MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
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Given the massive and intense public interest in competitive sport, it may surprise those who habitually take a cynical view of human affairs that it has taken more than a century for the Greek ideal to be overwhelmed by the Roman. Even now there are many who cling to the ideal of the scrupulously fair amateur and the sturdy, modestly paid professional but undoubtedly the age of the glamorous gladiator is with us.
As sport cannot survive in its current highly commercial form without stadium ticket sales (if only to provide atmosphere) and home viewing, it is up to the public whether it wants its sport to be weighted more towards Greece or Rome, weighted because to go the whole way in either direction is not so much unthinkable as undoable. Economics and public opinion might occasionally lead to a slight down-turn in remuneration but it is inconceivable that big money can ever be separated from sport. This does not inevitably lead to the farce of wrestling; we want more for our money than the sham posturings of grotesques.
So, if we really want to reduce the role of diet and drugs in commercial sport, the simple answer is to design games, or frame the rules of those we have, in such a way that the role of brute force and aggression are reduced and the role of skill increased. The problem arises in all games where skill is pitted against brute strength. Drugs and diet have increased athletic strength but not skill so that pitchers in baseball, servers in tennis and bowlers in cricket have all gained an advantage over batters, receivers and batsmen. American football has fared well because the brute strength is more or less equal; soccer has prospered because, among other things, it is skills based; and golf has held its own because course architecture has been able to deal with increased driving power. In the three declining sports the solution is either to increase the size of the ball (to slow it down), increase the size of the bat and racket (to make hitting easier) or to increase the distance between the deliverer and receiver. This is not a matter of fairness but of contrivance; people want an even contest between receiver and deliverer and would also prefer more rather than less successful hitting as long as hitting doesn't in turn become too easy and lose its value. Now and again people talk for hours about a one run ball game but they more often talk about an 11-10.
As an aficionado of baseball and cricket I would, of course, resent any change to the basic rules if only because it would render statistical comparison between generations meaningless - and for the physically challenged there are always statistics - but that would only make our debates about who really was the greatest even more argumentative. Without change, men's tennis, baseball and cricket will fade because they are badly designed for the people we are; indeed, the balance has tilted in cricket such that the bare-headed batsman of the 1960s has been replaced by the helmeted gladiator of today. Not surprisingly, as the Greek gives way to the Roman the audience changes; but this is not a matter of one thing or the other. We simply have to be more imaginative and flexible in the way we design our own entertainments. If anything is a proper subject for consumer power it is this massive, trivial, essential part of our lives.
Because the issue is not clear, the debate is difficult but it is made worse by a tendency towards necessary self-deception. For almost half a century athletes from Eastern Europe flaunted the Roman in the Olympic arena and we did not want to look too closely. Neither did we really want to know that until recently Mark McGwire was taking a testosterone booster, androstenedione, still permitted in baseball and we are all mighty pleased he has now announced that he has stopped, particularly as it seems not to have affected his batting prowess. The real muddle, however, is biochemical. We accept that jocks eat steak breakfasts, chew glucose tablets and even inhale pure oxygen on the sidelines but they are not supposed to take their chemicals out of phials. Biochemically there is no serious distinction between food supplements (for babies or athletes), legal medication and illegal drugs with items from all three loose classes moving between them as social mores change. The problem in the case of Linford Christie, an Olympic Gold Medalist and campaigner against the use of drugs in athletics who has been tested positive for nandrolene, is that it could have come from any of these three classes.
But as well as designing sport to strike a balance between strength and skill its survival depends upon youth identity and aspiration; a game which young people cannot imagine themselves playing successfully, and possibly professionally, as adults will never attract major interest. This is why soccer is such a universal phenomenon; it is played professionally by five-footers and seven-footers, oaks and bamboo poles, by every race and by people from every background. It requires no special equipment nor environment and is habitually played in slums on broken ground with objects that leave much to be desired in the spherical department. Its physical and psychological democracy, its fluidity and spontaneity and the simplicity of its rules (in the playground at least) makes it uniquely accessible. In other sports, however, there comes a point when special equipment and physical attributes steadily exclude teenagers from participation. There is a lesson to be learned here from the Caribbean where cricket has been eclipsed by basketball. Whereas mature cricket requires special equipment, basketball does not.
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