Is sport more winning than losing? Are there more than two sides? There’s always next Paddy McGuinness column.
1. “Sport and business,” SMH, 8/4/95
2. “A society’s foundations,” SMH, 12/4/95
1.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Sport and business,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, April 8, 1995, p. 38.
It is a long time since any kind of football has been a simple game. All that Rupert Murdoch is proving is that those who have control of rugby league have been running it for their own benefit for years, sharing that benefit with Kerry Packer, and that there are other interests which if appealed to can change that situation.
It is only a matter of time before all the popular spectator sports in Australia, and in the world, will go the same way — including Australian Rules, which despite its status in Victoria as a boring conversational substitute for politics, sex and religion is just as much about money and power in its essential structure as the rest.
The two main neglected interests in football for many years have been the players and the customers. The players have been treated as a kind of slaves, well-rewarded but with the huge revenues that their efforts and injuries generate creamed off by administrators allegedly for the good of the sport, but more often for the sake of the power structures which have come into being to control and exploit the sport. The spectators have equally been exploited, in having the way in which they spend their money on watching the sport channeled according to the wishes of the administrators and the media with which they align themselves, rather than having available a full range of alternatives ranging from attendance at the ground to video hire.
Forget the word sport, anyway. Football is simply a form of mass entertainment which involves no more effort on the part of the vast majority of its public than pointing a remote control and popping a beer can. For its players it is a path to levels of income and prominence, not to mention available women, which they could not hope for otherwise (except for a very few who are otherwise talented). It has a special charm for adolescents, and most men retain aspects of adolescent thought patterns and behaviour for most of their lives, because it is violent and macho — the physical contact, the ritualised battle, the homosexual intimacy of the locker-room, the boys-together boozing and whoring which follow it, are all very basic instincts indeed in the human male. And the display of physical prowess and strength is clearly appealing to the basic male-seeking instincts of the female — footballers are like billy goats, who when in rut butt each other stupid until the thickest-skulled gets the females.
It is not at all surprising that people love watching the ritualised violence and battle of football, just as the Roman crowds loved the slaughter of the games, and that there is therefore an incentive for football to be played harder, faster, and more violently. The very thinly disguised intention is to inflict physical damage on the other side, and the lightness of the penalties inflicted for overstepping the mark gives the message none too subtly to the players. Most professional footballers suffer permanent injury — and even the luckiest have short professional lives.
So long as it is to be permitted and encouraged (personally, I think there is as good a case for making football illegal as there is for boxing) then it is sheer hypocrisy to pretend that it is other than the exploitation of young men to satisfy the bloodthirst of the public. In such a case, the men involved should be allowed to earn the full market value of their performance, rather than having this creamed off by the monopolistic controllers of the sport. They should also pay out of their earnings the full actuarial value of the costs they impose on the community in future health care. Rupert Murdoch, in pursuit of power and profit, is in fact doing the footballers a good turn by bidding their market value up to something nearer its proper figure as justified by public demand. By proposing alternative methods of delivery he is both increasing the value of the sport and doing the public a favour. Why should we not have free choice as to whether we pay ten bucks or so to watch a footy match without interruptions on cable or satellite TV, pay nothing while the advertisers pick up the costs, pay extra for the beer while watching it in a pub or club, pay higher taxes to finance the ABC’s self-indulgence, or brave the elements and actually go to the theatre of battle? Any restriction on these alternatives is only in the interest of existing cartels and privileged groups.
Kerry Packer knows this perfectly well, of course. Rupert is only doing on a larger scale what Kerry did to the cricket. To those sentimentally attached to traditional cricket, the most boring game ever invented, it was sacrilege of course — to see all these blokes in pastel coloured pyjamas or modified baseball outfits playing cricket is not the same thing. But it has undoubtedly made cricket more popular — and despite all the gentlemanly cant, cricket has always been macho and dangerous. Now the players (as distinct from the gentlemen) have benefited.
Of course it is still possible to play cricket or football for fun. Quite a few people do, but even then competitive pressures are likely to lead to the exercise and fun becoming violent and harmful. The behaviour of many fathers on the sidelines of games played by little boys is far from edifying. However, very, very few of the huge audiences for spectator sports indulge in any exercise at all — unless it be walking in and out of the stadium.
