Sport has become the new pornography. We must salute Allen Stanford for this
remarkable breakthrough. Stanford has set up a cricket match for Saturday;
one in which a million dollars go to every player on the winning team - and
nothing whatsoever to the losers.
The match pitches England against something called the Stanford Superstars.
England, yes, but not the England I was cheering for during the 2005 Ashes
summer. This is not a team seeking victory and glory: these are 11 blokes
each trying to get his hands on a million bucks.
I won't be watching out of partisanship, loyalty or patriotism, or the pursuit
of excellence. If I watch - and I feel no pressing need to - I will do so
for reasons that are furtive and shaming. The spectacle may be briefly
compelling, but it will soon lose its charm, leaving behind only a kind of
embarrassment for the grotesque contortions of the participants. In short,
pornography.
Even the issue of selection is pornographic. Four players from the 15-man
squad must be told “sorry” and the word sorry will cost them each three
quarters of a million. That's the difference in remuneration between squad
member and player. Once on the pitch, every dropped catch, every bone-headed
shot, every loose over could cost ten other people a small but immensely
desirable fortune.
This is not, then, the pursuit of excellence. Nor is it the pursuit of money.
Rather, it is the pursuit of squirming. It is a billionaire's malicious joke
at the expense of people he never could be, even if he had a billion
billion. He will make a group of richly gifted international athletes squirm
and grovel before the altars of money.
This is, then, a calculated exercise in humiliation. Its aim is to humiliate
the brilliant and the beautiful for the amusement of the viewer - and that
is another definition of pornography. It is not, in the end, anything to do
with the sensual perfections of sport, still less with love. It is an
exercise in power and that is a further definition of pornography.
Of course, the cricketers have come flocking, while telling the world that it
has nothing to do with the money. It is like the great question of Mrs
Merton: what first attracted you to Stanford's $1million-a-man cricket match?
It is, I suppose, an intriguing examination in personalities, and you can
argue that sport has always been exactly that. Sport has been called the
ultimate reality television show and, while that is true, there is a crucial
difference. Reality TV shows are contrived things, put together with the
specific aim of extorting dramatic revelation of personality.
Sport is not contrived. Sport has a meaning for us. The England cricket team
mean something to some people: cricket itself means something. It has a
place in our culture. I played it in the playground, on the common, on the
village green at Tewin; I watched it with my grandfather and my father; I
have covered the sport on five continents. Cricket is a part of my life.
But the Stanford match has nothing to do with me. It is just a prurient
exercise in humiliation. It seeks not heroes but goats. Above all, it looks
for the man who cost his mates a million. It is a thing without roots or
meaning, and I hope both sides lose.
American football fashions cultural change
In the mid-Eighties, football was unfashionable: loathed, sneered at, feared,
rejected and despised. The fashionable game was American football, with the
weekly highlights on Channel 4 an unmissable treat. An exhibition game was
held at Wembley Stadium and everyone asked if American football would take
over from the round-ball game.
Well, it didn't. That's because fashion and culture are different. American
football had no roots, while football was, and is, a part of our land.
Fashions change at a fast and bewildering rate, for that is what fashion
means. Cultures move to a slower, more profound rhythm. But never think that
cultures cannot and will not change. American football has not gone away. It
is not a part of the fixed stars, like football and cricket; rather, it
appears at regular intervals like a comet, each time briefly lighting up the
skies with beauty and novelty, as it did yesterday. It is no longer
fashionable; rather, it is worming its way into the sporting culture of this
country.
English football hates change with a bitterness. Before the Second World War,
they thought the World Cup would never catch on. Then they thought that
televised football would take all the money from the game. Then they thought
an elite league would destroy everything. The latest horror is the 39th
game: the suggestion that some Premier League matches should be played
overseas. The idea gave football people a fit of the vapours. While they are
all swooning, the National Football League of the United States is stealing
the global niche.
Testers should look to the future
Every time I hear about the possibilities of using new methods to retest old
samples for drugs, I am overcome with squeamishness. It's not just the
thought of all those yellow bottles, lovingly kept for year after year like
the finest of wines (James Joyce, incidentally, used to call his favourite
“Archduchess's Urine”). No, what disturbs me is what they might find: the
amount of history that will have to be rewritten, the amount of rage or
sadness or - I suppose it's possible, just about - sheer relief that we will
have to go through.
The notion that the guilty should be found out and punished is not a bad idea,
but something in me recoils from the thought of all this agonising over the
past. It would be energy almost wilfully directed at the wrong cause. It's
not the drug-users of the past that should concern us: it's the drug-users
of the future - and the wacky idea of trying to make sure there aren't any.
Humble operation does fine work
As the Breeders' Cup - the World Cup of horse racing, albeit on American terms
- ran its course over the weekend, my thoughts turned not to the winners but
the losers; the many horses that are bred for speed but fail to find it, or,
having found it, can race no longer. What happens to them all?
The lucky ones go to the Thoroughbred Rehabilitation Centre, 230 acres of
Lancashire run by the great Carrie Humble. Here, ex-racehorses are
re-schooled for civilian life, then lent out to carefully vetted people who
are happy to share their lives with the glory and beauty of an ex-racehorse.
Everyone who has ever found joy in racing is in debt to Carrie and the TRC.
Poll reveals truth about referees
I did a spot of radio last weekend: Eamonn Holmes of Radio 5 Live was kind
enough to ask me on to talk about my book The Horsey Life. A fellow guest
was Graham Poll, the former referee, and while I was waiting to do my bit,
there was a spirited debate about refereeing, technology and all that sort
of thing.
Poll's argument came down to the abiding principle that the referee's decision
is final. The referee is the boss. In truth, the referee is subservient. But
that's the problem with asking the opinion of football referees on football.
They are not interested in accuracy or justice: what they are interested in
is power. I reach into my back pocket to show Poll the yellow card. Three
times.
