The irrelevance of sport?
A couple of weeks ago I explained in a column what an important part sport has played, and very much continues to play, in my life. I got a few responses, one or two playfully tongue-in-the-cheek I think, which questioned my devotion to games. The gist of the comments was that in a serious world, getting more serious by the minute, sport is an irrelevant waste of precious time and the deep interest I showed in such trivia betrayed a frivolous approach to life which ill became me. One correspondent urged me to give up sport completely and use the enormous amount of time thus released for more constructive purposes.
I wonder what it would be like to exclude sport completely from one’s life for, say, one year? No playing sport, no watching it, no reading about it, no discussing, no thinking about it even.
It would certainly be very strange. Ever since I can remember I’ve been fascinated by sport in all its guises. Games are in my bloodstream. My father played first-class hockey, tennis, cricket and football in Trinidad. A great-uncle on my mother’s side captained Trinidad and played for the West Indies at cricket. An uncle of my father’s side represented Great Britain in the 1948 Olympics. I was trying out leg breaks in the back garden and hitting tennis balls against a wall before I was 10 years old. I’ve spent more happy hours than I can possibly count playing games and watching every sport under the sun.
But still, despite all that, think of the time that would open up for other things if one excluded sport utterly from one’s life. After all I’ve met persons of fascinating character and wide range of interests who have known literally nothing about sport, absolutely nothing – people who stare blankly at you if you mention Pele or Lara or Michael Jordan or Mohamed Ali or Tiger Woods, people who haven’t the slightest idea what an over is or who ran the first four-minute mile or who won the last year’s World Cup in cricket or football.
Do not mock such people or throw stones at them for being heretics beyond the pale. They have a point of view that deserves respect. After all, is sport really of much importance compared, for instance, with politics or religion or good literature? When John Arlott was asked once whether cricket was important he unhesitatingly and emphatically replied, “No.” If Arlott can say that about the greatest of all games it makes you wonder what verdict should be given on all those other lesser games.
It is certainly true that these days there are a great number of things that seem to be going wrong in sport which make it less and less appealing: too much emphasis on frantic rather than Test cricket; too much foul play in football; too much hooliganism in the spectator stands; too much calculated professionalism and too little love of the game for the game’s sake; too much money-grubbing everywhere; too much politics.
I remember once reading what George Orwell had to say about sport:
“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy boastfulness, disregard of all rules, and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words, it is war minus the shooting.”
Orwell was an honest and perceptive man and these days there seems to be more and more truth in what he said and wrote. But Orwell was not a sportswriter. Yet even Neville Cardus, one of the best writers on sport that ever lived, had this to say about his attitude to sports and games:
“I have never been interested in sports as such; I am not appealed to by the excitement and speculation of games… My love of cricket has little to do the sportsman’s instincts; as a fact, I am bored by most indoor and open-air games and by those who play them. Card-players I have found usually to be actual or potential bores. Tennis cannot possibly be a great game because women have been known to attain proficiency at it. Golf is really a middle aged and sedentary occupation; and though football has the greatness which comes from any activity that exposes a man to physical hurt, it is for me too actively combative, with none of the lazy irrelevance of cricket.”
So perhaps, after all, one should consider taking leave of absence from sport for a while, a sabbatical from cricket, tennis, squash, athletics, football, boxing and all the rest. Think of the things one could do with all the time that would then become available. I could re-read Marcel Proust’s great novel Remembrance of Things Past or Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I could learn to cook. I could learn to fly a small plane. I could explore every gleaming inch of the Essequibo, the most beautiful river in the world. The incredible thought occurs to me that I might even take a shot at understanding computers! Perhaps I could tackle the collected works of Karl Marx and find out once and for all what the fuss everyone used to make about him is all about, I could learn a language or to write in script. I could collect the bright wings of butterflies and make a great collection. Giving up sport would make space for so much that I have left undone.
Yet in my heart of hearts I know it is all a dream – or more like a sort of nightmare. No sport in one’s life – it would be like giving up salt in food or the sweetness of friendship and love! One would feel lonely, deprived, underprivileged and lost. Escape the siren call off sport – impossible! And thank goodness for that!
Ian McDonald.