of the spectator's
involvement with media sports. Viewer interest may be minimal ("nothing else
going on") or intense ("follow my favorite"), with the latter reflecting major
classic mythic-rituals of the tribe and the former resembling smaller domestic
rituals. The context may be alone, with family or friends, or in a public place,
each reflecting a distinct level of mythological meaning and ritual membership.
The sport may be more intense (college basketball) or less intense (tennis, golf),
calling forth distinct emotional and expressive responses reminiscent of warlike
or more peaceful traditional rituals. The nature of the interpretive community in
which the sport fan places himself or herself and the degree of psychological
identification with the athletes contribute to dimensions of both breadth and depth
in fan mythic identification.
This form of analysis opens up empirical studies of sports fans to such
classical mythic notions as tribal identity, catharsis, and liminality. In addition,
this analysis connects the deep structures of modem mediated games to the
psychological structures of fans, making relevant an integrated analysis of the
polysemic texts of sport and the interpretive framework of fans.
 Deep Fan 325

The interrelationshipsbetween fandom, technology, and advertising can be

examined in grounded cases of international sports events (the Olympics, the
World Cup), national sports events (the Super Bowl), and regional, state, and
local sports events. These events express and reflect larger cultural structures, as
the ritual rites of the fan leave him or her far from alone in the agony and the
ecstasy of mythic identification and participation in media sports.
Communication Technologies and Sport
Details of the games of the 24 qualifying World Cup soccer teams playing
in 12 Italian cities in 1990 became immediately available on every continent
through a vast array of communication technology. Well over 100 countries
purchased television rights for direct broadcast (Los Angeles Times, July 17,1988,
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p. D-3). In addition, radio and print accounts blanketed the world alongside
television. Expensive and complex relay systems brought the emotion-filled
games via electronic cameras and recorders, computers, satellites, microwaves,
cables, fiber optics, and related technologies to the most diverse cultures, lan-
guages, and locales.
Before Gutenberg and the printing press, a sporting event was available
only to the players and the live spectators. The emergence in the 19th century of
a sporting press created the first mass followings for spectator sports (McChesney,
1989). In the 20th century radio, television, and satellites have vastly expanded
and intensified public access to sport.
The expanded access appears in the form of broadcast audiences of many
millions for major national and international sporting events. For a sports media
fan in developed countries, the expanded access becomes personal in a typical
cable television system that two or more sports-only channels and
frequent sports offerings on the other 10 to 40 channels. The expanded intensity
appears in the form of close-up shots, instant replays, informed and emotional
commentary, on-screen data displays, feature inserts, and other material not
available even to the live spectator in the stadium. (However, this is becoming
increasingly available through the in-stadium use of giant screen TV.) Television
makes the magic of superstars like Diego Maradona of Argentina or Ruud Gullit
of the Netherlands immediate and powerful for the public.
Physical action, speed, and coordination make sport the ideal content for
the visual medium of television. The open-ended live drama of competitive games
also make sport ideal for the electronic media of radio and television with their
simultaneous live transmission. The psychological identification of fans with
teams and players creates an emotional projection into the live broadcast that is
virtually unequaled for the viewer or listener as a media experience. Major
international sporting events on the scale of the Olympic Games and World Cup
magnify and multiply these rich audience incentives and make viewing virtually
mandatory. In Brazil, Germany, and so many other places during the summer of
1990, life without access to World Cup games would have been as inconceivable
as life without the basic necessities.
This relationship between sport and media, especially television, has been
described as symbiotic (McChesney, 1989; Ruttle, 1989). In a symbiotic relation-
ship two dissimilar organisms live together in a way that is advantageous to both,
as when fungus and alga together form the lichen. It is distinct from parasitism,
wherein only one benefits. Sports purists have charged media with parasitism,
 saying that television in particular has exploited and damaged sport (Rader, 1984).
But objective analysis points out that sport has exploited television as well,
especially for its money. The phenomenal growth of modem spectator sports in
popularity and income has resulted from exposure through television, radio,
daily newspapers, sports weeklies, and other media. Neither party-sports or
media-has remained unchanged in this relationship. The symbiosis between
sport and media contributes to the continued growth of each and increases the
presence of sports in the everyday environment of the sports fan.
International sporting events, like the 1988 Calgary or Seoul Olympic
Games, or the 1986 Mexico or 1994 United States World Cup Games, are
immense spurs to technological innovation. ABC offers a 20-minute videotape
of technical innovations it has introduced specifically at various Olympic Games
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and subsequently used for many transmissions. Technologies of graphics storage

