High life
Unbecoming
Mkt
From the earliest sportswriter (Homer, Iliad XXIII) to the most recent (the one you are reading), the world has agreed that life is a game — complete with winners, losers, good and bad sports, as well as prizes and commentators. Those who comment on sports as sports are called sportswriters; those who comment on sports as a metaphor for life are called literary types. When John MeEnroe, the tennis tycoon with the tube-like legs and the facial expression of contrived insouciance, grabs his crotch and shakes it for the crowd (as he has been known to do), literary types tend to blame it on the root of all evil. Capitalists, after all, are supposed to be vulgarians, according to most literary types. I say the contrary: it is not capitalism's fault.
The reason one never sees a Russian or Iron Curtain player grab his or her crotch and shake it for the crowd is because they have never read Immanuel Kant. Nor for that matter have any of the capitalist athletes of the West. Kant said the following: 'Cultivated to a high degree by art and science, we are civilised to the point where we are overburdened with all sorts of social propriety and decency,' Jimmy Connors, Martina Navratilova, McEnroe, Nastase, and the rest of those barbarians everyone will be watching for the next fortnight on the television, do not labour under Kant's burden. They pelt the linesmen and judges with rotten language, theyraise their fingers, they transform a formerly pure game into the moral equivalent of a tag-team wrestling match. What was once intolerable and inadmissible public conduct has now become commonplace. And the sportswriters as well as the literary types do not mind. If a referee declared that a player who swore should immediately forfeit the match, nobody — not even Navratilova and the Americans would ever swear again. But if a referee did that, I would be willing to go to work for the Morning Star if he ever got to be a judge again. Much of today's offensiveness began in the guise of honesty, a refreshing virtue, or in the guise of heat of battle excess. In America those modern-day Shylocks, the TV networks, rule supreme. Ratings, which bring in revenues, are more important than any sport or any ideal. Ironically, all three networks preach a left-wing line, with authority, manners, social graces, and good sportsmanship shown as things only the rich can afford. Thus the compulsion to affront by athletes is almost inevitable, and punk tennis, punk football, even punktrack, have become the order of the day.
In sport, records, have always been made to be broken. But now it is the rules which are made to be broken. It's against the rules in any sport to use drugs on an animal or on a human. But it happens more and more. It's against boxing's rules for a trainer to use too much tape that, once wet, becomes almost as lethal as a bar of iron. But trainers do it. It's against the tennis rule5 to create delays, thereby gaining a rest or unfairly disrupting an opponent's concentration and rhythm. But it happens all the time.
Well, things were different back in the good old days, when Pheidippides ran 26 miles 385 yards from Marathon to Athens, uttered one word and dropped dead, following the orders of Militiades. Athletes did not cheat even if they realised they would not be detected. They did not need referees, nor did they use gamesmanship.
Winners and losers were recognised only through the olive branch the winners wore. There were no groupies, and no Dan Maskells to praise half-demented, onedimensional robots with, 'I say, glorious shot', and other such 'understated hyperboles'. More recently, I enjoy recalling the attitude of the regiment from Poona That would infinitely sooner Play single-handed polo, A sort of solo polo Than play a single chukka With a chap who isn't pukka..
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