The hallowed turf
As I write, the Belarusian Premier League is the most-watched sporting competition on the planet.
This is, of course, because it is pretty much the only professional sport still being played. The coronavirus pandemic has closed the gates on almost all sport for the foreseeable future - no Premier League, no County Championship, no Rugby Premiership, no Masters golf, no Wimbledon, no Olympic Games. Athletes - apart from the hardy souls of Belarus - reduced to working out in their bedrooms or gardens, wondering if they'll be able to compete in any meaningful sense in 2020.
For the most part, sporting fans have taken this with good grace. Of course Bill Shankly was wrong when he famously asserted that football is more serious than life and death. It isn't, and everyone knows that really. But lovers of sport everywhere still feel bereft of something which feels genuinely important, genuinely significant, even if we struggle to articulate quite why.
Why sport?
Theories abound as to why humans in every society in history develop a sporting culture, some theories more generous to athletes and fans than others.
Could it be that sport is a proxy for war? That is, the natural aggression which could result in fighting and bloodshed is instead channelled into the more irenic pursuit of sporting excellence. In this way we allow ourselves the time and space to work out our frustrations and satisfy our bloodlust by belting the football into the top right corner, rather than belting seven bells out of each other. It's possible. Certainly it would explain my own distaste for boxing. If the whole point of sport is to be a substitute for violence, then violent sport seems pointless. (Although given that I have to hide behind the sofa when Call the Midwife is on, it could be that I'm just squeamish.)
Or perhaps sport is not a proxy, but a preparation for war; a way of instilling the martial qualities of endurance and discipline into the young troops? Is it true, as George Orwell once wrote - possibly quoting the Duke of Wellington - that "the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton"? This was certainly the view of Sir Henry Newbolt, who in his famous poem Vitai Lampada ("The torch of life") credited the ability to fight on in a lost cause to the crucial training of a last-wicket stand in a schoolboy cricket game:
The sand of the desert is sodden red, --
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; --
The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
'Play up! play up! and play the game!'Sir Henry Newbolt, Vitai Lambada
My favourite theory until recently was that sport provided an identical function to a soap opera. The enduring appeal of the soap opera is that, no matter what else is going on in your life and in the world, the same characters are always there, week-in, week-out, playing out the same story that has been running for decades, where everything happens and nothing happens all at once. It gives us something to talk about which has some resemblance to real life, but which isn't stressful to dwell on because of its detachment from reality.
Similarly, the sporting seasons come and go, and the compelling narratives they create provide continuity and stability in an unstable and frightening world. I had long vaguely suspected this before Simon Kuper put it into much better words than I can manage:
The point of sports fandom is precisely that it doesn’t really matter. When you spend the day obsessing about whether England’s seventh-wicket partnership can hold on till stumps, you are escaping the responsibilities that adulthood piles on to you.
You would like England to eke out a draw, but really you are seeking consolation in the soothing changelessness of sport. Real life is complicated. Girls reject you, people get cancer, and sometimes global disasters happen. But turn on the radio and England are still touring India just as they did in 1933 and 1951 and 1992, and for a few hours you are free to be eight years old again. Sports fandom is a ritual of continuity.
Simon Kuper, Knowing the Score, The Spectator 10/12/2006
Perhaps this is why the cancellation of sport during a pandemic feels particularly cruel. Precisely at the moment we feel we need it the most, the ritual of continuity is disrupted in the most total way possible. (Of course this is another species of the need for distraction that I explored last week.)
A worship in the summer sun
Recently, though, I've been taken by another idea. As you may have gathered, I am a huge cricket fan, and cricket more than most sports has carried around with it the idea that it is "more than a game." (The late Neville Cardus, whose excellent biography by Duncan Hamilton I have just finished reading, was a particular proponent of this idea, although certainly not the first to express it.) An awful lot of wistful and elegiac writing has given cricket the air of being the game, and particular the game which expresses the English ideal - fair play, sportsmanship, perseverance, skill, the simple joys of drinking tea and watching the scorecard lazily tick up in the afternoon sun on a village green. Anything which detracts from this ideal - cheating, giving up, being a stickler for the rules rather than an advocate of the (vaguely-defined) "Spirit of the Game", an overmuch obsession with money or personal glory at the expense of the team - is derided as being "not cricket."
