Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine

For all that’s good about something we enjoy there’s always someone who can find fault.

Some find fault with a few things – the club chairman perhaps who has been given the role because he is the compromise between the cheerleader and the cynic – and others find fault with everything.

And if you judged this author by the title of his book (Foul Play: What’s WRONG with Sport) you would think that Joe Humphreys had never discovered his funny bone. After reading it you’d be starting to think that there is something wrong with everything about sport because Humphreys paints a bleak picture. It’s significant that he doesn’t include a question mark at the end of his subtitle because he is not asking questions of sport. He has produced a serious document filled with evidence that sport is in a bad place right now.

Sport, he contends, promotes extremism – listen for the shouts you hear at the next game you attend and the number of reasonable views expressed. It promotes racism – google some of the soccer chants in vogue in the choirs watching English soccer clubs, never mind the fact that fascist groups in Eastern European countries blatantly used soccer clubs as a recruiting ground in the past.

It promotes a skewed set of moral values – we excuse stars of sins we would not excuse others because they are not relevant to their day job as a sports star. Manchester United winger Cristiano Ronaldo hired five prostitutes after an FA Cup final yet because he winked at his own bench when Wayne Rooney was sent off while playing for England in a European Championship game against Portugal the then teenage winger was vilified, abused and threatened with death.

One act was a crime and one act was a gesture yet supporters reacted as if the crime was normal and the gesture a grievous act of indecency.

Sticking with soccer we could go back further to Swen Goran Eriksson’s reign as English manager. His results and his ability to fill tabloid newspapers with tales of his many love affairs were all by the bys when it came to his downfall at hands of a reporter posing as a fake Sheikh, using the illegal tool of entrapment to convince Eriksson to take on a club manager job and leave his national post.

There is a world of examples to read in Foul Play where Humphreys debunks various myths; that sport can solve world peace; that sport can help the poor and that sport can help to kickstart a national economy (Ireland at Euro 88 and the Celtic Tiger).

There is also another belief that Humphreys destroys; that sport is a meritocracy. Money and social standing are crucial to your development as a golfer just as you’re unlikely to find many Travellers lining out for a local club, other than the boxing one.

This particular theory is added to in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, where he shows that when you’re born is as important to your sporting chances of success as the environment into which you are born.

Gladwell studied the birth dates of the elite hockey players in Canada and found that a hugely disproportionate number of them were born in the first four months of the year and most were born in the month of January.

The reason was simple: the cut off date for underage players was January 1. When underage elite squads are picked those born in January are naturally bigger and better developed than players the same age but born near the end of the year. He found the same for a Czech league that had a July 1 cut off date and those players born in the month of July were placed at a huge advantage.

Gladwell wasn’t suggesting that if you’re born in January you’ll become a great hockey player and if you’re born in December you won’t. Those born in January gain a little advantage at a young age that grows to become a huge advantage over time as they go through the ranks of elite squads and specialist training.

Both authors show that we shouldn’t just ask questions but think about the answers.

Humphreys was a huge sports fan, a die-hard West Ham supporter that started to question things and came to the conclusion that sport would be a better place when Africa wins the Ryder Cup, when there is no such thing as football analysts and when fans take the Special Olympics as seriously as the Olympics and neither is taken too seriously.

And that seems a fair wish because it is the things we actually use our senses for that really matter. If you think about it top level sport is for the elite; local clubs and communities are for everybody and that is where sport is not a form of foul play/. What we do for each other is valuable, what we do for the elite is enjoyable and altogether too professional because for them it is a job but the sport that we know has a serious meaning is a true vocation.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 1:23 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.