and recall, of special effects generation, of visual and audial manipulation, of
electronic amplified relays, of virtually every aspect of television have been
spurred on by the unique demands of scale and complexity in Olympic broadcasts.
In Japan the NHK network first squeezed two simultaneous video pictures into
one frame for satellite relay in transmitting the 1984 Los Angeles Games back to
Japan. Stereo transmissions, cordless on-field cameras, mechanically shuttered
slow- and stop-motion cameras, and uniform graphic fonts have been introduced
first for Olympics and World Cup coverage (Roizen, 1989).
Although the sophisticated technologies might emerge without these mas-
sive international sport spectacles, the size of audience and the resulting television
monies usher in these technologies more quickly and with specific configurations.
For example, the 1988 Seoul Games provided the first live transnational transmis-
sions by NHK using their Hi-Vision high definition television (HDTV) system.
For a sense of the sophistication of the technologies, an engineer's summary of
the HDTV transmissions (Roizen, 1989) is informative. Technically the Hi-Vision
wideband (30 MHz) camera signals went via fiber optics to the International
Broadcasting Center (IBC) in Seoul, where they were recorded on 1-in. analog
20 MHz VTRs, then converted by MUSE encoders to a digitally compressed 8.1
MHz signal, which the satellite transponders could handle. From an uplink at
IBC, the signal went Ku-band via Intelsat to an earth station in Japan, then
uplinked again to the domestic BS2 satellite, which was then picked up by about
80 small Ku-band dishes that fed their 200 HDTV display monitors or projectors
located in public places around Tokyo. The resulting HDTV coverage of the
Korean Olympic competition was recorded and delayed 1 day, but the opening
and closing ceremonies were carried live. (KBS Courier, November 1988, pp. 38-
5 1).
The technology for transmitting mass sports events tends to be one-way,
not interactive, and very expensive. Two-way or addressable technology that
would provide individual selection of event coverage at home will be even more
expensive if and when it becomes available.
The earlier notion that everyone in the world was watching the same
Olympic events has been made pass6 by advancing technologies. Gatekeeper
selection of what home viewers will actually see takes place primarily at the
national level. British see equestrian events, Indians view field hockey. Austra-
lians watch swimming, Finns see distance runners, and so on. The host Olympic
broadcasters such as the Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) in Seoul provide a
 Deep Fan 327

"clean feed" of video and audio from each Olympic venue; each country's
system can add its commentary and transmit, record, or omit the coverage as it
wishes. World Cup coverage is simpler because there are not as many simultane-
ous events taking place at different locations as in the Olympics, but each country
still sees only the World Cup games that its national broadcasters choose to
transmit, whether live and complete, tape delayed but complete, or merely in
edited highlights.
These developments in communication technology during the last 150 years
enable the fan to become vicariously immersed in the experience of sporting
events at a depth and breadth previously unimaginable. The nature of the spectator
experience has been changed. "Take me out to the ball game" is replaced with
"Bring it on home." A decisive element in the new experience of sport is the
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increasing commercialization and commodification of the viewing experience.