Of course this may be just more imperial public-school patriotic tub-thumping of the Sir Henry Newbolt school. That was certainly the opinion of Flanders and Swann, who memorably sang to the chorus of "The English, the English, the English are best":
And all the world over, each nation's the same
They've simply no notion of playing the game
They argue with umpires, they cheer when they've won
And they practice beforehand which ruins the fun!Flanders and Swann, "A Song of Patriotic Prejudice"
Indeed, anyone who has read Derek Birley's superb Social History of English Cricket - or delved in any other way into cricket's long and sordid history - will realise this is all nonsense. Cricket has long been just as much a hotbed of self-interest and skullduggery as any other sport, and only became popular because it afforded new opportunities for the idle rich to gamble.
But somehow cricket retains its aura; an aura only matched by baseball, another sport which (in its own myth-making) has come to represent a national ideal, as Ed Smith uncovers in his book Playing Hard Ball, comparing the two sports. Smith's theory is that deep-down, we just really like sport, and we're a bit embarrassed about that, and so we invent some "wobbly metaphysics" (Playing Hard Ball, 199) to give it an air of respectability.
However, this doesn't quite cover the sheer range and depth of metaphysical, religious and worship language used to talk about not just cricket and baseball, but most sports. The quote from the heading ("a worship in the summer sun") is from a poem about cricket by Edmund Blunden, but consider the "hallowed turf" of Wembley or Lord's; the "icons" of sporting heroes; the "redemption" of a beaten team who roar back in the second half; "glory, glory Man United"; stadiums called "cathedrals", a dressing room referred to as an "inner sanctum." (I'll come back to the idea of sacred spaces in another post soon.)
Of course in one sense this is simple idolatry - the desire to find meaning and satisfaction in a created thing (see a helpful and nuanced explanation from this angle here). Yet every idol works because it half-glimpses a real truth. Recently I read this quote from an essay by Thomas Boswell, when he describes the quasi-liturgical thrill of the first day in the sporting (in this case baseball) calendar:
"Born to an age where horror has become commonplace, where tragedy has, by its monotonous repetition, become a parody of sorrow, we need to fence off a few parks where humans try to be fair, where skill has some hope of reward, where absurdity has a harder time than usual getting a ticket."
Thomas Boswell, Why Time Begins on Opening Day
Here, perhaps, is the deep urge that sporting idolatry aims to fulfil. We have, in among the chaos and sin and God-hating rebellion of this world, a deep sense that something has gone badly wrong - even if we reject the God of the Bible and the message of his Son Jesus Christ. We have a deep sense that life should be fair, that rules should be followed, that justice should be done, that merit should be rewarded. And every week, for 90 minutes (or 80 minutes or over the course of 5 days), we set aside a space where that seems to happen. We create a mini-Eden, a place of joy and play and fairness and justice, and we breathe a deep sigh of happiness and think that, just for a couple of hours, everything is right with the world.
Of course it can't last. We have to return to the real, broken, sinful world eventually. And the idol cannot satisfy even on its own terms. Sportsmen and women are sinners, and the sporting world is not fair, just like life is not fair. Our dreams are shattered either when (as Ecclesiastes 9:11 puts it) "the race is not always to the swift, or the battle to the strong"; or when our favourite sporting superstar - our literal idol - turns out to be a drug cheat, or just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill, fairly ropey human being.
And so where can we turn for the true satisfaction that idolatry of sport fails to give us? Where does our deep desire for Eden find its true home?
The Bible's answer: we find it in the better Eden; the new Jerusalem; the restored creation, formed around the cross and resurrection of the God-man Jesus Christ. The one who, on the cross, ensured that justice would be done; and yet made it possible for the underdogs to triumph - the sinners who scored the own goal and got sent off in the first half, miraculously included in the man-of-the-match award (won, on merit, by Jesus) and invited to join the open-top bus parade (as Paul's image of the triumphal procession in 2 Corinthians 2:14 surely finds its modern-day counterpart). And one day, those who join Jesus' team (is this metaphor wearing a bit thin, do you think?) will find themselves on the hallowed turf, the place where joy and play and freedom will reign for all eternity, to the glory of the conquering hero:
I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp... No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.
Revelation 21:22-23, 22:3-5.