Everywhere is getting like everywhere else, we are told. International communications are so good now that food, music and television are much the same everywhere you go. Well, they may be at the level at which international communicators live, but downstairs I think things have stayed pretty much the same, that is, quite different, and as an example of this I would like you to think about sport for a moment. We are told endlessly that sport is a great leveller, a force for peace, at least a substitute for war, an institution that brings people together. I think, on the contrary, that sport manages to keep people happily apart.
For a start, there are vey few games or sports that are truly international, that is, indulged in by everyone. Football, yes. Boxing, yes. Nothing else that I can think of. Athletics and the Olympics, do I hear you say? Well, yes, ostensibly. But apart from some of the running and jumping, there are very few Olympic events with a universal appeal. Half the countries in the world have no interest in skiing, sailing, horse-riding or diving. Some countries will never be good at certain sports – it was once explained to me why, anatomically, it is more difficult for an African to be gifted at swimming, just as it is physically more likely that he will be good at running. And the Chinese and Japanese are culturally and traditionally drawn more to sports which involve sophisticated physical co-ordination, like gymnastics and table-tennis, than heavy grunting sports.
There again, many sports have social overtones which are not often mentioned, but which are real enough. I met a headmaster of a South African boy’s school recently, who was seriously thinking of introducing soccer as a rival to the sacred rugby football. ‘Well, the school is going to be multi-racial pretty soon, and soccer is the top game for blacks in South Africa. I think some of our white boys will welcome it too; the Afrikaner boys take it so seriously, and get physically big and strong so early, that it’s quite a bruising experience for our boys to play against them.’ What he meant was that the blacks saw rugby as the white man’s game and wouldn’t want any part of it.
In the British Isles we have, as you might expect, delicate class overtones to the game of rugby. In England it’s fairly middle-class and southern (Rugby League is northern and more working class), whereas in Wales it’s much more down-market and the game of the common man. In Scotland it’s vey much a Lowlands game, played by farmers and professionals, and more Edinburgh than Glasgow, while in Ireland it’s middle-class enough for the Irish national team to be drawn from the whole of Ireland – you can’t imagine the two soccer teams of Northern Ireland and the Republic ever amalgamating.
Outside Britain the picture is even patchier. Yes, the French play it, but only down the South-West, and yes, the Australians play it – play it very well – but only, it seems, in two states: Queensland and New South Wales. It's almost as if games which inspire a sort of religious adherence, as rugby and cricket do, are the games which are restricted to only a small part of the earth’s surface. Golf and tennis are found more widely spread than most games, but nobody really gives a toss who wins the Davis Cup or the World Match Play Championship. Baseball is found only in America, and yet its adherents live or die by the result.
(Well, baseball is also found in one or two outlying parts of the American cultural empire. It isn’t often remembered that when Americans managed to get baseball into the Olympics in 1984, they didn’t win the gold medal. Japan did. Still, it’s comforting for Americans to remember that they are the reigning Olympic Rugby Union champions, having got the gold medal the last time it was included. In 1924.)
So fanatical are some Americans about baseball, that when the season starts in the spring the International Herald Tribune prints a poem about baseball. It’s always the same poem. It was written by an American who found himself abroad at the start of the baseball season and couldn’t bear it, and it’s printed for all the American readers of the Tribune who are abroad and can’t bear missing it either. But baseball is the sort of game that attracts writers and cultural people, like cricket, in a way that soccer and American football perhaps don’t – or perhaps they are the kind of games that attract individuals of the same kind that get into the arts. I’ve always been struck by the fact that jazz musicians, than whom you do not get more individual, formed baseball teams when they found themselves in American big bands, and cricket teams in Britain. I once asked an American artist why he disliked American football. ‘It’s too Prussian,’ he said. I think he meant, over-organised.
But once you get beyond the level of games which have a regional appeal – baseball, rugby, cricket, snooker, darts – and are therefore fanatically followed, you find yourself at the level of games which are only played in once country, and which to my mind are the real expression of the country. Australian rules football, Gaelic football, Scottish curling, Japanese sumo wrestling, chin-lon in Burma… Chin-lon is a wonderful game. Six or more men stand in a circle and bat to each other a wickerwork ball without letting it touch the ground. You can’t handle it. You can head it, kick it, or chest it. After a while, just keeping it aloft with the side of the foot becomes boring, so a player will indulge in athletic leaps and kick it from behind, or while pirouetting in mid-air. In its pure form, I believe, there is no scoring; it’s just done for fun and artistry. Very Buddhist.
(I don’t think many nations would play games for fun, not caring about winning. The English do with tennis and Wimbledon, but that’s only because they have given up all hope of ever winning. The Australians have evolved a neat system of dealing with defeat. They play so many sports that whenever they are losing at one against someone, they are beating someone else at another sport, and that’s the one that gets the headlines.)
I’ve not mentioned any sport restricted entirely to England, not because I can’t think of one, but because the choice is too big. Croquet? Conkers? (I once brought some huge conkers back from France for my children – the French customs man thought I was crazy. He didn’t know you could play with them and assumed I was going to eat them.) But I think French cricket is the game that is the most English, just as boules is most French. French cricket is not, as you will know if you have played it seriously, a child’s game. All right, so there is basically only one rule- you have to hit the batsman’s legs with a ball below the knee – but flowing from that one rule are lots of variations, most of them made up on the spot. Do you play not-out-first-ball? Do you play one-hand-one bounce catches? Do you have to throw the ball from where you stop it?...
There is no constitution, only lots of compromise decisions, just like in real British life, and there is absolutely no end to the game; you just stop when everyone is fed up. Perhaps that’s too ad hoc and English for the game ever to catch on anywhere else. Mark you, I’m sometimes surprised to think that cricket itself ever caught on anywhere else. It only just took root in Scotland, where it was taught for the first time by English soldiers to Scottish prisoners of war at Perth Prison after the 1745 uprising. No wonder it’s still thought of as slightly foreign up there. But for every Australian or New Zealander who is au fait with the game, you meet ten Americans who say in a superior fashion: ‘How can you possibly take seriously a game which lasts five days and even then usually doesn’t, or provide a result, or is rained off?’
‘Because,’ I always forget to say, ‘cricket is the only game in the world which is like life; life too has unhappy and abrupt endings as well as happy endings.’
Not that an American would want any game to be like life. He wants it better organised than that. Quite right, too. Everyone to his own. The Irishman to his shinty and the Basque to his pelota. As long as nobody tries too hard to pretend that sport is really international and all-embracing. And in my case, there is no point making cricket games longer. They tried it once in South Africa, where they decreed that the last game of a series against England should be endless. Open-ended. No time limits. They played on and on, batting carefully and scoring enormous amounts of runs. After nine days it was intimated that their ship would go without them if there wasn’t a result soon. They settled for a draw. A nine-day draw! Let’s hope the Americans never find out about that.
Shield- The international magazine of the BP group
