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We Are the World, We Are the Quake: the Redefinition of Fans as Interpretive Community in Sportswriting About the 1989 Bay Area World Series and Earthquake Disaster

University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94117-1080

This study provides a unique look at the confrontation of societal priorities about sport and life. The study examines how the meaning of a sporting superevent changes in a community when it is confronted by a natural disaster such as a major earthquake. Press coverage of the 1989 baseball World Series played between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics is used as a case study to understand how sport is variantly placed into the context of everyday life as social conditions and interpretations of a disaster change. A reader-oriented critique of press coverage focuses on the changing construction of the interpretive community of sports fans during fourphases: (1) the pre-series period, (2) the pre-quake playing period, (3) the moratorium period, and the (4) the post-quake playing period. The often unrecognized struggles of the press to create interpretive communities of fans are most clearly seen in the context of this intervention of a natural disaster into the workings of an ongoing process of "naturalizing" sport into everyday life.

Journal of Sport & Social Issues, Vol. 17, No. 2, 181-205 (1993)
DOI: 10.1177/019372359301700212


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