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 it no discussing it 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 long ago captained Trinidad and played for the West Indies (in 1906) at cricket. An uncle on my father’s side was a yachtsman and captained Great Britain in the 1948 Olympics. I was trying out leg breaks in the back garden and hitting tennis balls against a wall long before I was 10 years old. I’ve spent more happy hours than I can 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 even Sobers or Pele or Tiger Woods (although perhaps the name Muhammad Ali does bring a blink of recognition), people who haven’t the slightest idea what an over is or who ran the first four-minute mile or who won the last World Cup.
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 whether cricket was important he unhesitatingly and emphatically replied – “No”. If Arlott could say that about the greatest of all games it makes you wonder what verdict should be given on all those other inferior games.
It is certainly true that these days there are a great number of things that seem to be going wrong in sport which makes it less and less appealing to me anyway: the West Indies’ dreadful decline in Test cricket; too much falsifying foul play in football; too many childish antics and boredom on the tennis court; 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 a most 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 sports-writer. Yet even Neville Cardus, one of the best writers on sport who 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 with 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, football, squash, athletics, 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. Perhaps I could even learn to cook. I could learn to fly a small plane. I could explore every gleaming inch to the source of the Essequibo, most beautiful river in the world. Perhaps I could tackle the collected works of Karl Marx and find out once and for all what the fuss everyone made about him is all about.
I could learn another language or to write in script. I could collect the bright wings of butterflies and beetles 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 – one would feel deprived, underprivileged and lost. Escape the siren call of sport? Impossible! And thank goodness for that!
