Being and timeouts: live sports in the psyche

Despite televised sports being a non-fiction event, the gap that separates a sporting event’s live unfolding from its televisual transmission ensures that it has all the aesthetic dynamism of a dramatic series. This essay argues that the sense of liveness that undergirds a televised sports broadcast operates on the side of the viewing subject rather in the object itself. It is the psyche that makes sport live—not the broadcast. This essay looks to Freudian and Lacanian concepts and ideas from television studies to concretize its theoretical intervention.