Advertising and Commercialization in SportfMedia

Studies of the political economy of media (Hamelink, 1983; Schiller, 1991)
and cultural studies of sports (Gruneau, 1989; Jhally, 1989; Whannel, 1983)
affirm the crucial role of the commercial infrastructure in shaping the messages of
sports media. The sport media technologies are extremely expensive, an expense
justified only by the vast audiences. The financial linkage between the sports
events and the media transmissions is aid for in commercial Western broadcast
systems by on-air advertising. As a result, the sport media complex has become
a crossroads through which billions of dollars pass each year, most of that money
generated by commercial sponsors paying for television advertising time. What
do advertising dollars and other commercial tie-ins mean to the sporting event?
First, who are the main sports advertisers? In a typical 6-month period
(January-June, 1988) in the United States, advertisers spent $1.1 billion purchas-
ing commercial time on network sports television. he largest spenders, in mil-
lions of U.S. dollars (Macnow, 1989; Pesmen, 1989; Stoler, 1988), were as
follows:
1. Chrysler, $72.0 6. AT&T, 26.9
2. General Motors, 63.1 7. Sears, 25.0
3. Philip Morris, 54.7 8. U.S. Armed Forces, 23.9
4. Anheuser-Busch, 54.3 9. McDonalds, 23.0
5. Ford, 29.0 10. American Express, 20.0
As a result, sports telecasts in the U.S. are intertwined with shots of news cars,
beer consumption, fast food, telephone services, and military recruitment. In 1990
the U.S. Surgeon General, as the top national health official, denounced the
association of unhealthy products with sports, attacking in particular the sponsor-
ship of prominent tennis championships by Virginia Slims cigarettes (The New
York Times, January 12, 1990, p. 1).
Commercial advertisers can also become "official sponsors" of sports
events themselves, in addition to buying time on telecasts. The World Cup sold
international sponsorships in 1990 for about $10 million each to Anheuser-Busch,
Canon, Coca-Cola, Fuji Film, Gillette, JVC, and Phillips. Italian firms such as
Alitalia, Fiat, Olivetti, and RAI bought in as official sponsors as well (LosAngeles
Times, May 7, 1988, p. D-3).
 Second, what do rights to television sports now cost? The audience for
televised sports is desirable to sponsors both for its size and demographics. The
largest single television audience annually in the United States is for the Super
Bowl, which attracts somewhere near 100 million viewers and some two-thirds
of the households in the country. Air time for one 30-second commercial during
the Super Bowl cost $850,000 in 1992 (Sun Diego Union, Jan. 14, 1992, p. E-2).
The number of men between 18 and 45 who watch televised sports make the
events particularly attractive to sponsors selling automobiles, tires, batteries,
beer, computers, and other male oriented products. Conscious dimensions of the
audience experience of sports have been examined in detail by Wenner and Gantz
(1989), Bryant (1989), and Roloff and Solomon (1989).
Even seeming failures in major televised sport sponsorship bring out the
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vast dimensions of the popularity and lucrative nature of sports. When NBC
attracted an audience for the 1988 Seoul Olympics that was 16.6% below the
audience size NBC had guaranteed to advertisers who bought time on the Olympic
telecast, the network was forced to return $30 million in other commercial time
to those advertisers. Even with that "failure" NBC is generally estimated to have
reaped through advertising sales the $300 million rights fee-paid for the Seoul
Games and the $100 million production costs, and still have generated a network
profit of $80 to $100 million-on the 1988 Summer O l y m p i c s ( ~ c ~ h a i1988,
l , p.
2).
Yet, even if a major sports event loses money for a television network, the
promotional visibility may make the investment worthwhile. The 1976 Summer
Olympics in Montreal are generally credited with serving as the crucial lead-in
to allow ABC to jump from third to first in U.S. network audience ratings that
fall (Rader, 1984, p. 113), a jump worth hundreds of millions of dollars in
increased advertising sales. In 1990 the president of CBS Sports justified his
network's huge contracts for baseball, basketball, football, and Olympics coverage
with, "It's really irrelevant whether or not a given event makes money. The issue
is whether our strategy works in the long term" (Harvey, 1990, p. C-4).
Third, what effect does television advertising money have on sports? In
fact, money from commercial advertising has a monumental ripple effect through-
out the world of professional and amateur sport. Advertising makes possible the
huge fees that television networks pay for rights to broadcast sports events. As
Table 1 indicates, at the beginning of the 1990s the three U.S. commercial
networks had signed contracts worth more than $6 billion for upcoming sports
events. These billions of dollars go directly into sports franchises and bring
large profits to team owners, million dollar salaries to professional players, and
commercial incentives even to amateur athletes. Player endorsement contracts
with sporting goods manufacturers and other companies bring six- and seven-
figure payments and are available for successful Olympic athletes as well as
professional stars. Player strikes and owner lockouts now occur largely because
of the millions of dollars at stake from television income. This is not a casual
relationship: they are predicated on owner~labordisputes about what constitutes
a fair distribution of ~rofit.
Olympic television rights payments now provide the bulk of the operat-
ing budgets of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the international
sport federations that govern sports. One-third of the Olympic television money
is passed down to national sports organizations and their athletes. official
 Deep Fan

Table 1
Sports Rights Fees by U.S. Networks

Amount
(in millions $U.S.) Yrs Network

National Football League 3,600 4 yrs 3 networks plus 2 cable

Major League Baseball 1,480 4 yrs CBS, with ESPN cable
National Basketball Association 600 4 yrs NBC
Barcelona Summer Olympics 401 1992 NBC
Albertville Winter Olympics 243 1992 CBS
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Lillehammer Winter Olympics 300 1994 CBS

Based on reports in Broadcasting, Advertising Age, and the general press.

