LOCKER ROOM:We may beg to differ over human rights, but the ordinary Chinese leave us in their dust when it comes to good cheer, good manners and community spirit, writes Tom Humphries
WE, SPORTS journalists are the herd that were bred and cloned as a solution to the rampagings of the Lonely Planet generation. We get to go to smoggy places in large groups and study matters of such vital cultural importance as air conditioning, telephone connections and the comparative price of Big Mac meals. We draw big conclusions on superficial evidence.
Here in the Main Press Centre, a technologically-advanced shanty town built just a few hundred yards from the Bird's Nest of Beijing, we greet people we haven't seen since Semple Stadium two weeks ago as if they were lost explorers who have wandered bewildered and badly dressed back into civilisation after decades during which our memory of them had grown necessarily dim.
We gather over our trays, which groan under the weight of mass-produced Asian cuisine, and we debate important matters of the intellect as they pertain to the world just outside the window.
That's not true, is it, about there being nine million bicycles in Beijing? Is it? Cos it's in my intro? If it's not, why did Melua add "and that's a fact"? And are the Chinese really that inscrutable? Not at all, unless you're chatting them up. Then they are as inscrutable as Kerry football managers. What was Mousy Tongue? Some sort of plague disease?
Across the road from the Main Press Centre is the International Broadcast Centre, where those too cosmetically blessed for grimy printwork spend their empty days. We ink-smudged slaves of the written word know well they have nicer food over there and get better media packs and greater access to athletes and fewer inscrutable looks of rebuff. But we know also we are brighter and come the revolution we will be spared for longer than they. Ha ha.
It was a surprise, therefore, to tune into Chinese television the other night ( the English-language channel - ironically, my Mandarin is a little too rural too grasp the tonal subtleties of Beijing's Bill O'Herlihy).
They were discussing vis-à-vis the Olympics the dialectic tension created between the tradition of Confucian collectivism the host country lives by and the voracious culture of individualism the Olympics represent.
They were generally worried.
I stayed with it, my brain's metaphorical little feet paddling duck-like and furious as I got further and further out of my depth just watching sports television.
I had been fretting about other, not-unrelated matters like how my own heritage of Dub individualism would fare against the quiet intransigence that is the Tao of Mickey Harte. I could not grasp - from either the telly or the Dubs - any reasons to be cheerful.
China is a disarming sort of place. Perhaps they live in collectivist harmony. Perhaps the collectivism is hierarchical. Perhaps Confucian philosophy can't survive China's lusty embrace of capitalism. The point is they talk about it on sports programmes and have some philosophy of living and dignity and culture that makes Fáilte Towers look, well, frankly embarrassing when set against it.
They have a place for sport and its contribution to the health and harmony of a progressive society. We can giggle and laugh but we have a place for prawn-sandwich eating and expensive celebration of sport.
China is a surprising and humbling place. You come here with your suitcase full of misgivings about Darfur and Tibet and human rights but you never get a chance to unpack your concerns.
You are standing in a hotel lobby and it is raining heavily - raining Irish summer style - outside and you are asking the six women behind the desk to check again if your name is on their computer.
When you walked into the lobby dripping wet and rolling your eyes two minutes ago they laughed and clapped with delight and came out from behind the overstaffed desk and gave you the present of a lovely, wooden-handled umbrella. See, this is your third visit of the day trying to find your hotel and you are old friends with them all now.
They have greeted your bedraggled return with the merriment an unseasonal visit from a slightly tipsy Santa Claus might provoke.
The young fella who carried your bags with you the half mile or so to one of the other hotels you don't seem to be booked into comes over to shake your hand again and happily repeat his three words of English: "Welcome to Beijing. Ha ha ha!"
So once again they start checking their computer and making earnest phone calls and try to keep you happy with bottles of water and a towel and almond pastries and hard-boiled sweets and a seat if you would like it. You notice what little bit of attention they are not offering to you is being directed at the large-screen TV at the other end of the lobby.
Up on the screen Zhang Juanjuan, who was seeded 27th, is in the process of winning a gold medal for archery on behalf of China. Zhang Juanjuan is lovely and calm in a white floppy hat, which keeps the rain from her eyes as she lands her arrows time after time.
