Restricted accessResearch articleFirst published online 1993-08
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
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.
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