February 07, 2022
1. Comprehension - Textual Grammar
You may or may not agree with his views
but the essay is certainly worth reading and talking about.
I am always amazed when I
hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if
only the common peoples
of the world could meet one another at football or
cricket, they would
have no inclination
to meet one another at football or
cricket, they would have no inclination to
meet on the battlefield. Even if one
didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting
contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it form general principles.
Nearly all the sports practised nowadays
are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning
unless you do
your
utmost to win.
On the village green, where you
pick up sides and no feeling of local
patriotism is involved, it is possible to play simply for the
fun and exercise: but as soon as the question
of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you
and some larger
unit will be disgraced if you
lose, the most
savage combative instincts
are aroused. Anyone who has
played even in a school football match knows this. At the international level
sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant
thing is
not the behavior of the player but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind
the spectators, of the nations
who work themselves into furies over these
absurd contests, and seriously
believe-at any rate for short periods- that running, jumping and kicking
a ball are tests of natio
nal virtue.
Even
a leisurely game
like cricket, demanding
grace rather than strength, can cause much ill-will,
as we saw in the controversy over body- line bowling and over the
rough tactics of the Australian
team that visited
England in 1921. Football, a game in
which everyone gets hurt and every nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners, is
far worse. Worst
of all is boxing. One of the most horrible
sights in the world
is a flight
between white and coloured boxers
before a mixed audience. But a boxing
audience is always disgusting, and the behavior of the women, in particular, is
such that the army, I believe, does not allow them to attend
its contests. At
any rate, two
or three years ago, when
Home Guards and regular troops were
holding a boxing
tournament, I was placed on guard at the door of the hall, w ith orders to keep the women out.
In England, the obsession with sport is
bad enough, but
even fiercer passions are aroused
in your countries where games playing
and nationalism are both recent developments.
In countries like India or Burma, it is necessary at football matches to have strong cordons of
police to keep the crowd form invading
the filed. In Burma, I have seen the
supporters of one
side break through
the police and disable the
goalkeeper of the opposing side at a critical
moment. The first big football match that was played in
Spain about fifteen years ago led to an uncontrollable riot. As soon as strong
feelings of rivalry are aroused,
that notion of
playing the game
according to the rules always
vanishes. People want to see one side on top and the other side
humiliated, and they forget
that victory gained through
cheating or through the intervention of the crowd is
meaningless. Even when the spectators don’t intervene physically they try to influence the game by cheering their own
side and ‘rattling’;
opposing players with
boos and insults. Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is
bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness,
disregard of all rules and sa distic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other
words it is war minus the shooting.
Instead of blah- blahing about a clean healthy rivalry on
the football field and the great part played by the Olympic Games in bringing the
nations together, it
is
more useful to inquire how and
why
this modern cult of sport arose.
Most of the games we now
play are of ancient origin, but
sport does not
seem to have been taken very seriously between Roman
times and the nineteenth century.
Even
in the English public schools the games cult did not start till the later parts of the last century. Dr. Arnold, generally regarded as
the founder of the modern public school,
looked on games as
simply a waste
of time. Then,
chiefly in England and the United States, games were
built up into a heavily-
financed activity, capable of
attracting vast crowds and rousing savage passions, and the infection spread
from country to country. It
is the most
violently combative sports,
football and boxing, that have
spread the widest.
There cannot be
much doubt that the whole thing
is bound up with the rise of nationalism-that is,
with the lunatic modern
habit of identifying
oneself with large
power units and seeing
everything in terms
of competitive prestige. Also,
organized games are more likely
to
flourish in urban communities where
the average human
being lives a sedentary or at least a confined life, and does
not get much opportunity for creative labour. In
a rustic community
a boy or
young man works off a
good deal of
his surplus energy
by walking, swimming, snowballing, climbing trees,
riding horses, and
by various sports
involving cruelty to animals, such as fishing, cook-fighting and
ferreting for rats. In a big town one must indulge in group
activities if one
wants an outlet
for one’s physical strength or for one’s sadistic
impulse. Games are taken seriously
in London and New York,
and they were
taken seriously in
Rome and Byzantium: in
the Middle Ages
they were played,
and probably played
with much physical brutality, but they were not mixed up with politics nor
a cause of group hastreds.
If
you wanted to
add to the
vast found or ill-will existing
in the world at this moment, you could hardly do
it better than by a series of
football matches between Jews and
Arabs, Germans and
Czechs, India ns and
British, Russians and Poels, and Italians and Yugoslavs, each
match to be watched by a mixed audience
of 100,000 spectators. I do not, of course, suggest
that sport is one of the main
causes of international rivalry; big-
scale sport is itself I think, merely
another
effect of causes
that have produced nationalism. Still
you do make things worse by sending forth a team of
eleven men,
labeled as national champions, to do battle against some
rival team and allowing it
to be felt on all sides that
whichever nation is defeated will ‘lose face’.
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