Double Happiness
Page 9
The line between sport and war is a smudged one. For just as sport is a metaphor for war, it can also work the other way round. Last year US intelligence finally tracked down Osama bin Laden. It turned out that, rather than roughing it in the remote mountains of Afghanistan, he’d spent the last few years mooching quietly with his wives in a detached house in suburban Pakistan. It was a tad embarrassing for both sides, really. But anyway, in went a chopperload of Navy Seals. They stormed the house and killed bin Laden.
When the news emerged there were spontaneous demonstrations of joy on the streets of American cities. Groups of young men jumped up and down chanting ‘USA, USA’. The triumphalism was indistinguishable from a crowd at Wembley chanting ‘Engerland, Engerland’. This parallel was further underlined when the Fox News Channel marked the assassination by selling celebratory T-shirts. The slogan across the chest said, ‘Navy Seals 1, bin Laden 0’. (Though bin Laden might reasonably have argued that he’d actually won the game by several thousand goals.)
18
Parochial milking
In Big Babies: Or, Why Can’t We Just Grow Up?, Michael Bywater argues that modern Western society infantilizes its citizens. Kept in a state of childish emotional dependence, those citizens can be controlled and milked for cash. It’s a persuasive thesis, confirmed by the growth of sport as business.
To Shakespeare, sport meant extramarital sex, or learning the skills of war, or hunting animals, or torturing animals. But it didn’t mean sport as we know it. Sport as we know it barely existed in the sixteenth century, but Shakespeare’s word for it was games. Games were kids’ stuff. The people who took part in games were just playing.
Playing games is as instinctive to children as it is to puppies. Games mimic the world they will grow into and foster the skills they will need. Boys and puppies like to play competitive games. They fight for supremacy without drawing blood. Trying to repress this urge is futile, as those who have tried to expunge competition from primary school sport have found. The kids always know who’s won.
It is as instinctive for tribes to wage war as it is for kids to fight. So it’s a good civilized thing for tribes to wage their wars bloodlessly on the sports field. It acknowledges a destructive instinct and channels it into something athletic and joyous. Over the fifty-something years I’ve been alive, sport has furnished me with more enduring friendships than any other activity and more pleasure than anything except perhaps literature. Sport is wonderful. And local rivalry adds spice. Each town puts up its local heroes and others turn out to cheer them on. So when the centre forward for, say, Rotherham, bangs one into the net, his neighbour in the stand can exclaim with some pride, ‘Aye, that’s our Fred.’ And the next time he sees him in the pub he can buy him a drink. It’s clan feeling, local tribalism, instinctive and understandable. And for these precise reasons it is exploitable. It has been duly exploited.
The Rotherhamite enjoys feeling parochial. But he enjoys even more feeling parochial and victorious. And if the price of victory is to import a player or two, it’s a price he is happy to pay. It means that the power unit he belongs to is more powerful and he gets more pleasurable feelings of superiority by association. His allegiance to his feelings proves stronger than his allegiance to authenticity.
So Rotherham buys players from elsewhere. To pay for them it charges people to watch them. And if the team wins, more spectators come, paying money to buy more players and suddenly the team called Rotherham has become a business. In the process there has been a semantic shift. The word Rotherham now means two things: the business and the town. The business exploits the parochial feelings that the name of the town evokes but it has lost all actual connection with that town. In the context of the business, the word Rotherham has become a mere noise, an evocative tool. It has become a brand. And thus the gates are opened to bullshit.
Bullshit rapidly discovered that tribal allegiance is easily aroused and quite amoral. People are happy to associate themselves with anything successful. It does not depend on actual tribal affiliation. It depends only on feeling good. So successful sports teams develop huge followings regardless of their ostensible home. Huge followings make money. Money buys the best players. And so the cabbage swells.
In the 1990s a Russian billionaire bought Chelsea Football Club. He imported a Portuguese manager, and a squad of fine players. None of them came from Chelsea. Few of them could have found Chelsea on a map. But they became a team called Chelsea and they were good and the people flocked and the money followed. Chelsea does not mean Chelsea, any more than Manchester United means Manchester. You can buy shares in Manchester United on the Singapore Stock Exchange. Bangkok hosts a Manchester United fan club.
Sport is simply a business. It sells the thrill of partisanship rather than, say, toilet tissue, but the principle is identical. (Though I would not be surprised to learn that in the Manchester United shop you can buy, along with the Manchester United home strip and the Manchester United away strip and the mugs and the scarves and the signed photos, Manchester United branded toilet tissue. Or perhaps, and this on reflection might sell better, Manchester City branded toilet tissue. Manchester City, by the way, is not listed on the Singapore Stock exchange. It belongs to an investment arm of the government of Abu Dhabi.)
There seems no limit to the proliferation of sporting businesses. Factitious competitions spring up from nothing. In the 1990s the astute and remorseless Rupert Murdoch, who also, as it happens, owns the Fox News Channel, created a rugby union competition for the benefit of his media empire. The teams were known, indicatively, as franchises.
