SPORT: Foul Play: What's Wrong with Sport By Joe Humphreys Icon Books, 271pp. £8.99A book that takes modern sport and fandom to task should generate arguments that last well beyond half time
ON THE FACE of it, there seems to be nothing wrong with sport. It's a multi-billion-euro industry. By word and deed (though definitely not by thought) it pervades the world's airwaves. Its top exponents possess iconic status. Its top brass are treated with as much seriousness as the statesmen and cultural ambassadors they like to think of themselves as. Its cultural significance, psychological influence and social value continue to be the subjects of many a treatise and seminar. And though, as is its way, television has distorted and exaggerated sport's place in the scheme of things, over the course of the past century sporting authorities themselves have not been shy in proclaiming the eirenic and therapeutic powers of their product, beginning with the global romance enshrined in the Olympic movement.
Well, Joe Humphreys is mad as hell and he's not going to take it any more, and has written a shibboleth-busting polemic to prove it. No opportunity is overlooked not only to debunk popular assumptions about the social and personal utility of sport but to expose the various hypocrisies and inconsistencies of the major sports' governing bodies. Sport doesn't build character, it's physically dangerous and intellectually stultifying; through competition and the mindlessness of fandom it appeals to the uglier sides of our natures; in its handling of cheating and doping sport offers cynically spurious, not to mention reactionary, versions of crime and punishment. And so on. The indictment is lengthy, and covers - a bit breathlessly, perhaps - all aspects of international sport in contemporary culture and society, from an opening salvo on the dumbness of sport (a section entitled "The Sportiest Societies Are Also the Dumbest" begins: "One word for you: Australia. Another word for you: Brazil") to the dominant role of the media in projecting what sport is, to sport's baneful influence on the citizenry at large, particularly in its spawning of (as Humphreys sees it) that hapless loser, the fan.
In addition to being a brisk bout of smiting the Hittite, Foul Play also has a confessional component. This does not detract from the main critical business at hand, but it shows the author to be an insider. A once-avid sports fan, complete with nerdy statistical resources and must-see compulsions, Humphreys speaks with convincing regret about those lost hours on the couch, the organisation of leisure time in terms of broadcast schedules, the promotion of televised images in his scale of values and the relegation of actual people. The comparatively small amount of attention paid to the personal angle may come as a relief to readers as tired of self-incriminating memoirs as Joe Humphreys is of sport. But there could have been a bit more of it, since, for one thing, that would have opened a window on an area that the book doesn't have much time for, namely the various codes, notions, insecurities and dramatisations of maleness that the increasing virulence of the sports bug has let loose.
RATHER THAN THE gender angle, the one that's played most consistently throughout Foul Play is the religious. About that there seems to be a certain ambivalence. On the one hand, sport's readiness to act as "a dangerously emotional crutch" makes it, when aficionados' fervour reaches a certain pitch of need and intensity, "something of a surrogate faith in a Godless society". This, presumably, is one of the ways in which, as Humphreys's bottom line has it, play has been fouled. On the other hand, it's not clear if the author's own "deep emotional connection to sport, which at times borders on the religious" is the same kind of foul. The way sport - its patrons, saints, devils (red and otherwise) and damned - is the subject of pilgrimages, shrines, icons, symbols, fetishes, lends the religious argument credence. And it's hard to refute the author's point about there being a certain "fundamentalism" about fans. The comparison can be extended to note that in the cases of both sport and religion, the quality of institutional control over one's affiliation tends to become more of an issue than belief itself.
Another view, to which Foul Play doesn't devote as much attention as it might, is that play has been fouled by becoming a mainstay of the leisure industry, with marketing, media exposure and advertising to match. Sport is a less satisfying means of escape because there's more of it. The very novelty value of its inherently exhibitionistic culture is diluted through over-exposure. There seem to be more cups, more competitions, more championships with more rounds than ever, with not only increased demands on fans' pockets but with a subliminal insistence on competition as a virtue and a necessity. Paying dearly to sample at leisure, and to applaud, the same ethos as one may well be experiencing in a stress-filled job is bound to tell. No wonder fans tend to be unhappy campers - or "consumers", as Humphreys calls them, not without reason. In a way, sport has become an expression of male insecurity - that is, of what makes them insecure (the ultra-competitive workplace) and the resulting insecurity of attempting to find adequate, compensatory escapes.
AS IN ALL polemics, baby and bathwater tend to go the one way in Foul Play. The case against the current institutional culture of sport is well-made, briskly written in a somewhat in-your-face (dare I say competitive?) style, and richly packed with telling anecdote and salient quotation from academic studies. But it's difficult to agree that the scene is as joyless as it's made out to be. Not all fans are as lumpen as they're portrayed here. There's surely the possibility that some of them, somewhere, can appreciate a given player's tenacity, say, or courage. Sport's elite players may be pampered superstars, but they must have moments when they enjoy what they do, and even enjoy playing together, for their own sakes.
A citation from Noam Chomsky on sport as, effectively, another instance of repressive tolerance is followed by the statement that "If Chomsky is right, sport is the modern equivalent of Nero's Roman fiddle. We play it while the world burns". Would the world not burn if there was no sport? And there are a number of similarly questionable claims and emphases. Still, those may be the very reason why Foul Play will be generate arguments that last well beyond half time. As, on balance, it should.
George O'Brien is the editor of Playing the Field: Irish Writers on Sport. His essay on Roland Barthes' What is Sport? appears in the current Dublin Review