sponsorship of sporting events and teams has been spurred on largely by the
publicity value of such sponsorship, publicity resulting directly from the tele-
vision, newspaper, and other media exposure given such events and teams.
University teams compete for playoff money from television contracts
and are tempted to cut comers in recruiting players, policing their academic
advancement, and reporting problems with drug abuse or crime. The result has
been the thorough commercialization of sport in the era of television. Olympic
team officials ponder ways to insert new corporate sponsor logos onto uniforms
and other sport paraphernalia. Official sponsorship of a U.S. Olympic team
requires a $1- to $5-million payment to the U.S. Olympic Committee. Official
sponsorship through the International Olympic Committee costs from $10 to $30
million. Moreover, sponsorship experts advise clients to "pay twice as much
promoting their sponsorship as they spend to obtain it" (Mulligan, 1992, p. D9).
Fund raisers are as important as coaches for preparing national teams for world-
class competition. Expensive technologies of training, timing, and performance
enhancement for athletes increase the distance between rich countries and poor
countries in international competitions. Independent critics (Gruneau, 1989; Kidd,
1989; Tomlinson, 1989; Whannel, 1989) ask what the limits are, if any, to what
Olympic organizers will sacrifice for commercial gain.
Fourth, how has television afected the sports themselves? The financial
strength and audience size of television has given television executives the upper
hand in negotiating the actual event schedules and starting times along with
modifying certain rules of the sports events. As early as 1972 Olympic organizers
were willing to reschedule the basketball final between the United States and the
Soviet Union to 11:30 p.m. Munich time in order to place the game during early
evening prime time in the U.S. By 1988 the Seoul Games were being dubbed the
breakfast games because more than half the track and field finals were scheduled
for morning hours in Seoul, a time closer to U.S. television prime time than the
traditional afternoon and evening final event times. The schedule of the 1988
Calgary Winter Olympics was stretched from 12 to 16 days and spread out to
cover three weekends, not two, in order to maximize the appeal to television
broadcasters (Lippman, 1992, p. D8); in addition, the date was moved forward
 to bring the Games into the February television ratings "sweeps" period
(McPhail, 1988, p. 3).
American professional football is epitomized by the National Football
League and represents as thorough a marriage of sport and television as one can
imagine. The NFL has long had special "television time-outs" and added time
for five more 30-second commercials within games by 1992. The league is adding
two more teams to the playoffs and two more weeks to the season primarily for
the benefit of television. The schedule change will likely back the Super Bowl
up into the February ratings sweeps period when broadcasters will feature their
most popular programming because annual advertising rates are determined by
audience size during the four sweeps periods of the year. Thus the Super Bowl
can make even more money for the NFL.
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David Stem, Commissioner of the National Basketball Association (NBA),

notes that the extra time added to time-outs during televised NBA games brings
an additional $43 million in income to the NBA each year (Fisher-LaMay, 1988,
p. 6). Certainly the most inflammatory suggestion is the one by the President of
FIFA that, in preparation for the 1994 World Cup, the first to be held in the U.S.,
the matches be switched from two 45-minute halves to four 25-minute quarters
(Harvey, 1990, p. C-4). His motive is to make the game more appealing to
American television with its need for commercial time-outs. Needless to say,
such a change would significantly alter internal dynamics and strategy in soccer,
such as the pacing of play during a period, substitution patterns, or plays dictated
by the final seconds ticking off the clock. The question is, in the Faustian bargain
with commercial television, what independence can and should sport retain? The
commercialization of sport through advertiser and sponsor financing ensure that
the fan's viewing experience itself will be commercialized, with players and
products inseparably associated. The sports themselves are presented as commodi-
ties, and the fan becomes not merely a spectator but a consumer feeding on this
heavily promoted and virtually omnipresent diet of mass-mediated sports.

Cross-Cultural Implications
Although access to mass-mediated sports is now widespread, there are still
large segments of the world that have only restricted access to major international
sporting events. Nigerian research indicates that only 10% of the population in
that West African nation has direct access to Olympic media coverage (Ugbuoa-
jah, 1986, 1989). The absence of electricity and affluence precludes television
access for many, while a high rate of illiteracy limits the usefulness of the print
media. Only radio can transcend these limits to provide World Cup or Olympic
coverage. Latin American research on Olympic media coverage finds it another
instance of "gigantism," with the poorer developing nations marginalized while
wealthier nations participate fully in the spectacle (Reyes Matta, 1986).
The success of developing countries in the World Cup may seem to contra-
dict the gap between have and have-not nations. Yet, while Argentina and Brazil
for example have had historic success in the formal sports competition of the
World Cup, this success does not necessarily translate to success and equality on
the infrastructural level of communication technologies and the monetary level
of rights fees and advertising dollars. Given the arrangements of technology
as influenced by advertising incomes, sports fans in developing nations have
 Deep Fan 331

