ABSTRACT
In 1998, sport communication scholar Lawrence Wenner coined MediaSport as the “cultural fusing of sport with communication” (p. xiii). The concept – and the associated volume of the same name – attempted to explain the increased political, social, economic and cultural influence of spectator sports on society, as well as the fusing of sports as both performance and mediated entertainment. The specific focus on spectator sports is no happenstance: after all, the role of spectator is by definition one relegated to being an audience member – one watching action from a relative distance, whether in the stands or through a mediated lens. Likewise, the role of media in spectator sports has always been to bring spectators as close to on-field action as possible – in many cases closer than can be done through in-person attendance (cf. Bowman, 2013). March 5, 1733 saw the first sports-related story printed in a US newspaper when the Boston Gazette ran a reprinted story about a prize fight copied from a London newspaper, providing the primarily English-born colonials a glimpse of sporting life back home (Enriquez, 2002). KDKA Pittsburgh transmitted the first live sports radio broadcast when junior lightweights Johnny Dundee and Johnny Ray met at Motor Square Garden on April 21, 1921, and less than four months later they began broadcasting professional baseball. In these examples, we see media playing an important interlocutory role in removing space-time barriers between sports fans and on-field action, placing the non-collocated spectator into the sports arena through the use of the technologies of the time.
