A Sports-Eye View of Life and Death
"Some people believe football is a matter of life and death," said Bill Shankly. "I'm very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you, it's much, much more important than that."
Never has a falser word been spoken. And as should be acknowledged, Shankly didn't actually believe it.
Yet as we line the terraces at weekends, singing and shouting and screaming as though our lives depended on it, one would be forgiven for thinking that this is a universal truth; a mantra followed up and down the land. And tragically, we know there are people who really do believe it, in other countries as much (if not more) than our own. In very recent times, two Leeds United fans lost their lives in Istanbul after an away match against Galatasaray. A Middlesbrough fan was stabbed to death in Amsterdam after a UEFA Cup match against AZ Alkmaar. And we, the sporting public, wonder about the fans of our own teams, and which club will next feel the weight of such a tragedy.
We are conditioned to do so, but it exacerbates a very real problem when we think of such tragedies in these terms. They were, for the record, not "two Leeds fans", or "a Middlesbrough fan". They were Christopher Loftus, Kevin Speight, and Brendan O'Connor.
Sport simply does not do real life; it does not understand or have the means to comprehend real, human tragedy. A case in point has been the enduring, excruciating debacle of former Pakistan Cricket coach Bob Woolmer's murder. Reduced to a caption on the Sky Sports News ticker, the world looks on through its sport-shaped lens and therefore is wilfully blind to the human side of the story- Woolmer's wife, Gill, looking forward to spending time with her husband at their home in South Africa. Woolmer's two children, hoping to see their father on the other side of the World Cup during which he died. That isn't to say that the sports media didn't present such news as sensitively as was possible. But there remained something troubling about seeing such human tragedy squeezed inbetween stories about contract negotiations and transfer rumours.
The inquest into Woolmer's death has been one of the grisliest spectacles in sporting history. At length, an open verdict was returned, and Gill Woolmer remains in the dark as to what claimed her husband's life. His death was initially thought to be foul play- and even then, with the horror of murder staring us in the face, we wrestled with the event trying to fit that squarest of pegs into the round hole of sporting familiarity. It seems that we look to sport as our escapism, which is fine. But when tragedy occurs, there's a bit of us which wonders how to ignore it.
Sport and cliche go hand in hand, and an alarming number of those cliches encourage the view of sport as a microcosm of life itself, rather than a tiny, individual component. A passage of play can now routinely described as "do or die". The end of the game is "at the death". The sound of a cricketer's stumps being shattered is "the death rattle." We love to talk sport up, to make a game into a battle. But all this serves to do is further alienate sport from real life, paradoxically by veiling sport in the guise of real, human drama.
It was John Doherty, one of the most promising of Manchester United's Busby Babes, who had perhaps the best perspective on sport's problematic relationship with truth and reality. Arguably the most outrageously talented of the lot, an horrendous knee injury meant he retired aged 23. Had he not suffered that injury, he would almost certainly have been on the plane which crashed in Munich in 1958, killing eight of his former team-mates."I grew up making my living by playing a game, then I went on to a gloriously happy family life, while lots of my mates were dead before their time. What's to complain about?"
Never has a falser word been spoken. And as should be acknowledged, Shankly didn't actually believe it.
Yet as we line the terraces at weekends, singing and shouting and screaming as though our lives depended on it, one would be forgiven for thinking that this is a universal truth; a mantra followed up and down the land. And tragically, we know there are people who really do believe it, in other countries as much (if not more) than our own. In very recent times, two Leeds United fans lost their lives in Istanbul after an away match against Galatasaray. A Middlesbrough fan was stabbed to death in Amsterdam after a UEFA Cup match against AZ Alkmaar. And we, the sporting public, wonder about the fans of our own teams, and which club will next feel the weight of such a tragedy.
We are conditioned to do so, but it exacerbates a very real problem when we think of such tragedies in these terms. They were, for the record, not "two Leeds fans", or "a Middlesbrough fan". They were Christopher Loftus, Kevin Speight, and Brendan O'Connor.
Sport simply does not do real life; it does not understand or have the means to comprehend real, human tragedy. A case in point has been the enduring, excruciating debacle of former Pakistan Cricket coach Bob Woolmer's murder. Reduced to a caption on the Sky Sports News ticker, the world looks on through its sport-shaped lens and therefore is wilfully blind to the human side of the story- Woolmer's wife, Gill, looking forward to spending time with her husband at their home in South Africa. Woolmer's two children, hoping to see their father on the other side of the World Cup during which he died. That isn't to say that the sports media didn't present such news as sensitively as was possible. But there remained something troubling about seeing such human tragedy squeezed inbetween stories about contract negotiations and transfer rumours.
The inquest into Woolmer's death has been one of the grisliest spectacles in sporting history. At length, an open verdict was returned, and Gill Woolmer remains in the dark as to what claimed her husband's life. His death was initially thought to be foul play- and even then, with the horror of murder staring us in the face, we wrestled with the event trying to fit that squarest of pegs into the round hole of sporting familiarity. It seems that we look to sport as our escapism, which is fine. But when tragedy occurs, there's a bit of us which wonders how to ignore it.
Sport and cliche go hand in hand, and an alarming number of those cliches encourage the view of sport as a microcosm of life itself, rather than a tiny, individual component. A passage of play can now routinely described as "do or die". The end of the game is "at the death". The sound of a cricketer's stumps being shattered is "the death rattle." We love to talk sport up, to make a game into a battle. But all this serves to do is further alienate sport from real life, paradoxically by veiling sport in the guise of real, human drama.
It was John Doherty, one of the most promising of Manchester United's Busby Babes, who had perhaps the best perspective on sport's problematic relationship with truth and reality. Arguably the most outrageously talented of the lot, an horrendous knee injury meant he retired aged 23. Had he not suffered that injury, he would almost certainly have been on the plane which crashed in Munich in 1958, killing eight of his former team-mates."I grew up making my living by playing a game, then I went on to a gloriously happy family life, while lots of my mates were dead before their time. What's to complain about?"
posted by Matt at 3:07 pm
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