significantly less access to mass-mediated sports than do fans in developed

countries.
There is great irony in the fact that the U.S. was awarded the right to host
the 1994 World Cup, despite its failure to qualify for the World Cup between
1950 and 1990 and the absence of a major soccer spectator market in the U.S.
either live or on television. The U.S. won the rights because they have the stadiums
and the financial and organizational resources to host the event (Harvey, 1990,
p. C-4). Moreover, if American commercial television becomes interested in
bidding major amounts for World Cup rights, income from the World Cup will
be vastly increased. The U.S. consistently pays four or fives times as much ($200
to $400 million U.S.) for Olympic television rights as the rest of the world
combined ($50 to $75 million U.S.) (Real, 1986). This has occurred because U.S.
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networks have been pitted against each other in high-stakes bidding wars for
Olympic rights while broadcasters from Western Europe and certain other regions,
unfettered by anti-trust laws, have developed coalition bids and negotiated low-
cost contracts for the games.
The sheer media wealth of the United States must logically be the greatest
attraction for international sporting events, enabling the U.S. in the case of the
World Cup in 1994 to host an event that is a life-or-death competition throughout
much of the world but one with which the U.S. public is barely conversant. In
general, U.S. television ignores World Cup matches except for the final, which
it carries outside prime time and with little publicity. In 1986 U.S. coverage
employed a split screen to insert commercials during live action, but advertisers
disapproved and American coverage in 1994 will presumably simply cut away
from live action to insert commercials.
Debates rage about whether new communication technologies narrow or
widen the gaps between the haves and the have-nots. At a typical North American
conference on Information Prosperity and Information Poverty (Gannett Center,
1987b), William Miller of Stanford University argued that now more than at any
other time in history, technology serves people as individuals rather than as mass
markets. The result, he argued, is "an economy of choice," in which people and
nations alike can thrive in a new, diverse, and more equitable era of competition,
consumption, and production. The new technologies permit decentralization,
customization, and small-batch production, resulting in ''a shift from materialism
to experience, from quantity to quality, from uniformity to diversity, from hierar-
chies to problem-solving units" (Gannett Center, 1987b, p. 7). Miller reasoned
that everyone and every nation benefits, decreasing the gap between haves and
have-nots: "The standard of the developing world is growing more rapidly
than ours. They are closing the gap. These new technologies are more readily
transferred; they can be quickly taught and learned" (p. 8).
In contrast, Majid Tehranian of the University of Hawaii argued at the same
conference that "the mere existence of interactive technologies, like videotapes
or compact disks, will not automatically create a more democratic formation, nor
will it reduce the gaps in information and knowledge or wealth and income in
society. It takes something much different than that, a level of critical public
discourse, of consensual democratic formation, to recognize the nature of the
problem. " Tehranian concluded, ' 'Left to their own devices the new technologies
will widen the gaps, on the whole, and the reason for that is that these technologies
are primarily expensive, they take a great deal of know-how to manage, and they
 are primarily in the hands of organized sectors of the market. . . . public policy
has to make a conscious effort to bridge whatever gaps and problems arise"
(Gannett Center, 1987b, p. 17).
One sees both of the above contradictory dynamics at work in the World
Cup, the Olympics, and similar international media events. The immense popular-
ity of the events among the transnational public and their resultant financial
resources create a strong thrust toward technological expansion in quantity and
quality. The technological expansion flows across national and ideological bound-
aries to nearly all corners of the world. In 1960 the first major international
television coverage of the Olympics was available to approximately 400 million
viewers in 21 countries. By the 1980s the International Olympic Committee was
claiming that Olympic television coverage reached 1.8 to 2.5 billion people in
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some 150 countries (personal communication with Michael O'Hara of the Los
Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, January 1983).
But such technological expansion tends to take on a life of its own. The
technological arrangements serve the purposes of entertainment and profit but may
be poorly adapted to serve education and political participation. Audiences are
conditioned as passive consumers of spectacles and products, not as active partici-
pants in the ongoing creation of society and culture. World Cup fever can be
exploited to prop up a repressive political regime as easily as to reward and celebrate
a just and egalitarian society. In developing countries, television may be increasingly
available but still concentrated in urban areas, as in India, and dominated by
programming from developed countries, as in Africa. The expansion of technology
may increase the number eating at the international media feast, but it does not
equalize their portions or ensure overall quality of life around the table.
In the long term, however, and when combined with enlightened public
policies and social movements, the expanded technology can lead to more and
more people having access to more and more knowledge and information for less
and less expense. From the development of the alphabet to the audio cassette and
the fax machine, improved communication technologies have contributed to
progressive change. As Benjamin Compaigne of Harvard University notes,
"Compare any place in the world today to 100 or 200 or 500 years ago, and more
and more people have access to more and more information" (Gannett Center,
1987b, p. 14). Expanded access to the World Cup, the Olympics, and other
international sports events both reflects the quantitative expansion of media
technology and contributes to that expansion.
If the technology is a mixed blessing, what of the content of the World
Cup, the Olympics, and other international mass-mediated sporting events? In a
cross-cultural context, Johann Galtung (1982) has argued that competitive sports
carry a set of Western structures of space, time, knowledge, nature, and relation-
ships. International sports space is highly center-peripheryoriented, with the West
in the center. Time is dramatic, with linear progress toward catharsis or fall.
Knowledge is atomistic, confined to a few well-defined dimensions made quanti-
tative to facilitate comparative measurements and records. Nature is to be domi-
nated and overcome with concrete stadiums replacing natural surroundings and
providing controlled conditions. Relations are individualistic and competitive.
The total configuration carries a message of Western social cosmology that
ovemdes alternative conceptions of space, time, knowledge, nature, and relation-
ships in different cultures.
 Deep Fan 333

