Ideas from left field

Ideas from left field

Sport, like life, is pure Darwinism. It is too innovative to be confined by one political theory

* Ed Smith
* The Guardian,
* Saturday March 15 2008


We are all too familiar with debates about sport and political controversies - should we allow an Olympic games in China? Should England play cricket in Zimbabwe? - but we hear little about sport and political ideas. Does the history of sport demonstrate the rightness, or otherwise, of a political world view? If sport had to don political colours, would it wear a red strip or a blue one?

The Marxists, as is often the case, have some of the prose stylists. CLR James, the doyen of all sports writers, was a Marxist class warrior as well as a wonderful cricket writer. Marxism runs through James's Beyond a Boundary rather like Catholicism courses through Graham Greene's fiction: they are all too keen to advocate their respective faiths, rather less good at getting their narratives to embody them.

Far from proving James's Marxist ideals, Beyond a Boundary undermines them. Any static ruling establishment, no matter how well-intentioned, quickly morphs to become very similar to the one it replaced.

The book's convincing strand about the spirit and ingenuity of early black West Indian cricketers proves that, far from cricket needing more Marxism, Marxism needs to learn from West Indian cricket. "Never trust the teller," as DH Lawrence put it, "trust the tale."

To high Tories, of course, the history of sport proves that civilisation is gradually collapsing - it has been all downhill since the demise of the Corinthians. This amateur, and usually victorious, football team rolled penalties back to the opposition goalkeeper (no foul could possibly be intentional) and retired one of their own team should an opposition player leave the field injured.

High Tories cherished the fact that British sports were once governed by institutions that belonged to neither the free market nor the state - the Royal and Ancient, the MCC, the All England Croquet Club. Now business, they say, has vulgarised sport and the government is meddlesome. Who needs either?

For interventionist social democrats, sport proves that something must be done, even if they're not sure what or how. The free market must be curtailed! Fairness must increase! Loyalty can't vanish! Local identity mustn't be lost! We must sort everything out! The centre-left sits very much on the sporting moral high ground - but often in the expensive seats near the halfway line.

In fact, I would argue the history of sport challenges all these political systems of thought. Sport, like life, advances through evolutionary individualism, not top-down institutional diktat. Unfortunately for those who like to control sport from the centre, you simply can't stop people getting better at sport by their own devices.

Sport is about problem solving. A challenge is set: kick the ball into the net; hit the ball over the boundary; jump over the bar. Rules are (eventually) agreed - no kicking of opponents; don't pick up the ball with your hands; stay within this area, and so on. From then on, it is pure Darwinism - players innovate constantly, sometimes deliberately, sometimes by accident.

When the great Australian cricketer Greg Chappell compiled a list of the game's foremost champions, he discovered that an extremely high proportion learned their methods on their own, without first being taught the received wisdom of traditional technique. As a boy, Don Bradman practised at home, hitting a golf ball against the wall with a stick. Garry Sobers played beach cricket. Javed Miandad learned to survive on uneven surfaces on the Karachi streets. Jeff Thomson emerged out of the Sydney surf to learn he could bowl 100mph with a completely unique action.

Gifted human beings, if they address a physiological challenge with their full attention and talents, invariably come up with pretty good solutions. When they are exceptional, they rewrite convention and the game inches forward.

Sportsmen, inevitably always searching for competitive advantage, can't resist asking left-field questions. Why shouldn't I jump over the high-jump bar head first (the Fosbury flop)? Why shouldn't I aim my sweep shot towards off-side where there aren't any fielders (the reverse sweep)? The winning innovations, like dominant genes, survive and are absorbed into the mainstream; the bad ones never get off the ground.

This is taking place all over the sporting world, beyond the control of administrators or writers of textbooks. As such, sport is irreverent, constantly changing and essentially resistant to authority. Sport never stands still long enough to be effectively ensnared by an over-arching political theory. It is much too interesting for that.