THE FUTURE OF SPORT
VOR-'inanY reasons sport has beconie lately as much a problein. as a pleasure. Cricket threatened to create an Imperial conflict, the Olympic games may be used to buttress dictatorship, and football beleenies a means for extracting the weekly shilling from the pocket of the working man. And again, men are, perhaps with greater justification, disturbed because most people have so few oppor- tunities for playing games rather than watching or betting on then'. .But, fOr most Englishmen, the most serions• and persistent question which' sport arouses is that 'of the profesSional and the amateur; and to that question the instinctive, if not wholly sincere, answer is, that the amateur is the better man. The answer is not wholly justified, though easily explained. For the amateur is one Who plays a game, or practises an art, for the joy of doing so, without payment, and he obtains all the plea. sines and benefits which healthy exercise can give. The professional sells his skill for money. It would be 'easy to decide which of the two is the more - admirable, and better for the gamic itself, if it were not 'true that the pre- cessional can sell his skill because thousands arc willing to pay to sec the game played so incom- parably well.
Thus the question is complicated. But just as it is the excellence with which the professional plays which makes him, literally, a saleable commodity, so it is-the introduction of money which tends to corrupt his game. • If 'he is . paid for playing well, it may profit some people to pay him for playing fool Or for playing badly. Mr..Hemingway has a painfid story, 2'w- My Grand, of two boxers each bribed to lose the same match, and Of the grotesque means they adopted to do so. The Football ASsO- eiation has lately declared that cases of bribery have conic to-its notice, and no one who regularly frequents boxing-matches; hOrsel'aces, greyhound-trackS is ever surprised when allegations of foul play arc made. Of course, the motive for corruption i4 accounted for by betting 'which, when the risk' is turned by bribery into a 'Certainty, becomes exceedingly profitable. Yet, for the spectator, it scarcely matters. For just as the 'very excellence of the professional, eommercialiSed, tends to corrupt his game, so it attracts thousands 'to watch who would, physically and mentally, be better engaged ..inplaying:the game turns themselves. The professiefial ms' the game into a spectacle and others turn it into a business. No one will deny' the merits of the spectacle. There . ts.`thor& artistry to be seen in profe,,si8nal 'contests than in most theatres today, and a sporting spectacle has often an excitement and splendour which nothing can surpass. But the spectacle again tends to corrupt itself. Its excellence is maintained only when the spectators have enough knowledge of the game to know when it is good or bad, and the only good judges arc amateurs who play the game them- selves.
It is through exactly the same lack of discrimina- tion that many people get more pleasure and excite7 ment from betting on a game than from playing or even watching it. But such ignorance is the result more of a lack of opportunity than of anything else. Both professional sport and gambling exist as the means to pleasure of thOse whose lives without them arc exhausting, squalid, and unsatisfying. For it is a mistake to suppose that money is the motive of gambling. The gambler identifies himself both with what he backs and, for the moment, with his stake, and it is this vicarious part in a perilous enterprise which gives him his thrill. For a moment, every gambler is both ,a horse about to win or lose_ a race and a millionaire faced with ruin on the Stock Exchange. In such games as roulette it is exactly_ the identification of the gambler with so mindless, soulless and foolish a thing as a black or a red ball which gives him his most intense and pen erse pleasure. A great psychologist who was also an inveterate gambler only too well recognised the spiritual disease from which his passion was born. In the same way it is those whose lives arc physically! and spiritually starved who, unless they go for the pleasure of seeing what they themselves do less well; done expertly, must go to the professional match to. see in others' pleasures the health and skill which they lack themselves.
It must be recognised frankly that they do obtain a real pleasure and an intense one. Themselves, they • have neither the strength and skill, nor, if they had, the opportunity of exercising them. Many are too tired from long and monotonous labour to take any but vicarious pleasure. It would be a grim Puritanism which proposed to restrict that pleasure without putting both opportunity and capacity for another in its place. It is foolish to try to suppress the pleasure even of gambling without realising that it is often a flash of excitement in intolerably dreary lives. To give opportunity to play games, to provide playing-fields. and social amenities, to extend eduea- lion, rest, and a' diversified leisure, are better than any legal'obstacle in the wayOf betting or any &nun- elation of professionalism. At present, these things tare ,lacking,..and _those who are dismayed by the growth of - gambling, which, despite restrictions, steadily increases, should demand them insistently.. The drastic action of the Football Association can only check, in the form of football pools, tin evil which, under present conditions, must appear in ,another.. So long as there- is an intense desire to gamble there will be a supply, however foolish, to satisfy the demand, and the demand exists. So Also :dors the der id for irrffspitipej.: sport,i ark it is as legitimate a demand'as tor the theatre OF the cinema. • Yet, under presenit conditions, it must corrupt and kill games as they should be played. Professionalism, and sport itself, can only have their proper place- when people are strongbealtlij,tatul able to take their own physical pleasures' Wit'hout paying others to take them instead.
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