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Abstract
Some athletes say that they cannot perform without hearing an instantaneous running commentary in their heads. Thus crossing the line or scoring a goal is invariably accompanied by ‘x crosses the line!’ and ‘y shoots – he scores!’ The event, the experience, has become, in effect, a pre-text. I was struck, recently, in watching a game of American football in New Jersey, that commentary, the voiceover, has become such an integral part of the game that not only are the words of the commentator and the responses of the crowd reactions intimately meshed, to such an extent that they appear scripted, but the players themselves are clearly tuning in too. They cannot fail to hear a commentary in their heads since the PA system is audible on the field of play. At the same time they can see themselves playing on the giant screen behind the goal. Semi-instantaneous ‘screen memory’ is built into the game.
In this article I trace the rise of the meta-discourse of sport in a specific realm, surfing, in which it had previously been relatively insignificant, and the relative effects of text and image. And I consider two alternative approaches towards the role of the media, embodied in the figures of Ken Bradshaw and Mark Foo, two competing philosophies of the text. But out of this encounter there also clearly emerges an important point: that competition in sport is, at least partly, a struggle over the forces of representation. Footnote1
Notes
1. I am grateful, in particular, to Ken Bradshaw and SharLyn Foo for their cooperation. Otherwise unreferenced quotations are taken from personal interviews. Some of them are recorded in my two books, Walking on water (London, 1991) and Stealing the wave (London, 2007). Matt Warshaw's work, notably The encyclopedia of surfing (Orlando, FL, 2003) and his forthcoming History of surfing, is indispensable. Under the heading of anthropology, Ben Finney, Surfing: A history of the ancient Hawaiian sport (Petaluma, CA, 1996) provides a useful overview. The most interesting work on the neuroscience of surfing is Steven Kotler's West of Jesus: Surfing, science, and the origins of belief (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006). Aaron Baker and Todd Boyd, eds, Out of bounds: Sports, media, and the politics of identity (Bloomington, IN, 1997), and Susan Birrell and Mary G. Macdonald, eds, Reading sport: Critical essays on power and representation (Boston, MA, 2000), provide an orientation to this essay. I am also indebted to the works of Jean Baudrillard.
2. ‘Pensa Cola’, Surfer, May 1974, pp. 56–60.
3. ‘Mark Foo’, Surfing, Feb. 1978, p. 86.
4. Isaiah Berlin, The hedgehog and the fox: An esaay on Tolstoy's view of history (London, 1967), p. 1.
5. Martin, Stealing the wave, p. 70.
6. ‘Mark Foo’, p. 86.
7. ‘Conversations’, Surfing, Oct. 1982, p. 71.
8. I trace some of the elements of Foo's complex entrepreneurial history in Stealing the wave, pp. 86–8.
9. ‘In search of Nuevo Wavo’, Surfer, March 1984, pp. 40–8.
10. ‘In search of Nuevo Wavo’, Surfer, March 1984, p. 44.
11. It first appeared in Surfing in June 1985, pp. 66–88, from which the quotes are taken.
12. A fuller account of this episode can be found in Stealing the wave, ch. 10, ‘The unridden realm’.
13. Surfer, January 1986, p. 23.
14. ‘The ultimate thrill’, Surfer, Jan. 1987, p. 78.
15. In, for example, Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste (Cambridge, MA, 1984).
16. I include more of their conversation, as recalled by SharLyn Foo, in Stealing the wave, p. 203.
17. Personal conversation; but he made many similar comments over the ages, notably in an interview with the BBC.
18. ‘A tale of two bays’, Surfer, Oct. 1989, p. 63. ‘Caught inside’, Surfer, May 1986, p. 36.
19. An era captured by Matt Warshaw in Surf movie tonite! Surf movie poster art, 1957–2005 (San Francisco, CA, 2005) and Riding giants (Stacey Peratta, 2004).
20. I am thinking here of his early essays in, for example, Noces (Paris, 1960) and L'Ete (Paris, 1954).