A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Sports and Games (16 quotes)
And so you can learn an enormous amount about the business community by studying the rules and procedures in cricket or baseball, or golf, as far as that goes. All these games are huge ways of discovering, dramatizing, what the society you´re in is all about.
Monday Conference; 1977 TV appearance in Australia, where MM answered questions from the audience for one hour; transcript: 12:11
Year: 1977
A business that survives as a sport does so only when it has some pleasure-value or vanity-value. Shooting or trapping other animals has these values. Also the pictorial representation of objects, the composing of music and performing on musical instruments, singing, literary composition, verbal dexterity and so forth, possess great pleasure-value and great vanity-value.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 98
Year: 1970
Nothing representational will remain in sport, as happened to painting with cubism, as “spectator,” players and the “home audience” merge.
“Living at the Speed of Light” (1979), typescript, p 20
Year: 1979
The Olympics are an obsolete form, of course. They’re finished. This is the last one. You are seeing a 19th century form go under right now. It’s not 20th century….20th century is much more dialogue and less competition.
“It Will Probably End the Motor Car,” 1976, p 26
Year: 1976
Chapter:
Predictions
Half the world today is engaged in keeping the other half "under surveillance". This, in fact, is the hang-up of the age of "software" and information. In the preceding "hardware" age the "haves" of the world had kept the "have-nots" under "surveillance". This old beat for flatfoots has now been relegated to the world of popular entertainment. The police state is now a work of art, a bureaucratic ballet of undulating sirens. That is a way of saying that the espionage activities of our multitudinous man hunters and "crediting" agencies are not only archaic, but redundant and irrelevant.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, pages 25 and 26
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Hardware / Software
Any game, like any medium of information, is an extension of the individual or the group. Its effect on the group or individual is a reconfiguring of the parts of the group or individual that are not so extended.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 242
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Language
Likewise, the mechanical precision of our world is expressed in the high degree of skill and co-ordination demand of [professional sports] players. Plays are plotted in advance with the care and skill of great sales and advertising campaigns.
Attribute?
Drawn to McLuhan #15
In the Eighties, as private identity dissolves further (and with it, detachment), the narcissistic involvement of everybody in everybody else’s image increases, and spectatorship will end. Nothing representational will remain to sport, as happened to painting with cubism, as “spectators,” players and “home audience” merge.
“Living at the Speed of Light” (1979), typescript, p 20
Year: 1979
The so-called-vulgar arts and recreations are not a popular substitute for the high arts. And the high arts of painting, music, and poetry are not an alternative to baseball, comics, and detective fiction. They are all closely interwoven in the single network of communication which makes any society what ever a living unity. In fact, that is the clue which I shall offer as the solution to the conundrum of "why is baseball culture?"
Baseball Is Culture, 1952 p 2
Year: 1952
Chapter:
Living Unity
… to “throw together’ [symbolizing] is a work that cannot be undertaken nor understood by the unequivolizing, single plane, rationalist mind.
“Mr. Eliot’s Historical Decorum”, 1949 [locate publication details and page]
Year: 1949
“Our games help both to teach us this kind of adjustment and also to provide a release from it .”
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 238
Year: 1964
Our new forms of sports will include the audience in the action.
“Living at the Speed of Light”, original typescript, 1979, p 7
Year: 1979
“Baseball is a spectator sport, with much of its inner drama depending on close attention to league standings and complex batting and other averages. The mixture of gamble and skill, so necessary to spectator satisfaction, is kept within specific limits by a precise code.
The Mechanical Bride, 1951, p 135
Year: 1951
“One fact worth attention out of many that cannot be introduced here is the way in which baseball and football more than maintained their positions during World War II. It was partly because through these sports people in and out of the services could maintain an intimate link with ordinary social and business life.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 174
Year: 1964
American sport [is] the artistic imitation of American business our great emotional educator and indicator.
Letter to Felix Giovanelli, May 10, 1946
Year: 1946
Baseball on television is committing suicide and is disappearing very rapidly from the sports scene on television., because it’s a one-thing-at-a-time game. It belongs to the nineteenth century and to our old, specialist phase of culture…. One thing at a time, perectly executed: the new world is not like that. It’s an interphase world of many phases and many methods simultaneously, and it prefers football or more tactile sports. Skin-diving, anything rather than baseball. Baseball is high definition. It’s precise, elegant, finished.
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 93
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Linear and Nonlinear | Television