'Colour Bar' Cricket . . .
Paul Johnson, in his New Statesman column last week, wrote about 'so-called sportsmen' par- ticipating in 'colour-bar cricket' at the same time as I was writing about the South African cricket side. The point is important. We are not, Qf course, arguing about the weight of our detesta- tion for apartheid: we can perhaps agree to call that a draw. The point is whether one should or should not shun sports teams became one dis- approves of the policies of their government. And I answer `no.'
Did, in fact, in 1965 any county or even any county player refuse to play against Van der Merwe's team? Did not the placard campaign against watching them fall on stony ground? And does it follow that everyone who watched them or played against them is only a 'so-called sportsman'?
I wonder what, in practice, we hope to gain by erecting our own barriers. The South Afri- cans were excluded from the last Olympic Games, even though they would, in fact, have sent a mixed team. And if we help to exclude them from the next Olympic Games in Mexico, we shall for example, deny the chance of a gold medal to the twelve-year-old schoolgirl Karen Muir who recently (in Britain) broke a world swim- ming record when competing in the heats of a junior event. Who exactly (apart from the silver medallist) is supposed to gain from that?
If we are to pass political judgments on sports teams, we can hardly stop at South Africa, There would surely be at least as much to be said for banning Indian and/or Pakistani teams for the future. War, after all, is even worse than demented bigotry.
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