About sport

I’ve never really been enthusiastic about sport. Maybe it’s because I’m not particularly competitive by nature, so I’ve never quite got the point of it.

There are of course two kinds of sport: participatory sport and spectator sport.

Let me start with participatory sport.
I was always a pretty weedy kid with minimal hand / foot / eye / ball coordination. As most sports in which I was obliged to participate seemed to involve a ball I was not very good at any of them. Consequently, when it came to picking teams, I was the one who got chosen second to last just before the fat kid with glasses.
“Games” as they were called at school were an exercise in ritual humiliation. They were an opportunity for classmates who were resentful of the fact that I was good at lessons to get their own back.
There was no instruction, you were just expected to get on with it as something natural that boys knew how to do. Nobody even bothered to explain the rules. The idea that with some words of explanation and practical example it might be possible to improve technique, even in an apparently hopeless case, was just alien to those in charge. Most teachers just “took games” on a voluntary basis; they had never actually received training on how to provide physical education. It was something of a bold innovation when my grammar school hired a new master specifically for sport who had actually studied it at teacher training college. His services, however, were mainly dedicated to coaching the school teams. Sport at school was about winning. If you were a loser, you could be dispensed with, but still forced to go through the motions even if largely ignored. It was a non-education.
I particularly loathed rugby - I went to the kind of posh school where boys played rugby during games and football in the playground. I tended to be left at the back, which was a blessing as it meant not having to participate in the scrum, and was expected to stand in the way of someone twice my size thundering down on me with a funny shaped ball under his arm. I soon learned to take evasive action at the last moment having feinted a vague interest in stopping him. Mercifully in third year you could opt out of rugby and do cross-country running instead, which I also hated, but at least it didn’t involve being pushed face first into the mud.
In the sixth form assorted wimps, wusses, intellectuals and obese kids were allowed to spend games inside out of the rain in the gym playing volley ball or anything else they fancied with no supervision at all. This was actually fun. For a start we were all equally bad and many of these kids were my friends, and then there was no quasi-military pressure brought to bear. We had a laugh and enjoyed playing as a team, not that it mattered partciularly who won.

I took up playing squash at university and for a few years after that. I was consistently bad at squash too, but enjoyed it all the same when someone else was happy to give me a thrashing. When my last squash partner did his back in I sort of let it drop; it’s not a particularly healthy form of exercise anyway, it’s far too jerky and abrupt.
I am known to partcipate infrequenty in not too serious scratch games of football, cricket and volley-ball when the opportunity presents itself and I appreciate the aspect of shared activity, but I don’t really seek it out. I guess I was turned off team sports and not properly educated for them as a kid, which is a shame as they perform a great social function I think of that as a failure of my school education, a missed opportunity, though I accept I’m now a bit too old and out of practice anyway for the rough and tumble of many sports.
The long and the short of it is that I exercise a lot but not in the form of what you would term sport. I like to cycle, walk, swim and ski but in a strictly uncompetitive way and more often than not by myself. I don’t even compete against myself. I’m not really interested in how fast I can do something, though I am interested in how far I’ve been and for example will keep a record of how many km I do on my bike. If while out cycling someone else overtakes me I feel no urge to chase them, catch them up and overtake them to prove I’m fitter - partly because I know I just couldn’t catch them if I tried.
I suppose over the years I’ve rationalized my usual tendency to lose at any physical sport into an indifference about the outcome.

I”m not sure whether my lack of interest in spectator sport stems from my lack of interest in participatory sport. There are after all plenty of people who never practise sport themselves yet have a consuming interest in watching other people do it.
This has apparently always been so. Ancient Rome famously kept its people happy by offering them “panem et circenses”, free bread and the circus games, such as gladiatorial fights and chariot races which at that time were popular spectator sport. As a ruse to keep the people sweet, this would not have worked if the people genuninely had not get excited about the games. Come to think of it, in its gory fascination with death, perhaps ancient Roman sport was actually more exciting to watch than snooker is today.

Various psychological, sociological and philosophical explanations can be offered for this constant phenomenon of spectator sport in human history. There is the uncertainty of the outcome during the competition which lends excitement to the watching of it, possibly enhanced by the financial stimulus of betting. There is the impressive display of technical skill by the athletes that commands admiration. There is the identifying with a champion who vicariously fights one’s life battles. There is even the fighting of wars by the proxy of a national team. There is the clarity afterwards of an unambiguous result, a winner and a loser, which is much simpler than in real life.