In Galtung's view, the net result of international sport is to legitimize the

idea of beating others, of competition over cooperation. It parallels economic,
political, and military competition among individuals and nations. And sports
aggression appears no more likely to displace other aggression than to reinforce
aggressive tendencies, just as McQuail (1987) and others note is the case in
televised violence in general. More recently, Csikszentmihalyi (1990) affirmed
the apparent tendency of mass-mediated sport to rationalize athletic activity into
measurable rather than human objectives and the tendency for television to
provide a passive and largely unsatisfying viewing experience.
The so-called deep structure of mass-mediated sporting events dictates
the deep structure of the fan's mythic experience of the sport in ways that
communication research is only beginning to articulate. Emphasizing the overall
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"commodity context," Jhally (1989) suggests examining mass-mediated sports

in reference to militarism and nationalism; competition and the rules of the game;
labor, the team, and authority; gender; race; and sports culture and the culture of
consumption.
To consider just one of these aspects, nationalism is especially reinforced
in the Olympics and World Cup despite official lip service paid to the ideals of
internationalism. Sport and media gatekeepers ensure that a national audience
sees its own athletes in competition as much as possible. Ethnocentric and
jingoistic announcer comments exacerbate the tendency to identify only with
one's own team. Politicians jump on the self-promotional bandwagon of an us-
against-them world mentality. At its worst, nationalistic fervor in sport teaches
not the improved awareness and appreciation of other nations and peoples but an
opposition to all but one's own. Audience surveys in Australia, India, Japan, and
the United States each uncovered scattered evidence of some viewer reaction
against what they saw as exaggerated nationalism in their own country's television
coverage of the 1984 Summer Olympics (Real, 1986).
Ritual dimensions of sports events can celebrate either nationalism or
internationalism. In the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics, the on-
field presence of athletes from all over the world and the rituals associated
with that tend to be strong symbolizations of international appreciation and
cooperation. But in the Olympic medal ceremonies the raising of national flags
and the playing of national anthems reinforce seemingly inherent nationalism.
The Olympics do not officially keep national team point scores, but much of
the international press does, again encouraging nationalistic responses to the
international competition. Rituals and crowd behavior surrounding the World
Cup reveal the same contradictory tendencies of official internationalism but
emotional nationalism.
Comparative analysis of Olympic newspaper coverage in selected countries
on six continents reveals extreme differences in the degree of national self-
centeredness in reporting of the 1984 Summer Olympic Games (Real, 1986). As
a measure of nationalism, the percentage of each country's Olympic newspaper
coverage devoted to reporting that country's own athletes and teams was:

Mexico, 17.1% Chile, 33.5% China, 60.0%

Yugoslavia, 25.5% Australia, 44.0% Korea, 76.0%
Japan, 31.3% Brazil, 49.6% United States, 79.0%
Spain, 3 1.4% Nigeria, 52.2%
 Countries with higher percentages had the least internationalist content in their
1984 Summer Olympic press coverage. The findings do not correlate with size,
ideology, stage of development, or regional loyalties. The two East Asian powers,
China and Korea, scored high in nationalism but neighboring Japan scored very
moderately. Mexico carried little Olympic news and was the least nationalistic
of the sampled countries. Approximately one-third of Chile's reporting and one-
half of Brazil's concerned their own athletes. Spain proudly reported the Olympics
extensively in anticipation of Barcelona's bid to host the Games, but proved less
nationalistic than many.
Charges of narrow American nationalism and self-centeredness seem con-
firmed by these findings. Of course, the United States entered large Olympic
teams and American athletes won the most medals by far. However, even the less
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thoroughly Americanized Winter Games in 1984 found 73% of the reporting in

