Life on the Jumbotron

I went to a Carolina Hurricanes game with my wife and a couple from her office last night, and it gave me an occasion to make a few observations.

The modern professional sporting event is a hyperreal spectacle on a grand scale, in which reality and representation are reflected endlessly, back and forth onto one another, until they are impossible to disentangle.

The constructedness of pro hockey is relentless, and shows up in everything from the idea of professional sport itself—the salaries of men tied to their performance in a series of events with seemingly arbitrary rules—to the indoor climate control that severs hockey from its situatedness as a game of the North and of winter.

Yet the assembled audience gives the game the weight of intersubjectively verified reality, and the reporters on Press Row immediately elevate that verifiability from the level of shared anecdote to the level of published fact.

The game itself is only a fraction of the spectacle. The action below is reflected on the Jumbotron above, where it is given the malleability of media and becomes one element of a hyperkinetic multimedia collage. Live game footage, instant replays, movie clips, player interviews, commercials, celebratory graphics, and audience shots all tumble by at a frenzied pace.

I have sat on Press Row as a reporter, armed with a wifi connection, a television monitor, and a thick press packet full of statistics and news clippings. From that vantage the event becomes a hypertextual artifact, full of references to the communities which sustain it, to past and future games, and to the present game as both live and mediated spectacle.

For the ordinary spectator, the audience shots are one of the most important elements of the experience. We go to the game not so much to watch an event as to be a part of an audience, with all of its attendant rituals. By playing the role of the fan well, you might be rewarded with a moment on the Jumbotron, to see yourself being seen, to become as undeniably real as the game itself, if only for an instant.