The Power of Sports: Media and Spectacle in American Culture by Michael Serazio (review)

To say that sports industries exercise a great deal of power over American media and culture would be an understatement. Though the last few years have brought about several highly public uproars regarding hegemonic or oppressive power structures in sports industries, not to mention said industries' ever-precarious relationship with politics and political discourse at large, sports have undoubtedly retained an elusive power over the country—politically, economically, socially, and culturally. Michael Serazio's interdisciplinary survey The Power of Sports: Media and Spectacle in American Culture probes and untangles these industries' pervasive and far-reaching influence, particularly through the lens of sports as a contemporary secular religion.

In borrowing terminology and methodology from religious studies, Serazio is less interested in a comprehensive one-to-one comparison between religious structures and sports cultures as he is in understanding the enduring emotional and cultural appeal of sports through the lens of religion. As he puts it, his use of the term "religion" "is not … about the cosmic order; … it is about social order and the imagined bonds that unify a group" (15). Centering religion in the matrix of questions the book asks about sports communication, fan rituals, and the power dynamics between sports corporations and spectators allows Serazio's approach to be productively interdisciplinary and as informative for those in leisure studies and sports communication as those in media studies.

The four body chapters center particular themes: journalism, commercialism, gender, and politics. As the book's scope is generally broad, in terms of both the sports covered as well as how said sports industries exert power and influence over the public, Serazio likewise treats each chapter's theme broadly and uses each term as an entry point to examine larger issues in the fields of sports communication, media studies, and fan studies.

Chapter 1 lays the theoretical framework through which the rest of the book proceeds, namely that "sports and religion are, theoretically, 'soul mates.'" As Serazio points out, athletes, fans, and believers alike "recite similar liturgies," "divide the world into winners and losers," "require total commitment of body and mind," and are "bathed in myth and sustained by ritual" (18). Here, Serazio locates the enduring appeal of contemporary sports and their subsequent cultures within their capacity to act as the definitive "civil" or "folk" faith of our time that "fills the vacuum created by the decline of traditional religion" (20). He then goes on to illustrate how major actors in sports and sports media industries, such as sports leagues and sports media corporations, work to exploit this power, particularly through capitalizing on the so-called nowness of sports, which, Serazio concludes, "is existentially critical for living through asynchronous postmodernity, when people seek mindfulness, individually, and co-presence, socially, against the onslaught of distraction, multitasking, and disjuncture of time and space" (30).

Chapter 2 focuses on recent developments in sports journalism and communications, paying particular attention to the ways that American sports leagues exercise immense control over the networks and outlets that broadcast and cover their games. As Serazio succinctly explains, televised American sports occupy a peculiar position in modern cultural and communication structures, given that they are "situated at the uncertain intersection of journalistic objectivity, entertainment spectacle, and dramatic storytelling" (55). This directly ties into chapter 3, in which Serazio outlines how the increasingly commercialized sports and sports media industries maintain their power. Returning to the motif of contemporary sports as religion, Serazio argues that sports industries set out to "convince fans to care more about the means in the stands than the ends on the field; that is, to be so bound to allegiance itself (as a source of identity and a space for community) that totemic worship is worth more than individual game or even season-long outcomes" (148).

Centering on gender, as well as biopolitics at large, chapter 4 expands on Serazio's comparison of sports with religion by outlining how the former...