American newspapers concerned with American athletes (Real, 1989, p. 239). Is
there a connection between the nationalistic Olympic coverage and political
insensitivity at the international level? One must be cautious in drawing conclu-
sions from this sample especially since Soviet, Eastern Bloc, and Middle Eastern
countries were not sampled.
Future research might compare World Cup coverage around the world on
a scale of nationalism. At this time no such comparison exists, nor is there other
reliable research data on World Cup media coverage. Sport sociology in North
America can contribute by examining many of the facets proposed by Jhally in
exploring the 1994 World Cup to be hosted by the U.S., such as nationalism,
militarism, gender, race, competition, authority, the organization of labor, com-
mercialism, sports culture, and the culture of consumption.

Future Trends

Virtually all the evidence points to the future providing even more of the
above trends in the fan's experience of international sport, technology, and
advertising. Technologies of communication will continue to expand their pene-
tration of potential markets. Elite urban populations and rich countries will
continue to be best served, continuing the inequality of access even as more
remote locations and less affluent peoples are brought into the international sport
networks. High technology breakthroughs show little promise of breaking that
unequal distribution pattern, especially with the continued heavy reliance of
international sport coverage on commercial advertising. At present 85% of Olym-
pic rights fees are the result of advertising (Real, 1989, p. 232), and as commer-
cially sponsored television increases in the European economic community and
in the former Soviet Bloc countries, sport around the world will be available
almost exclusively as advertiser supported programming or pay-per-view.
The technology and economics of pay-per-view television are slightly
different from advertiser supported programming, and pay-per-view is becoming
increasingly common for sports programming. Major boxing bouts in the
U.S. have employed this technology to bring in tens of millions of dollars for a
single event. For example, viewers pay a $35 fee to have their local cable com-
pany transmit a heavily publicized heavyweight championship directly to their
home on a one-time basis. Individually addressable cable technology makes this
 Deep Fan 335

possible. The attractive economics of this, however, are countered by reduced

access for the general public.
Mixing broadcast and pay-per-view cable offers a middle ground for sports
television. NBC broadcasted its major Summer Olympic coverage this past sum-
mer but also transmitted hundreds of hours of additional Olympic coverage on a
pay-per-view channel. By the 1996 Atlanta Summer Games, television executives
speculate that the television rights mixture will include a broadcast network, pay-
per-view cable, and possibly television rights purchased by Ted Turner's CNN
or even by Coca-Cola, which in 1992 purchased Olympic sponsorship in 154
countries (Lippman, 1992, p. D8). The growth of pay-per-view could create more
unequal access to sporting events, restricting access to more affluent individuals
who can afford the direct cost for each event.
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For major international sports events, balancing the dominance of those

who pay large rights fees against other interests will continue to be a difficult
challenge. That dominance creates problems large and small. Henrikas Yushkia-
vitshus, deputy chairman of Soviet radio and television, expressed several Soviet
and East European (OIRT) concerns after the 1988 NBC rights included first
interview rights with event winners even when they were not from the U.S. He
urges the IOC to continue its practice of awarding rights to reach the largest
audience, even if in a given country the national network cannot pay as much as
a new commercial network. Yushkiavitshus even suggested assistance from the
United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in
spreading Olympic television coverage to some African countries and other
unserved parts of the world (Roizen, 1989, p. 45).
The UNESCO report, "Olympic Media Coverage as an Instrument of
International Understanding and Cooperation" (Real, 1986), compared coverage
around the world and pointed to three steps for administrators of sports and media
to consider. First, narrow the gap of unequal access to the Olympics in different
parts of the world. Second, discourage excessive nationalism in covering such
events. Third, create and support rituals for international understanding in con-
junction with the events. Against each step, commercial incentives to maximize ,
profits may be the strongest pressure.
For the hundreds of millions of viewers intently focused on their television
screens during the 1990 World Cup matches, only the game mattered. But to
media scholars, the technological/financial game behind the game may have
proved more interesting. Italia '90, the World Cup organizing committee, planned
for the following (Harvey, 1990, p. C-4):
15 billion television viewers
85 million in Swiss Francs ($58 million U.S.) from television
6,000 accredited journalists
1,240 positions for photographers
1,440 seats for photographers
4,935 seats for broadcasters
9,500 telephones for broadcasters and journalists
8,338 television sets for the press
10,000,000 sheets of paper for journalists and photocopying
Such technologies make possible a fan's mythic identification with the
tribal identity of hisfher national team or other competitors. The fan is carried by
 the event over a threshold of "liminal" experience (Turner, 1977) with quasi-
sacred trappings. The catharsis thus ritually achieved helps determine individual
and collective identity in potentially profound ways. But the cathartic experience
thus achieved is not value neutral. It is profoundly entangled in the web of
influences from technology, advertising, commercialism, ethnocentrism, and
other characteristics embedded in the infrastructure of the political economy of
media and sports in contemporary society.

