Are sport fans really still hero-worshippers?

SPORT: Fields of Courage: The Bravest Chapters in Sport,  By Max Davidson, Little, Brown, 272pp. £16.99

GREG LEMOND won the Tour de France riddled with shotgun pellets. Derek Redmond finished his 400m semi-final at the Barcelona Olympics on one leg after snapping a hamstring. Wayne Shelford, an All-Black, needed 22 improvised stitches in his scrotum in a match against France. And there are many more like them in the 50 or so pen pictures in this peculiar book. Other forms of courage feature as well, of course, from God-fearing Eric Liddell (of the C hariots of Fireteam) refusing to run on a Sunday to honest Peter Norman, whose story is probably the most shameful and moving one of all. Norman was the other man on the podium when John Carlos and Tommy Smith gave the Black Power salute at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. The way Norman was treated when he went home led to much greater destructiveness than anything the men he stood by did (and even the way they were pilloried didn't match Australian prejudice).

For grotesquerie this story even beats that of Randy Romero, the American jockey who spilled the beans about the seemingly compulsory bulimia, a practice known as flipping, necessary to meet weight limits.

Speaking of salutes, by the way, apparently the English soccer team playing a friendly against Germany in 1938 gave the Nazi salute, while the members of a successful pick-up team in occupied Kiev refused to give it and were horribly punished.

Norman’s is obviously a case of moral courage, and though the majority of the stories here are about the physical variety, the author tells some good stories about the other kind as well: about Glenn Burke, the first openly gay baseball player – the man, incidentally, credited with inventing the high five; about the All-Black Graham Mourie, who refused to tour South Africa back in the bad old days; about the referee who sent off Kevin Moran in the 1985 FA Cup final; about the remarkable Alice Marble, whose championship exploits on the tennis court are not half the story.

Cases of moral courage typically involve enlightened thinking about racism, sexuality or taboo subjects like being HIV-positive (Greg Louganis; Earvin Johnson, whose forename the author seems to think is Magic) or depression (the cricketer Marcus Trescothick: cricket, it turns out, “has the highest suicide rate of any sport”). Physical courage brings with it a different rhetoric, an overcoming of personal limitation enshrined in the statement attributed to Al Oerter, the great discus-thrower: “These are the Olympics: you die for them.” Overcoming pain is a personal triumph, its exemplary value reconstructed in retrospect to convey notions of socially-approved extreme behaviour. Vindication of moral courage is less assured, as it is typically a critique, something not felt to be an athlete’s business, somehow.

Max Davidson evidently thinks the two types of courage belong together. But if his head gives the nod to moral courage, it is his heart that’s more readily engaged, going out to Bert Trautmann keeping goal with a broken neck or to the record-breaking blind speed-skier Kevin Alderton, “one of those accidental heroes who are the soul of sport”.

These figures’ appeal is registered in a vocabulary of superlatives, raising them into a non-social realm of mythological attainment, exceptions without a rule to prove. Left out of such a picture is the notion of the team, without which little can be attained, not even in individual events. It’s the thought and support of a team that show sporting achievement to be within the social, non-mythological sphere.

Hats off, by all means, to, say, Lis Hartel, the Danish equestrian who overcame polio to win Olympic silver. But to hear Davidson tell it she did it all by herself. I don’t see how, but saying so tells a story of a reassuringly familiar kind. The individual is all, collective endeavour nothing. No wonder the Boy’s Own Paper is mentioned a time or two in the course of Fields of Courage. Davidson’s approach essentially takes a leaf from that hoary periodical, repository of grit, spunk and like virtues from the heyday of imperial maleness. This approach is no doubt one of the reasons why “so often in this book” we see how “sport and soldiering had become a seamless whole”. Quite apart from what’s made of sport when regarded in this light, there also is the assumption that modern sports fans – and modern readers – are still the same hero-worshippers they ever were. Or should be. To find that they do still write them like this any more is really rather peculiar.

George O'Brien is a professor of English at Georgetown University, in Washington DC, and editor of Playing the Field: Irish Writers on Sport, published by New Island in 2000