The franchise representing the region where I live was given the name of the Canterbury Crusaders, ostensibly a nod to Christchurch’s Anglican foundation. But it was neatly ironic that a team created by a ruthless acquisitor should be named after a bunch of ruthless acquisitors. And just as medieval kings and popes stirred up religious and patriotic fervour for their own acquisitive ends, so Murdoch has used parochialism to do the same thing. As he clearly understands, it isn’t the thing itself that matters — the sport, the religion — it’s the feelings associated with the thing. Arouse emotion, inflame it, then exploit it. It’s every bullshitter’s unspoken mantra, from the pope to the PR whore.
Murdoch’s competition boomed. People proved only too willing to become fans, even while knowing that the competition was synthetic. Cars in these parts are festooned with bumper stickers saying ‘Don’t cross the Crusaders’. Another nice ironic pun, of course, but one that makes the driver, though he may be a coward and a slob, feel both tough and perhaps clever by association.
Here’s a piece of commentary that could have come from the recent Rugby World Cup: ‘Arlidge to Thompson … Thompson cuts inside, breaks the tackle, slips the ball to Leitch … Leitch for the line, held up, but oh, a brilliant offload to Nicholas and it’s a try, a stunning try.’
To which country would that try have been credited? The answer is Japan. Countries, like commercial clubs, now acquire players from anywhere they can within the increasingly flexible rules. And players, naturally, will go wherever they can get international glory and the money that goes with it. Three of the best four batsmen in the England cricket team were raised in South Africa. African runners compete at the Olympics in the colours of Middle Eastern states that are flush with oil money. Kiwis play for or coach just about every team in the Rugby World Cup. International sport is as much a business as the club version. New Zealand Rugby has a CEO. And when the All Blacks were knocked out of the 2007 World Cup he said, ‘The brand has taken a bit of a dent.’
What the twentieth century did was to shift sport from something that people do to something that people watch other people do. The reward for the watchers is emotion by proxy. Whenever one game ends, another looms. Fans are drawn ever forward to the next emotional climax, like herds being led to the shed every morning and evening, world without end, to be milked.
19
The uniqueness of Wayne
Temples have been built by every human society. They are places where people gather to worship something greater than themselves. Rituals take place, often including prayer, rhythmical chanting, singing and so on. Those attending experience a sense of uplift and of unity, or so I’m told. Temples fall in and out of use. In many parts of Europe the official temples are temples no longer. For most visitors they’re now little more than historical theme parks with gift shops. Today’s temples, where people still go to find meaning and purpose through ritual, are, most commonly, sports stadiums.
Fans like to be part of a crowd. A sparsely populated stadium is no good because the people remain detached and individual. Only when crammed together can they lose themselves to a mass identity and become that joyously anarchic thing, a mob — a mob with no sense of autonomous dignity, a mob that performs Mexican waves, a mob that even in self-conscious England is willing to sing. ‘One Wayne Rooney,’ sing the fans of Manchester United, to the tune, I’ve just realized, of ‘Guantanamera’, ‘there’s only one Wayne Rooney.’ Which is precisely the sentiment that we sang in school assembly. Only we were extolling god.
At first glance the comparison between god and Rooney seems a good one. Both are male and famously short-tempered. But only Rooney has had a hair transplant. And also, crucially, there actually is only one Wayne Rooney. There are thousands of gods. (As someone else has observed, an atheist disbelieves in all gods. The faithful disbelieve in all gods except one. The difference is mathematically insignificant.)
The best-known choir in English football is the Kop at Anfield, their anthem, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’.
Walk on, walk on,
With hope in your heart …
It’s a fine tune and when I hear 20,000 Scousers bashing it out without restraint, something blind stirs within me and I almost want to join them in their abandon, just as I almost do when I hear black gospel singers bashing it out without restraint in some barn of a church in South Carolina.
The sentiment expressed in ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ would fit nicely into Hymns Ancient and Modern. It is hard to distinguish from:
Yea, though I walk in death’s dark vale,
Yet will I fear no ill
For thou art with me; and thy rod
And staff my comfort still.
The most famous manager of Liverpool Football Club was Bill Shankly, a gruff Scot. In my dictionary of quotations he immediately follows Shakespeare. ‘Some people think football is a matter of life and death,’ said Bill. ‘I can assure them it is much more serious than that.’ He is half-joking, but only half. Look around a stadium during a tense match and you will see people undergoing emotional extremes. You will see them assume attitudes of prayer. You will see them sway and sing. You will see them enthralled by ritual drama, one that they attend every weekend, something that they look forward to, something that matters to them right then more than anything else, that gives them hope and purpose and that makes them fully alive. Bill Shankly knew exactly what football was doing. It was tapping into what every faith taps into. But unlike any pope or ayatollah, Shankly could be funny about it. He was capable of irony, the saving grace of our species. He acknowledged it was a game.
They know what they’re doing at Manchester United as well. As the players emerge from the basement vestry into the temple at the start of the game, the congregation banked on all sides and focused on them and them alone, the players pass under an arch. Above the arch is written the legend ‘Theatre of Dreams’. It’s bang right. For the ninety minutes to come, roughly the length of a standard religious service, the dream world is established. It is spectacle only but it touches something instinctive and pleasurable and profitable. And also, crucially, partisan. Part of the delight of belonging to a group is its distinction from another group.