Deep Fan and Deep Play

Do American media sports qualify as deep play in Geertz's meaning of the
term, or is the phrase deep fan not a distortion of his intent? Geertz (1973, p. 432)
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borrows the phrase deep play from Jeremy Bentham to characterize "play in
which the stakes are so high that it is . . . irrational for men to engage in it at
all." If a man wagers half his life's savings on an even bet, the disutility of his
potential loss is greater than the utility of his potential gain. In deep play, both
parties are "in over their heads" (Geertz, 1973,p. 432), and the participants stand
collectively to reap net pain rather than net pleasure. Bentham considered such
activity to be immoral and would therefore make deep play also illegal.
Deep play and the deep fan, however, must be considered as symbolic
rather than strictly utilitarian human activities. As Geertz (1973, p. 433) notes,
"much more is at stake than material gain: namely, esteem, honor, dignity, respect
. . . status." The level of betting increases the meaningfulness of it all, and Geertz
calls on Weber rather than Bentham to remind us that "the imposition of meaning
on life is the major and primary condition of human existence" (p. 434).
In Geertzian terms, the deep fan of contemporary media sports bears remark-
able similarities to the participant in the Balinese cockfight. First, the cockfight
is a subject of double entendres on cocks and provides language and metaphors
for other aspects of Balinese social life. Many (e.g., Carlin, 1987) have commented
on the double meanings and metaphoric power of sports terminology and values
today. Second, like the cockfight, sports today are elaborately organized with
written rules and umpires to apply them. Third, betting is extensive: by 1984
more than $70 billion a year were being illegally wagered on American sports,
and more than two-thirds of American newspapers were publishing betting lines
of college and professional games (Gannett, 1987a, p. 78). Fourth, violence
heightens the drama of each. Fifth, status hierarchies lend "deepness" to the
games more than the money itself. When "the really substantial members of the
community" (Geertz, 1973, p. 435) appear, the cockfight becomes more im-
portant. American corporate elite dominate the turnout for the Super Bowl,
while even heads of state, despite security risks, appear for Olympic opening
ceremonies. Competition between high status individuals makes the game deeper
to Geertz, involving greater emotion and larger bets. In American sports, college
games are higher status than high school, professional games higher than college,
as exemplified by television rights payments.
In a final comparison between the cockfight and media sports, today's
media sports event, like the cockfight, in utilitarian terms, "makes nothing
happen." Its essence is not in the commercial or ideological or technological
implications but rather in the game itself, which in any utilitarian sense is pointless.
Geertz (1973, p. 443) likens deep play more to an art form: "the cockfight renders
 Deep Fan 337

ordinary, everyday experience comprehensible by presenting it in terms of acts

and objects which have had their practical consequences removed and been
reduced (or, if one prefers, raised) to the level of sheer appearances, where their
meaning can be more powerfully articulated and more exactly perceived." An
NFL game, or any other media sporting event, resembles the cockfight in catching
up the themes of "death, masculinity, rage, pride, loss, benificence, chance-and,
ordering them into an encompassing structure" (p. 443). The construction makes
them meaningful and real in an ideational sense. Deep fan learns what the Balinese
learns from the cockfight, "what his culture's ethos and his private sensibility
. . . look like when spelled out externally in a collective text" (Geertz, 1973, p.
449).
Symbolically, then, the deep play of the participant in a Balinese cockfight
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has become diffused in a pluralistic society into the varied spectator sports
available for live or mediated participation by today's deep fan. The nonutilitarian
activity of sport has taken on, in the United States, such tangible dimensions that
it constitutes between 1 and 2% of the gross national product (Sarnuelson, 1989,
p. 49). But its symbolic or expressive importance is far greater than that for many
Americans because it provides a language or interpretive structure that at once
reflects, explains, and interprets social life. In the final analysis, there is substantial
evidence that, from its infrastructural base of a specific historical arrangement of
technology, advertising, and consumerism, mass-mediated sport today is capable
of providing for the deep fan crucial expressive, liminal, cathartic, ideational
mechanisms and experiences for the representation, celebration, and interpretation
of contemporary social life, warts and all.

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