It is strange how the words sport, game, play, which in the dictionaries are associated with fun and frolic, have more and more lost their original meanings.
The sledging – pioneered and perfected by Australia – which takes place in international cricket as a matter of course is a good example of the brutal bad manners, the pure nastiness, that rules in much of sport these days. In a recent Test match the Australian captain, Michal Clarke, jeers at and provokes England’s No 11 batsman and leading fast bowler, James Anderson, and tells him to look out because they are going to break his arm and the only thing found wrong about this is that Clarke was caught saying it for the listening audience to hear, the taunt itself dismissed as mere banter by both sides. And I have recently read that in all sport nowadays – basketball, ice hockey, NFL football and soccer (“the beautiful game” no less) to name a few – players readily admit that the equivalent of sledging at its crudest is commonplace and sometimes descends into actual, serious personal threats of violence. But this is covered up by players themselves, coaches and the authorities as simply playing the game hard and apparently comes within acceptable limits and is even viewed as spicing up the contest and increasing spectator interest. In ancient Rome no doubt gladiators in the arena sledged before they killed but we haven’t quite got there yet – but, after all, why not, if the gate money increases?
Sport has become a very serious business. At the highest level games are no longer associated with fun and relaxation. The physical workload that a man undertakes to become a champion is as hard as that of any labourer in the field or mine worker in the depths of the earth. Sport at the top is a business, a profession, a career, a way of life, a hard and daily occupation, a harsh routine – sometimes an obsession. And international sporting competitions are as far removed from friendly rivalry on the field as war is from training manoeuvres using blank shots. Countries feel they have to prove themselves, come what may, in every sporting contest. National prestige is at stake, patriotic machismo put to the test, in every international competition. Scoring a goal now in a big match is like capturing a border town in the old wars.
To some extent, of course, war has always entered into the spirit of games. The image of the Baron de Coubertin’s ideal Olympic Games as a sort of political truce is historically flawed. To the ancient Greeks their Games were very much a continuation of the whole struggle of life, as was war. Their word for struggle was ‘Agon’ and they called their Games Agones Olympic. For the Greeks, games were not an antithesis to war. Indeed, games and war were both equally important manifestations of the same struggle for self-realisation which went on throughout life. This ancient concept is in fact much closer to the modern view – that sport and politics are indissolubly mixed – than it ever was in de Coubertin’s romantic but impossible ideal. “War without the bullets,” George Orwell called sport – he was about right.
And, as an aside, I should note that there is one good sense in which sport is warlike. It can bring out heroism in the combatants. This is because sport, in a minor key, but still genuinely, can demonstrate man’s astonishing ability to hold on even at the brink of disaster and not give up. There it enables a man to call on resources of the spirit which he himself never knew he possessed. The will to win in sport briefly becomes like the will to live in war; out of such crucibles heroes at times emerge.
You cannot escape the terrible seriousness of sport. Diplomatic relations between two Commonwealth members were sorely strained at the time of England’s notorious “bodyline” cricket tour of Australia. Latin American countries have actually gone to war in the wake of angrily disputed football matches. Israeli athletes were massacred at the Munich Olympics in the cause of Palestinian nationhood. Presidents and prime ministers the world over commonly seek to rub a little reflected glory on their political images as they dispatch congratulatory telegrams to their victorious teams. We remember how the front line in the fight against apartheid in South Africa was often occupied by sportsmen and particularly cricketers.
And so with sport now more and more associated with big-time money on the one hand and big-time politics on the other, it is becoming less and less fun. I do not condemn or applaud this development – with a sigh of regret one accepts it as inevitable. I definitely miss the fun and humour that is gradually being lost. Consider the sporting commentators these days – they are so solemn and straight-faced. The accounts we read of matches and competitions are like dispatches from some military campaign. To lose is much too often considered a national humiliation. These days everything about big-time sport is too tense and strained and too fraught with most serious consequences for my liking.
I wish there was a bit more humour to enjoy. We need a little farce now and then to spice the heaviness of modern sport – like the lovely story of the Brazilian Olympic Team of 1932. In that year the Brazilian Olympic Team, 48 strong, was so short of money that it was given 50,000 bags of coffee beans by its equally impoverished government to pay their way by selling from the ship taking them to Los Angeles. On the voyage the price of coffee beans on the commodity exchange sunk so low that on arrival at Los Angeles only 24 of the team could afford to land. The remaining 24 had to spend the duration of the Games at sea and then only just had enough bags of coffee to pick up their 24 team-mates again – none of whom had succeeded in winning even a single medal at the Games!
Such an event would be no laughing matter now, you can be sure. But I like to think that in those days the world of sport was not quite so desperately grim as it is now and I somehow feel that those Brazilians, going out happily with their coffee beans to do the best they could, ended up having a very much better time than any of those tense and trained and super-fit competitors who gather in their hauls of medals and money in these days of mercenary and soulless sport.
