Sporting life
John Mortimer
Events of this week have but confirmed the suspicion that has grown on me since the far off, unpleasant day, when I first saw a goal post: sport brings out the very worst in people.
When I was at school I never found the work particularly fearful. It was when we were told to go out and play that life became suddenly at once cold, unbelievably boring and extremely dangerous. My sole ambition in any sort of organised game was to put the greatest possible distance between me and the ball, and this week a programme on the wireless taught me haw right I was. Many boys, A Doctor told us, were permanently injured by playing Rugby Football. Over went the interviewer to one of Our Great Public Schools, where A Sports Master said that Rugby Football was splendid for forming the character, words that might have carried greater conviction had he not been speaking from a wheelchair as a result of some childhood contest for the Honour of Wiggins or Cock House. I remember the Chaplain at my own school recommending football as a desirable alternative to masturbation, but I can think of none of my acquaintance permanently crippled as a result of over-indulgence in any form of solitary entertainment.
Neither are games without sexual danger. I remember being told of a school where the butler was so excited by the spectacle of boys slithering in the mud with their heads crushed by each other's buttocks that he would hide behind a bush, change into football gear, and leap out to join the scrimmage in the hope of a fumble. So mudcovered were all the characters that were being formed that he was never detected, and no doubt he was able to slip into the showers under the cover of the steam and join in the singing. The sports master on the wireless recommended parents to take out special insurance against football injury for their children: they should make sure that they are covered against sexual assault by disguised butlers. (Is there no end, I wonder, to the sacrifices expected of parents who save up to provide the young hopeful with private education? I remember a school which charged a heavy extra for trumpet lessons. The master's way of teaching the subject was to sit the pupils on his knee and squeeze their testicles if they played a wrong note.) Sport is a topic which fills me with such nostalgic distaste that I find it hard to dwell upon it. There comes back to me, wave upon wave, the dreadful smell of hot gym shoes and football socks. When I see lawyers and bank managers leaving work with sinister canvas bags, I know they are bound for a stuffy squash court, where they will breathe in air strongly scented with hat rubber and the sweat of some bounding dentist in vain pursuit of his youthful inches. It is of no particular comfort to me that their ordeal will do them considerable harm, that rowing men die early of heart failure and joggers drop as rapidly as subalterns on the Somme as they wobble unattractively round Central Park.
This terrible martyrdom might, after all, be worth while if, like the Ordeal by Fire and Water at the end of The Magic Flute, it did in fact temper the character and prove the sufferer fit for the nobler pursuit of lave. However, it appears clear from the news that all games corrupt and football corrupts absolutely. It took eight minutes to persuade an Australian cricketer to stop playing with a tin bat and take up the conventional variety (there should have been a starched old nanny on the pitch. `Put dawn that dangerous toy, Master Lillie, at once.') Managing English soccer, presumably Top Job in the English Team Spirit world, has, according to Mr Justice Cantley, had no sort of purifying effect on the character of Mr Don Revie who has emerged, after his years with goal post and ball, extremely 'greedy'.
It is not only the participants, such as Messrs Lillie and Revie, who deteriorate due to prolonged exposure to ball games; the characters of the spectators suffer a similar decline. Not only do those watching football matches, driven to distraction, I feel sure, by the extreme boredom of the occasion, assault each other with knives and razor blades, but the audience at Australian cricket games are so remote from the schoolmaster's ideal vision of character built boys watching enthusiastically from the boundary that they actually pelt each other with urine-filled Fosters cans. It is only sport which has this extraordinary and depraving effect on the general public: opera fans have never been known to fling specimen-packed Guinness tins at Placido Domingo, and spectators at the National Theatre seem able to sit through the uncut version of Hamlet without kicking their next door neighbour into insensibility, or rooting for Laertes in the duel. When an entire football stadium recently responded to a broadcast for information about the celebrated Yorkshire murderer by shouting 'Ripper twelve, police nil!' it was no help to the police but it told us a good deal about the effect of watching football. The disabled sportsmaster based his views of the character-forming nature of rugger on the alleged virtue of being cornpetitive. In fact, the good life is not concerned with competition; the artist, the religious mystic, the cook or the gardener, all people concerned with creation, conl" pete with no one except themselves. This i5 the fallacy behind literary prizes: Shakes' peare was not in the business to write 8 better play than Ben Johnson; but to write the best play that Shakespeare could write. There is no greater bore than the man wile cares desperately whether he wins at pia pang, and team spirit is, in my considered opinion, the final consolation of the nonentity'
Previous page
