ABSTRACT
In his book, Sport: A Philosophic Enquiry, Paul Weiss presents a normative model of the sports place. He argues that ideally the sports place should have ‘a normal set of conditions’, where there is no wind, no interference and no surface irregularities – ‘in short no deviations from a standard situation’. 1 Mirroring Weiss, it has been suggested more recently that to satisfy the norms of achievement sport, the ideal stadium would be characterized by ‘placelessness’ – a plane surface without spectators, communicated tele-visually to an audience which constitutes an absent presence. 2 This, it must be admitted, is (for fans, at least) a dystopian dream, yet there is more than a suggestion that the world of sport is moving towards a landscape of anaesthesia. 3 This essay seeks to explore one basic question. What would be lost if the aesthetic/sensory experiences derived from attending a stadium were replaced by the anaesthesia of the sporting non-place? Drawing mainly on ideas developed by the Chinese-American humanistic geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan, 4 we seek to explore ways in which our various senses are stimulated when attending stadium events. 5 For convenience, we take the game of soccer as a source for most of our exemplifications, which come from the USA and the UK. However, our general ideas could be applied to most sports and the places in which they take place.
