Game, set and message: The growing prominence of sport as a communication product

Abstract

Sport is just not cricket any more. Seems like just yesterday the only way we
Johannesburg folk could follow a nail-biting international rugby test happening at
Newlands in Cape Town was by listening to Gerhard Viviers' commentary on Afrikaans
radio. I remember my grandfather sitting on the stoep, a map of the playing field
drawn on a large sheet of paper on his lap, plotting team moves, attacks, defences and
scores, as Gerhard's staccato commentary poured through the speakers of an old Grundig
medium wave receiver next to him; definitely a case of what Marshall Mcluhan would
call 'a very cool medium'.
In the days before mass media, the sports message sent to those absent from the
action on the field contained little else of fact other than a score, and a winner, and
the message reached the receiver a day, a week or a month later. Messages then gradually
expanded to include match details and perhaps a grainy photograph or two as newspapers
started reporting on sport. Radio revolutionised sport in that it provided the impetus
for the massification of sport as teams and individuals developed followings, and the
concept of 'the fan' was born. Radio truly took sports matches beyond the stadium
gates for the first time.