Sports Media, 2nd Edition

3 Print

Print sports media obviously have a much longer history than their counterparts in broadcast, holding a monopoly on sports coverage from the mid-to-late 1800s to the 1920s. We have already discussed in Chapter 1 how the sports media incorporated cultural values in coverage, which was especially true in the early days of print and magazine reporting. Consider the following excerpt from coverage of the 1892 Harvard–Yale football game in the New York World:

An Aetna of humanity, bellowing with the combined thunder of a dozen tornadoes. A huge quadrangular crater filled to the brim with the hoarse tumult of human passions and blazing with blue and crimson fires. In this crater great black drifts, that heaved and swayed and rolled like earthquake-shaken ...