SPECTATOR SPORT

One thousand years of magnitude

Simon Barnes

IT has been my custom in this annually doubled space to summarise the past sport- ing year. However, this being a year of four-digit change, such an exercise seems pusillanimous. So I had better sum up the entire sporting millennium.

In AD 1000 sport was play, informal and unstructured; sport was also the hunting and killing of animals, and it was prepara- tion for warfare. So it continued for an awfully long time.

Various games and diversions grew up, more or less locally: leaping, wrestling, shin-kicking, coursing, jousting. Some games were complex and emphatically designed for grown-ups. Often they were associated with festivals.

Violent combat was always a favourite: boxing, cudgelling matches and so on. But, with these delights, rules increasingly became a requirement. Sport needed a structure of fair play; it was the only way to make a decent gambling medium for the wealthy. Cricket, boxing and racing were organised for the sake of the punters.

What followed was a hijacking of sport by educationists. Sport became a matter for the young, not as a diversion but as a preparation for life, an encouragement of the 'manly virtues' (team spirit and non- masturbation) required to control empires. Sports became codified and organised and revered.

But sport incidentally became something to watch as well as something to do. Leisure became a part of an industrial soci- ety; and professional sport arose to serve it. The English invented and codified sport; the French internationalised it, forming all sorts of international federations and, also, the Olympic Games. The first Games were held in 1896, and early Olympics contin- ued, often as sideshows to World Fairs, in memorable disorganisation and chaos.

Meanwhile, W.G. Grace invented the notion of the professional sportsman as a superstar. He created sport as a mass con- cern dominated by the cult of personality. He also invented shamateurism — posing as a gentleman but happily taking the money. For him, sport was not a prepara- tion for life, it was life.

Jack Johnson scandalised America as the first black boxing heavyweight world cham- pion, with a terrifying taste for white women. The establishment got him in the end, however. Suzanne Lenglen won Wim- bledon six times between 1919 and 1925; a revolution all by herself — corsetless, wear- ing abbreviated frocks and flowing silk ban- danas — she was an athletic assertion of the new possibilities available to women.

Sport became an expression of national- ism. Donald Bradman, redefining cricket, also redefined Australia with his extraordi- nary brilliance. In 1932, he was countered by a tactic called bodyline. This was consid- ered unfair and, with the massive diplomat- ic row that followed, it became clear that sport was also now an aspect of politics.

Hitler staged the 1936 Olympics in Berlin as a showcase for German national- ism, but Jesse Owens, the black American, won four gold medals and spoiled it. Joe Louis became another black boxing cham- pion, but he won respect and affection because of his studied modesty of bearing.

After the second world war England learned about the new order of things in their traumatic defeat by the Hungarian football team, while new possibilities of human endeavour were set by Roger Ban- nister when he ran the mile in less than four minutes.

Television increasingly made live sport available to the world. Muhammad Ali became the first global superstar, but he did so in a manner that set sport in the cen- tre of public debate. He won the world heavyweight championship, then announced that he was joining the Nation of Islam. He subsequently refused to be drafted into the American forces.

Sport, international politics, social change: these things had become inextrica- ble in the person of Ali. Sport drew all eyes. With that in mind, in 1972, guerrillas of the Palestinian Black September move- ment broke into the Olympic Village. By the time its work had ended, 11 Israeli ath- letes and coaches had been killed.

Sport became a vector for international ructions. The Iron Curtain countries saw sport as essential propaganda; Soviet bloc countries established battery farms for sporting excellence. With this on the one side and the rise of Western capitalism on the other, sport's ancient belief in pure- souled amateurism disintegrated.

Big events tended to be the target of profitless boycotts: the 1980 Games in Moscow and the 1984 Games in Los Ange- les were boycotted by opposite sets of nations. But the LA Games heralded the triumph of the West. The hitherto finan- cially disastrous Olympics became massive- ly profitable as the big corporations moved in. Through sport, a multinational product could reach the world.

Sport became an ineluctable aspect of global capitalism. The world's need for heroes fed the mighty machine of com- merce. Leading athletes sought to be 'role models', that is to say people acceptable to multinational corporations. Michael Jor- dan, the billionaire basketball player, summed up all corporate America in his vast stride.

At the Olympic Games in Seoul, Ben Johnson of Canada set a new world record as he won the 100 metres, but he subse- quently failed a drugs test. Sport had always cherished its own naivety: with the Johnson affair, cynicism took over. And it seemed that sport could survive even that. In sport, we do not merely seek people to admire. The Johnson affair showed that moral complexity was no handicap to the ever wider spread of the global fascination of sport.

Football expanded its World Cup from 16 nations to the current 32. Every other sport invented a World Cup of its own. A staggering amount of South Africa's recent history has been written on the sports field; with the fall of apartheid, the long ban on South African participation in international sport was ended. And the centrepiece of the new nation was rugby union, the sport of the white hardliners.

The World Cup was held in South Africa, and South Africa won, with Nelson Mandela wearing a Springbok shirt at the final. A symbol of oppression had become a symbol of freedom. It was a reconcilia- tion and a celebration of all that seems good in sport.

But sport continued its extraordinary growth. Newspapers that carried a couple of sports pages 15 years ago now carry a dozen. In this country there are at least eight television channels broadcasting nothing but sport — one of them broad- casts nothing but the doings of a single club.

Sport has never been so widely followed, never been so rich, never been so accessi- ble. But nothing stays the same for ever, and hints of the death of sport can be found in its current state of massiveness. We have just lived though the greatest cen- tury of sport the world has ever seen; per- haps this is the point at which the wave will break and roll back.