The key to all of this is the notion of competition. The narrative of capitalist society requires us to see competition per se as a good thing and Darwin is adduced to suggest that it is the mainspring of natural progress. However, many species succeed by dint of cooperation rather than competition among themselves, though species do compete with each other for scarce resources.
The competitive thing has also a strong residual sexual aspect to it, especially in the male, in the sense of competition to secure the best mate. Competitive displays of strength and skill are frequent amongst the animals to this end.
So, some would have it, competition is healthy and exciting, because after all life is about winning and losing. Actually, I don’t really see life in those terms myself and I offer this as a partial explanation as to why, frankly, most spectator sport on the TV, which let’s face it is where most people watch sport, bores me rigid and I’d rather be watching a good film.

My problem is that I don’t really care who wins or loses. Whether England loses again at football or cricket is a matter of profound indifference to me. So as a spectator this leaves me with having to find some interest in the actual sporting action itself.
In many individual sports, where every competitor is pretty well at the same level, you just end up watching the same thing again and again. After the admiration of the athlete’s skill the first three times, the interest becomes whether someone makes a mess of it (as when a slalom skier falls). The Olympics tend to be particularly tedious in this respect. For me the ultimate boring sport to watch, which in my book is not actually a sport at all, is Formula 1 where cars go round and round in circles and someone occasionally crashes.

Like any other field of human activity, I’m sure familiarity with the technicalities enhances the viewer’s experience and what I superficially see as sameness would become infinitely varied. However, I’m really not sufficently attracted to make the effort. Actually one thing I do find quite fascinating is to watch a sport I don’t know the rules of in a language I don’t understand: eg sumo in Japanese or pelota in Basque. It really demonstrates how curious a phenomenon spectator sport is with crowds cheering and commentators getting excited for no obvious reason.

Sports involving opposing teams and individuals potentially make for better viewing as there is the psychological dimension of opposing tactics and the consequent greater scope for variation in action and randomness of outcome.
I admit that football works well in this way and I occasionally watch the odd important game in company as a shared activity. I wouldn’t bother to watch a match by myself though.
In our modern age of politicians who would be a man of the people (and indeed woman in the case of Mrs Merkel) who the people can relate to and want to elect, it is politically correct to like football and make intelligent or witty comments about it. As I work a lot for politicians it is useful for me to be aware of football as of any other current affairs, so I do listen right to the end of the news broadcast and leaf through the last pages of the newpaper for the results, but it’s certainly not the bit I read first.

Another thing which puts me off spectator sport is the obscene amounts of money some of it, especially football, involves - again my parallel with Ancient Rome holds good. There is no justification whatsoever for the salaries of some football-players, nor indeed of certain merchant bankers. In both professions, since the financial interests in winning are now so big it has become acceptable to cheat to get the desired result. But I digress. In sport there are not only incidents of cheating like Thierry’s hand-ball that clinched France’s place in the football World Cup, but there is also the much larger and less obvious area of doping. Doping is rife in all professional sport and shows just how far we have come from original ideals and the setting of good examples for healthy boys and girls.
I did go through a period of watching the Tour de France, being a cyclist myself, though admittedly more for the pretty pictures of the landscape ridden through than any notional “action”. I was naively full of admiration for the superhuman effort of their riding hundreds of km day after day in all conditions. Now I know that they’re all on drugs which has somewhat tainted my admiration for them and I have stopped bothering to follow the Tour.
I’m sure if the truth be told, cheating has always been an integral part of competitive high-level sport, it’s just what happens when the stakes are too high. Most people prefer to ignore it though, unless it is really blatant, as in Thierrry’s hand-ball and then they get really angry about it, because for them it is “more than a game”. I find all this a bit sad myself as ultimately it’s really not that important and utterly ephemeral. I can’t see what people get so excited about, but they do.

So take this in the way of a confession: spectator sport leaves me cold. I am ready to engage in pleasant conversation about it in the way of social nicety, as indeed one might talk about the weather, only I find the weather an intrinsically much more interesting subject as it actually has a bearing on my life.