All my life I have loved sport. All my boyhood and youth I delighted in games. An important part of my active adult years was taken up in tennis competition and to a lesser extent in squash. And I have never wavered in my opinion that cricket is an endeavour to be appreciated on the same level as good literature and great drama. Now I sit and watch sport in pavilions or in front of a television set, I read as much as I can get about sport – still turning to the sports page first when I pick up a newspaper, and I put writing about sport, especially cricket, on a par with writing about anything else.
Nearly every sport holds a fascination for me. One game is particular I once knew nothing about but have grown to enjoy by watching it on TV is basketball as played in the NBA in America. At its best it is one of the most purely thrilling games to watch. Michael Jordan remains certainly one of a single handful of sportsmen of supreme genius I have seen in my life. (Rohan Kanhai is another I hold in that handful, Tiger Woods also, and another, dare I say it, is that supreme brat as well as supreme genius, John McEnroe). For me an enormous benefit of TV is that it brings the world’s greatest sporting events into our homes, immeasurably entertaining all of us, and especially the old ones, who love sport.
However, in my lifetime there has been an immense sea-change in sport. John Arlott, that peerless commentator on cricket, summed it up:
“The fundamental cause of the change was honest – even historically inevitable… it was the switch of attitude from ‘the game’s the thing’ to a belief that winning is all-important.”
The change may have been honest, it may have been inevitable, but to me it has seemed a melancholy change. An unpleasantness, a viciousness even, has entered much of sport. This spoils a game for me when it occurs, which it all too frequently does. I am much too old-fashioned to accept that coming first is all that matters. Courtesy and good sportsmanship and having fun can perfectly well be combined with an unbending will to win. My father taught me that and I try to pass the word on to my sons. Sport is not war, no matter how many modern-day coaches and trainers and professional managers try to convince their team members to the contrary. There should be an underlying goodwill between opponents in sport, an unspoken but strong mutual commitment to upholding the enduring values of the game itself before anything else. What is involved is the honour of the game. I am not embarrassed to use the phrase. The following words describe one of the greatest figures in cricket history, WG Grace, but seem to me to epitomize also what any great sportsman should be:
“He was and will remain the very impersonation of cricket, redolent of fresh air, of good humour, of conflict without malice, of chivalrous strife, of keenness for victory by fair means, and utter detestation of all that was foul.”
And if all this more and more seems stuffy and dull and outdated in an age of temper tantrums, the secretive taking of steroids, and the frequent display of gross confrontational and absolutely unfair conduct on the fields of play, then sport’s true spirit, at least as I have conceived it all my life, will have been lost entirely.
At the very least the sense of fun which lies at the heart of all games is in grave danger of disappearing from sport at the top level. In such circumstances spectators – numbered in their hundreds of millions with the advent of TV – will indeed begin to view sport as another form of war and the world at large will have mislaid another of its glories.
Love of money, of course, is the root of the growing malaise in sport. The huge amounts of money now at stake in sport at the top inevitably makes it into a cut-throat business. People competing in cut-throat business do not behave like people playing a game in the dictionary-original sense. I am not sure I will ever find it very enjoyable watching a lot of bad-tempered, cold-eyed, back-stabbing businessmen going about their too often overpaid work.
And yet despite these caveats, despite the ugliness growing in too much of sport these days, there is more than enough heart-warming and mind-delighting excellence still to be experienced in playing and watching any game with men and women performing to the limits of their potential. Time and time again games still catch fire – think of magnificent Usain Bolt. Time and time again games inspire what I can only call a reverence for the holy spirit of man creating beauty under the eye of an approving God. And if that sounds over-blown then I can only say that it is not far from what CLR James in the greatest book every written about any sport, Beyond a Boundary, writes when he entitles a whole chapter on the subject, ‘What Is Art?’ CLR affirms that cricket, at least, belongs with the theatre, ballet, opera and dance as an art form and clearly states his conviction that aestheticians who have scorned to take notice of popular sports and games have been utterly wrong:
“The popular democracy of Greece, sitting for days in the sun watching the Oresteia; the popular democracy of our day, sitting similarly, watching Miller and Lindwall bowl to Hutton and Compton – each in its own way grasps at a more complete human existence. We may some day be able to answer Tolstoy’s exasperated and exasperating question: What is art? but only when we learn to integrate our vision of Walcott on the back foot driving through the covers with the outstretched arm of the Olympic Apollo.”
Games have filled my own life with interest and exhilaration. They have revealed – and continue to reveal – marvel after marvel of extraordinary talent, physical courage, mental tenacity and sheer joy-giving achievement. I wish I could communicate to the younger generation my sense of the glories that lie in sport, despite developments that seem so reprehensible to my old-fashioned eye. If I could communicate to them the abiding glories and satisfaction of sport the whole of the rest of their lives would be lit by wonders and surprises and be made richer by far.