South Koreans always win the archery, so this is a huge surprise unfolding.
And every time a Chinese arrow hits the spot, back in the lobby the two porters turn to the girls behind the desk and shake their fists in absolute but joyful silence before turning back to stand loosely at attention by the door, ready should some guest arrive needing their services. And the girls, all of them, put their hands to their cheeks and bend their knees bashfully as they smile, and then they turn their gleaming faces back to the business of finding a room for the big, wet hack in front of them.
And as we are all standing there Zhang wins her gold and you want the lobby to burst into cheering and high fives and the ole-ole-ole sort of stuff we would go on with if we bothered turning up to work during the Dublin Olympics. But everyone wants to find a room for the big, wet hack and they look apologetic and smile that they are sorry for being distracted by the TV.
And they are sorry they can't find a room for this half-man-half-panda figure before them with luggage, but they have an idea.
So the porter goes running and summons a cab up from the street 500 metres away and argues it through the security barriers (look, he's big and he's wet, he seems to be saying as he points you out to the security guys) so that you don't have to get wetter even though you have their lovely, wooden-handled umbrella now. And they send you off again, everyone waving and smiling politely, and you feel you should send them postcards from everywhere you go for the rest of your life.
Collectivism. The idea of being a good community person, the notion that the fella who puts out the nets is as important to everything as the full forward who scores 2-3 in a game. The idea that serving the big, wet plonker in the lobby is as important as winning the archery gold - that it is all part of some greater collective purpose which is a source of pride for everyone. For us at home that collectivism, that benign socialism, is the last and best argument for amateurism in our indigenous sport, for volunteerism, for paying it forward, for the idea of harmony as a goal.
Communism here in China is as distorted and corroded as it ended up being anywhere else perhaps, but the way of life onto which it was grafted gives it a life force. The striving for harmony and co-operation may be a threatened ideal in China, but when you come from Celtic Tiger Ireland it feels like a warm and timely embrace from the past
And that is how these Olympics feel different. Bigger and yet more homely. China may be selling itself and its clout in the big, bad commercial world but the hustle is gentle and the people aren't yet polluted by cynicism for the big adventure. They don't seem to feel that they should all be making out like bandits.
The first Games at which this column entered the bantamweight quill-pushing event were held in Atlanta. The streets, the stadia and the temple of the main press centre were all filled with mountain ranges of tat that had to be sold. We won some dubious golds and the country was blind drunk with the celebrating for months.
As the days crawled past toward the welcome end of that wretched Olympiad you were hectored more and more vociferously to step right up, to buy some crap, cos they were goin' outta business, goin' outta business. And that was sport.
You look around these Games and nowhere is there anybody trying to sell you anything. The media shop in the main press centre has some discreet badges and a few posters with pandas and mascots but no T-shirts, no key rings, no pens and no tat.
Lots of books though.
It is fascinating to watch. Adidas, up to their necks in the Olympics, have an ad running on television that tries to reconcile individualism with collectivism in this new world China is opening itself up to. Four increasingly iconic Chinese athletes, faces of these Games, walk out from or spring from a sea, an ocean of bodies; they come toward us out of great forests of waving hands; and they disappear back in again. Their effort is everybody's effort. Their progress is everybody's progress. The individual doesn't get to the Olympics without the society striving to progress itself through sport.
Back in our voracious world, where Ronaldo is described as a slave and largeing it up is a lifestyle choice, collectivism is for suckers. We have lost something in a world that has as its motto "Where's mine?"
When these Games are over we will have a debate-cum-bloodbath on how much energy and money have been spent on an Olympic team that has hogged the footnotes here. It will be small-picture, short-term stuff. Needles drawn at dawn by pygmies, show-me-the-medals guff from a country that confuses an ole-ole-ole tradition with a sporting culture.
They get the idea, the Chinese. They see a big picture. We believe in them more than we believe in anything we will see (or have already seen) on, say, the sprint track.
They have their problems but they have a philosophy. We, their arrogant, swaddled visitors - we have, as Confucius might have said, lost the plot.
