# 71
Last weekend was all Hip! Hip! and Hooray! across
the land. We had Andy Murray winning the gentlemen’s singles at Wimbledon, The
Lions taking the Rugby Union series in Australia and Chris Froome wearing
the Yellow Jersey of the Tour de France. For many hours it was true to say that British
(and Irish) cups ‘ranneth over’. On Sunday afternoon the hot and sunny streets
of South London had fallen unusually quiet
save for spasms of gasps and yells and cheering spilling from the open windows
of living rooms. Indoors, with curtains drawn to keep out the sun’s unfamiliar
glare, the population were held in thrall to television pictures and commentary
from the Centre Court
at Wimbledon.
Pump me up
before you go go.
Everywhere fists were pumped, teeth bared
and flags waved. For three or four hours the nation experienced something close
to collective catharsis brought on by two extraordinary athletes playing lawn
tennis. The infectious noise and frantic arm-waving provided evidence, which I still
find quietly embarrassing, of how much less emotionally restrained we have
become than our parents were. The spread of professional sport has made us all
more competitive, more intense and more determined to win. We know we cannot play
like that ourselves - most of us have never won anything - but we are desperate
to identify with the winner or the winning side.
They argue
with umpires…
We are no longer recognisable as the people
parodied by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann in their 1967 Song of Patriotic Prejudice. That was a
time when (so they claimed) ‘the English,
the English, the English’ were best and the
English immodestly claimed that their sporting behaviour stood out in
contrast to conduct in the rest of the world:
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,
They practice
beforehand, which ruins the fun…
…they cheer
when they’ve won.
When Andy won, he gratefully thanked his
whole support team who had stood by him year after year; his trainers, coaches,
fetchers, carriers and backers. Doubtless – somewhere amongst them – there was a
‘Sports Psychologist’; tasked with giving him the “…mental and emotional skills
that athletes need for successful competition”[i] A
mentor who could be relied upon to dismiss what used to be called ‘Corinthian
values’; the ‘old-fashioned’ approach to sport that put amateurism, fair-play
and morality above such sordid, vulgar, things as actually ‘winning’.
1934, 1935
& 1936, Fred Perry wins – cue polite applause. No arms raised, no flags
waved.
Today, thoroughly professionalised and all
about money, sporting competition is no longer separated by its own special
values and virtues from the grinding everyday world of market forces. The will
to win at all costs has stripped much of the poetry out of sport. When it
ceases to contain metaphors for the dilemmas we might encounter in life, sport
is left with little to value but winning itself.
The Corinthian Football Club, founded in 1892,
is now largely forgotten although, in its heyday, its influence spread across
Europe and reached even as far as Brazil. Real Madrid, for instance, originally chose to
play in white shirts in respectful emulation of the kit worn by Corinthian FC.
The Corinthians played only friendly matches and wouldn’t join the Football
League or enter the FA Cup (until 1923) because they had rules forbidding them
to compete for prizes of any description or take part in any contest that did
not have charity as its primary objective. If the team they were playing lost a
man, either through injury or by being sent off, the Corinthians immediately
sent off one of their own men – just to keep the game even. Imagine Fergie or
José The Special One offering to do
that!
The Corinthians of ancient Greece were proverbial for their
wealth and profligacy but by Shakespeare’s time the title ‘Corinthian’
suggested a reliable ‘lad of mettle’. In Henry IV, Part 1, Act II, Scene iv,
Prince Henry says of ‘Tom, Dick and
Francis’ that;
“They take it
already upon their salvation, that though I be but Prince of Wales, yet I am
the king of courtesy; and tell me flatly I am no proud Jack, like Falstaff, but
a Corinthian, a lad of mettle, a good boy…”
Come the Regency period of the early 19th Century and ‘Corinthians’
described a group of hard-living aristocrats, dedicated to pleasure, pugilism
and horse-racing. By the 1890s the term had lost its associations with gambling
and licentious behaviour retaining
only ‘gentlemanliness’, ‘amateurism’ and the notion of playing sport for love
of the game - not profit. This was the world of Sir Henry Newbolt (1862-1938)
who famously championed the virtues of chivalry and sportsmanship combined in
the service of the British Empire. He belonged
to a very particular class and period of history, displaying attitudes mostly
alien to us now. Appropriately, he called his autobiography ‘The World as in My
Time’ (1932). In so far as Newbolt is remembered now it is for his 1897 poem
‘Vitae Lampada’ (Torch of Life) which
eventually became something of a millstone around his neck. By 1923 he was
describing it to an audience in Canada
as a “Frankenstein’s Monster that I created thirty years ago.” You will know
the work (I’m certain). It begins;
There’s a
breathless hush in The Close tonight,
Ten to make
and the match to win –
A bumping
pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to
play and the last man in…
It’s
clearly not simply a poem about cricket, belonging instead alongside Wellington’s
observation that the battle of Waterloo had been
won ‘on the playing fields of Eton.’
