As professional sport has grown into mammoth money-making ventures, with the best athletes in many sports being obscenely well-compensated for their abilities, sport itself has lost meaning. The best competitors are already insulated from the public, security is as tight as a nun’s wimple at championship events, and even the Olympics are run under a cloud of fear, that terrorism will divert from mano a mano, woman versus woman, team against team struggles.
Seeing how professional baseball is reacting to terrorism and the Iraq war, fearing that season-openers may be used for political purposes (after all, baseball is right up there with mom and apple pie in the US), how Eldrick Woods avoids travelling to Dubai for security reasons, thus passing up a million-dollar appearance fee at a golf tournament, how money, not the pleasure of competition decides where and how events are staged is enough to turn off any casual sportsfan.
Because the majority of fervent, rabid sportsfans are men, then it is hardly surprising to notice how war terminology has permeated the sports subculture. Announcers excitedly discuss “the heated battle on the pitch”, “going to war under the basket”, “hitting a screaming howitzer to right field”, “digging away in the trenches” marking the tight areas of a hockey rink. “True warriors” are the Gordie Howes, the Bobby Bauns “fighting for the team” cause with broken bones. Doug Gilmour is known as “Killer’ for his relentless approach to the game. And so on.
Fortunately, being a sportsfan is usually an adolescent phase, after a while losses and victories cease to matter, one realizes that a game is just a game. World peace does not hinge on the success or failures of the Maple Leafs.
These thoughts have been voiced by many others during this time of crisis, sports announcers have toned down their hyperbolic excess. Still, the concept of what sport is and should be has been greatly blurred by American boosterism, rampant consumerism. It may well be time to take a step backward and reflect on the advantages of using sport - much like the ancient Greeks - as a from of conflict resolution, without resorting to weapons more powerful than hockey sticks, penalties more severe than two minutes in the sin-bin for spearing an opponent.
Take exhibition games (not those of major league baseball, please). Used to be that they were organized for two reasons - to give coaches a chance to evaluate their players and their teamwork, second, to provide fans with entertainment. For this reason, on the continent at least, these games, whether in football (soccer) or cricket, are known as friendlies. That is a concept we should return to.
Last Saturday Estonia and Canada met in such a soccer “friendly”, and media reaction is telling. While the Toronto Star, claiming to be the paper of choice of the multicultural city, tries to provide international coverage of sports more popular abroad than here did note in a short article the preparations of the Canadian side for their exhibition match, it failed to give any space to an article about the game itself, choosing Lithuania’s defeat of Germany as being more important. Canada’s game was mentioned merely in passing, one line in the results column.
In Estonia it was a much bigger deal - but still, it seems that beyong patriotic pride certain one-upsmanship entered into the commentary. Estonia is ranked 62nd in the world to Canadas No. 70 in soccer; to hear Estonian announcers describe it, losing to Canada would have been an ignominious defeat - it’s Canada after all.
While Canadians are complacent and good sports - after all, losing is part of the national expectations - in true international hockey, say, it was nothing new for a half century until the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics, one could argue that homerism has no place in friendlies. (Read elsewhere in this paper the opinions of an Estonian-Canadian, living in Tallinn, thus reversing the flow of Estonians coming to Canada for work and play, and how he reacted emotionally to the soccer match).
This is not to deny the true patriotic impact of sport. The fierce pride one feels after seeing Erki Nool run around a track in Sydney with the Estonian flag is impossible to describe, much as it is difficult to gauge the impact that Martin Brodeur’s leap skyward after the final horn in the Salt Lake City gold medal hockey game has had on the Canadian citizen’s psyche.
Yet, when all is said and done, these achievements pale beside the negative impact of war. Sure, we may point with pride at Kristjan Palusalu’s gold medal achievements at the Berlin Olympics - but how can we forget that those summer games were the stage for Hitler’s megalomania, and were followed by indescribable terror and slaughter? Not the “slaughter” that a 10-2 hockey score is described as, but one with a true loss: that of countless lives, hopes for a normal existence.
Continuing with a sports metaphor - what is taking place in Iraq and elsewhere is just not cricket. We have rules in sports out of necessity: we have morals and ethics in society for the same reasons. These rules of engagement are being broken on the banks of the Tigris as you read these lines.
No matter that Saddam’s forces are “cheating”, breakking the Geneva Convention rules. Nothing is fair in love and war: that is the painful reminder.
Sport should be a diversion, merriment, describing games of distraction. It should be seen as a pasttime, amusement from which both participants and the audience can gain pleasure. We need more “friendlies” not less, more competition for the sake of it, rather than victory at all costs.
Among the rich sports metaphors in the English language the expression of leading a sporting life is seen as being in pursuit of the harmless and fun, comments made in sport are for the sake of badinage, not battle, the verb to sport means to make merry.
No matter the sport - soccer, baseball or hockey, it remains only a game. War games are also acceptable - it is the real thing that humankind needs to avoid at all costs.
Opinion: Make sport - not war
Arvamus
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