Stories of Sport and the Moral Order: Unraveling the Cultural Construction of Tiger Woods

Abstract

OF TIGER WOODS ings, as soon as one looks across cultures wide divergences occur.Mass media stories of sportfound in biography and autobiography, novels and short stories, documentary and fiction films, photographic display and, most routinely, journalistic accountsrepresent a superb empirical window on sociocultural meanings. Stories, or narratives, are the human vehicle by which layers of the social order connect, survive, or die relative to each other. And athletic endeavor, as critic Gerald Early observes (1994,131), somehow produces a heightened "need for narrative, for language, for story." Like all serious narratives, sports narratives do not merely recount events; rather, they relate events in ways that are evocative and persuasive in terms of the worldviews of putative audiences. Sports stories distill consensually accepted virtues in such realms as aesthetics, justifications for conduct, and goals of action into popularly accessible forms. For the researcher, therefore, these stories provide a ready and decisive entry-point into the moral order of dominant and local cultures.We use the term "moral order" not in a specific and narrow sensee.g., in the sense of customary vs. iconoclastic ways being defined as "moral" or "immoral" -but rather in the broad sense of a collective consciousness that is integral to a culture and that constitutes the foundations of social relationships, appropriate behavior, even good and evil (Durkheim, 1992(Durkheim, /1957. Although morals in this sense pertain to what we commonsensically think of in individual terms (mind, feelings, emotional commitments to values, and rules), they are fundamentally social; indeed, it is the collective nature of morals that gives them force (Turner, 1992, xxxvii).Key to the moral order is the definition of boundaries. Every society articulates boundaries that separate the acceptable from the unacceptable, insiders from outsiders, laudable acts from contemptible ones. The demarcation of these boundaries, penalties for transgressions, and rationales for these codes are woven through the fabric of the society, entwined with categories of thought, modes of language, distributive patterns, and maintenance of social equilibrium."Much of moral reasoning is metaphorical reasoning," said cognitive linguist George Lakoff (1996, 5). Sport, we contend, has long been a metaphorical vehicle for the negotiation and explication of moral boundaries; and stories of sport, which are further amplified, multiplied, and disseminated via modern mass media, manifest, reinforce, and help construct preferred visions of the moral order. Moral dimensions of sport may protrude sharply in topical news coverage of problematic athletes and episodesfor example, Tonya Harding, Mike Tyson, Latrell Sprewell. They

A beer a minute in Texas football: Heavy drinking and the heroizing of the antihero in Friday Night Lights

“…Asserting that “the essence of sport is to be found within the nature of its relationship to the broader stream of societal forces of which it is a part,” Sage has urged researchers to “approach sport relationally, always asking, ‘What are the interconnections of sport to other aspects of American society?’” (Sage, 1998: 14). Similarly, Polumbaum and Wieting have contended that “mining sports stories for nuance, background, contradiction, and complication is a productive way to study the prevalent ‘moral order’ of a given community” (1999: 70–71).…”

Military Metaphors, Masculine Modes, and Critical Commentary

“…My textual analysis of trade media articles borrows methodological and analytical insights from the work of scholars who have examined the different ways in which the institutions and texts of journalism are embedded within larger symbolic myths and cultural narratives (Bird & Dardenne, 1988;Carter, Branston, & Allan, 1998;Fair, 1996;Lule, 2001;Polumbaum & Wieting, 1999). Linking media texts to their social and historical contexts in her study of African women's representations on television news, Fair (1996) writes that scholars must use textual analysis to "explore more fully the relations among knowledge, organizational practice, consciousness, and cultural contexts in which news circulates" (p. 3).…”

“…Lule (2001) suggests that qualitative explorations of the media's repertoire of myths can bring to the foreground "societal narratives with shared values and beliefs, with lessons and themes, and with exemplary models that instruct and inform" (p. 18). Analyzing news coverage of golf star Tiger Woods, Polumbaum and Wieting (1999) argue that analysis of "nuance, background, contradiction, and complication" in texts is a productive endeavor to understand the metaphoric embodiments of a community's social norms and racial order (p. 70). Applying these insights to trade media stories on September 11, this textual analysis explores the social construction of journalism-a community that constructs a collective identity through discourse-in the midst of a significant political and historical crisis in the United States.…”

Spectacles of Gender and Globalization: Mapping Miss World's Media Event Space in the News

“…Studying African women's images in American television news stories on famine as part of a history of colonial knowledge production on Africa, Fair (1996) writes that scholars must use textual analysis to "explore more fully the relations among knowledge, organizational practice, consciousness, experience, and cultural contexts in which news circulates" (p. 3). Similarly, in their qualitative analysis of print and electronic news media coverage of Tiger Woods, Polumbaum and Wieting (1999) contend that "mining sports stories for nuance, background, contradiction, and complication" is a productive endeavor to understand the metaphoric ways in which the racial order of a national community gets embodied and conveyed (p. 70). Arguing that the representational limits of mass media offer clues to accepted knowledges about critical issues of the day, scholars locating themselves within a tradition of qualitative studies of journalism have thus employed textual analysis to reveal the ideological lenses through which news institutions filter discourses of gender, race, class, and nation.…”