Next year sees the centenary of the outbreak
of the First World War and this, therefore, is the centenary of the last
‘endless’ summer of Edwardian England – mythologized by images of tennis and
croquet played on green lawns, crisp rowing eights pulling together on bright
rivers, cycling clubs touring dappled lanes and day-trips from the pier aboard friendly
paddle-steamers. Reality, of course, was never like that. In England, the
summer of 1913 was dry, dull and rather cool. But, when compared with the
horror that was to come, there was an unnoticed finality – a hidden marker for
the end of an era – to the undistinguished summer of 1913.
‘The Close’ that hosted Newbolt’s ‘breathless hush’ was the cricket field
of Clifton College,
Bristol. In
June 1899, The Close was where A.E.J. Collins - then a thirteen year old
schoolboy – made the highest cricket score ever recorded of 628, not out, in an
innings that lasted across four afternoons. (Matches were not ‘time-limited’ in
those days). Then, sure enough, with tragic inevitability, young Collins went
on to get killed in action in November 1914 at the First Battle of Ypres. His
body, like so many, was never found but his name is recorded in Wisden’s Cricketers’
Almanack and carved in stone on the Menin Gate.
Newbolt’s poem linked his schoolboy
cricketer to a battle in Africa, but a minor quibble about geography could not
prevent the jingoism of 1914 applying its sentiments to the mud of Flanders or, later, to the slopes of the Gallipoli
Peninsular;
The sand of
the desert is sodden red –
Red with 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.”
Give me strength.
In ‘Take a Pew’, Alan Bennett’s wonderfully
hollow sermon from ‘Beyond the Fringe’ (1960),[ii]
he deliberately misquotes the words “of
that grand old English poet, W. E. Henley;
When that One Great Scorer comes
To mark against your name,
It matters not who won or lost,
But how you played the game.
‘But how you played the game’. Words
very meaningful and significant for us here, together, tonight. Words we might
do very much worse than to consider…”
Now, as far as I can Google, the reference
to One Great Scorer comes not from William
Henley at all but from the poem ‘Alumnus Football’[iii]
by an American sports writer named Grantland Rice (1880-1954). The theme of the
poem is the need to ‘keep coming back’; this being the advice given by a ‘wise old coach called Experience’. The
last verse begins;
“Keep
coming back and though the world may romp across your map,
Let every
scrimmage find you still somewhere within the scrap;
For when the
One Great Scorer comes
To mark
against your name,
It matters not
who won or lost,
But how you
played the game.”
Instead of this, the misquoted William
Ernest Henley (1849-1903) had actually written ‘Invictus’; a much more
considerable poem than ‘Alumnus Football’. From childhood, Henley
was afflicted by tuberculosis of the bone and at the age of seventeen had one
leg amputated below the knee. ‘Invictus’ was first published in 1875; the title
being Latin for ‘unconquered’. The first
verse reads;
Out of the
night that covers me
Black as the
pit from pole to pole,
I thank
whatever gods may be
For my
unconquerable soul.
And
the final verse;
It matters not
how strait the gate,
How charged
with punishments the scroll;
I am the
master of my fate:
I am the
captain of my soul.
Although I have only quoted two verses, I
recommend reading the whole. It is also, I believe, the origin of that phrase,
familiar to politicians and sports commentators alike, “My head is bloody, but unbowed.” Henley
implies that virtue is sufficient and avoids the sentimentality exhibited by
Newbold and Grantland Rice. His inspiration derives from Stoicism and a belief
that passion can – and should - be overcome by reason. This is an insight which
explains, for me, why Sports Psychologists make a living but Sports Stoics
don’t.
A player not being
overcome by Reason.
The
reputation of Henley’s ‘Invictus’ was greatly enhanced when we heard that it
had been recited by Nelson Mandela as an inspiration to his fellow prisoners on
Robben Island, but later dented when quoted too by the Oklahoma Bomber, Timothy
McVeigh, on the eve of his execution. Poetry it seems, like sportsmanship, is
eventually up for grabs.
[i] Random quote from the website of Winning Edge Psychological
Services, St. Louis, Missouri. It seems there’s no competition
that these guys can’t help you win!
[ii] See also my blog # 68, ‘Famished for shrapnel’ - below.
[iii] Published in The Pittsburgh
Press, November 1914.