If your dad takes you to watch Manchester United every Saturday of your childhood, you may still never like football. But if you do grow up to like it, it’s a racing certainty you’ll support Manchester United rather than City. Just as if your mum takes you to mass every Sunday you may still end up atheist. But if you do grow up to get god, the god you get will be the Catholic version rather than the Protestant one that plays at a different stadium. Shankly put that neatly too: ‘If Everton were playing at the bottom of my garden, I’d draw the curtains.’
Liverpool, Everton. Manchester City, Manchester United. Catholic, Protestant. Sunni, Shia. England, France. You get little say in your allegiance. And if you think the comparison is far-fetched consider Glasgow, with its two famous football clubs, Rangers and Celtic, one explicitly Protestant, the other Catholic. The line between religious bigotry and sporting rivalry, between parody sectarian war and actual sectarian war, can be so blurred as almost to fade from view.
Sport makes a cracking devotional cause because it has unchanging rituals — the Superbowl, the Stanley Cup, the World Cup, each a festival to look forward to, to build towards, like Easter, like Christmas — yet it is forever self-renewing. Within the ritual framework there is a constant change of cast. New godlets are forever striving to supplant the established gods. Right now there is only one Wayne Rooney, but in days gone by there was only one George Best. The king is dead. Long live the king.
And new thrones are constantly added. The bullshitters have discovered that the formula works more or less regardless of content. I have just, early in the afternoon, flicked through the five dedicated sports channels on Sky TV. One showed golf in the States, one netball, one an interview with a rugby league player, one motor racing and the last one, wonderfully, darts. Fat, pallid, middle-aged white men dressed in what looked like embroidered smocks threw darts at a board. Watching them do so was an animated, engaged, half-drunk, partisan crowd 7000 strong.
Professional sport, then, is a triumphant commercial enterprise, generating monstrous sums of money. Its success seems unaffected by global economic problems. It succeeds because it taps into deep-rooted emotional needs: the desire to belong, the craving for a sense of identity, the delight in combat, the urge to worship. It’s a winner in every way, a form of entertainment that plays to the fallibilities of the human animal.
But it differs from mere entertainment in one crucial way — the actors are not acting. They are being. They mean what they do. They mean it utterly. The tears of defeat or the grins of victory are never faked. Look at a picture of the All Blacks after they were knocked out of the World Cup in 2007. Their faces are drained, expressionless. They stare unseeing towards a black middle distance, preoccupied with the awfulness of now, unable to escape it. They look like the trench fodder of the First World War, shell-shocked, emotionally wrecked.
It is this intensity, this actuality, that renders sport unique. Despite the frame of bullshit that surrounds it, the weary hyperbole, the mythologizing, the cynical marketing, the proliferation of synthetic competitions, within that frame the strife is genuine. It may be a parody of warfare, but within the sealing bubble of its own rules, it is fought for real. And thus it has jumped what might seem an unjumpable gap. It has become quasi-reality, to such an extent that every news bulletin devotes a segment to it. This fake warfare, this exercise in making money, has achieved almost the same status as actual warfare. Which is like the police investigating a death on Coronation Street.
20
Just like us
Because sport has achieved this quasi-actuality, and because it is massively popular, and because it arouses such potent partisan and religious emotion, and because it is seen as a good, other businesses crawl over each other to conflate themselves with it. So even the fat dart throwers wear sponsors’ logos. Formula 1 cars are festooned with ads, as are football shirts, rugby jerseys, cricket bats, cricket stumps, cricket umpires even. (The one example of such advertising that I half-admire, if only for its sheer ballsiness, is the sponsorship of a local lawn bowls club b
y a firm of undertakers.)
Some businesses make use of marginally more sophisticated techniques than conflation. Here’s an email I received from New Zealand’s second largest company, Telecom. ‘Hi, we’re massive All Blacks fans and we love to share our passions with you. So, to say thank you for being with us, and to help get you going on XT, we have this almighty AB’s offer for you. Upgrade to XT … and you’ll automatically go in the draw to win a once-in-a-lifetime All Blacks experience.’
Telecom want me to transfer my phone to their new network. To encourage me they piggyback on the religious fervour associated with the All Blacks. The adjective ‘almighty’ comes straight from the prayer book, and the dreary ‘once-in-a-lifetime … experience’ suggests a similar absolute. At the same time, by thanking me and offering to ‘help get [me] going’ they imply that they are acting in my interest. They aren’t, obviously, and neither do I expect them to be. They’re a commercial business.
But the principal bullshit here is the attempt to personify a commercial entity. They hope to establish a bond with me. They want me to feel kinship. And because as a fifty-something male in New Zealand I am statistically likely to be an All Blacks fan, Telecom portrays itself as one big corporate All Blacks fan.
So I rang 018, the directory enquiry number. I got a charming young man at a call centre in the Philippines.
‘What listing, sir?’ he said.
I said I’d like a number for the All Blacks.
‘One moment, sir,’ he said. ‘Sorry, sir, we’re not getting a direct listing. There’s All Black cars, All Black …’