The contest between the Packer and Murdoch camps with respect to the rugby league is itself a form of public entertainment, and naturally there are people who get engrossed and start cheering for one side or the other. There is a constant high whine of moral outrage, as if there were any issue at stake in all this except the control of revenues and media outlets. There is, however, nothing of any permanent value in the existing institutions and arrangements of rugby league, any more than those for for any other sports. About the only virtue of the club and central administrations is that they provide a career path for players who are past any professional attainments — and often enough they are simply not intellectually equipped for the job. Appeals to loyalty and tradition are so much codswallop.
The Packer-Murdoch conflict is about money and technological change. In the process if there is not too much government interference the players will benefit, with the greatest beneficiaries being the best of them, and the public will benefit by having a free choice of the manner of delivery of its bread and circuses. As that suggests, those who want entertainment delivered cost-free and under central control have ulterior motives.
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2.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “A society’s foundations,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, April 12, 1995, p. 18.
The report of the “civics expert group” appointed by the Federal Government to look at non-partisan education on government and the constitution has had little impact, largely because it is of little value. It was vitiated partly by its dependence on a survey which was misconceived in its assumptions and treated the sample it surveyed as captive students required to satisfy their teachers by regurgitating knowledge in the form demanded by teachers. In doing so it totally misrepresented and understated the actual political sophistication of the community.
But this is not to say that the survey by ANOP was not professionally conducted. It is just that since ANOP was instructed to ask silly questions it got silly answers. But not all the information provided by the survey was without value. What was of value was the response (undiscussed) to questions about the respondents participation in various voluntary associations and activities.
If one wanted to mount a defence of the Australian Rugby League against Mr Murdoch’s super league, virtually the only sensible line would be to insist on the social importance of the various clubs apart from the players — although these of course are the reason for the clubs. It may be that clubs are merely a stage in the evolution of a sport, as mutual savings and friendly societies were an early stage in the development of the finance industry. But the existence of clubs and other voluntary associations is increasingly being recognised as of fundamental social importance, and even related to economic growth rates.
A fascinating study of how democracy works which has been receiving increasing increasing attention lately looks at how voluntary associations have contributed to political stability and economic development in modern Italy. This is Making Democracy Work by Robert D. Putnam and others. Putnam summarises his work in a recent issue of the IPA Review. In effect, his study showed that those Italian communities with the longest traditions of, and the most active present commitment to, community activities which have nothing to do with politics and government tend to have superior social and economic performance.
Putnam and his colleagues measured the effectiveness of the regional governments not by the kind of crude indicators of wasteful spending employed by the Evatt Foundation in its recent scorecard for the Australian States, but by much more telling criteria — such as promptness of response to inquiries, Cabinet stability, budgetary promptness, and legislative innovation. They also asked the electors, who largely agreed with their evaluations of which governments were working well and which not. They found, remarkably, that “what best predicted good government in the Italian regions was choral societies, soccer clubs and co-operatives. In other words, some regions were characterised by a dense network of civic associations and an active culture of civic engagement, whereas others were characterised by vertical patron-client relations of exploitation and dependence, not horizontal collaboration among equals.” Choral societies and soccer clubs seem to have especial significance in Italy. And far from being the result of growing wealth, he argues, the evidence supports the fact that the mutual co-operation and trust such activities foster between citizens contribute directly to more effective working of the society.
“Of two equally poor Italian regions a century ago,” he writes, “both very backward, but one with more civic engagement, and the other with an hierarchical structure, the one with the more choral societies and soccer clubs has grown steadily wealthier. The more civic region has prospered because trust and reciprocity were woven into its social fabric ages ago. None of this would appear in standard economics textbooks of course, but our evidence suggests that wealth is the consequence, not the cause, of a healthy civics.” Top-down government based on a powerful central government dispensing all patronage is positively harmful to civic health and wealth; dispersed power and a multitude of voluntary relationships foster co-operation, trust, the acceptance of social rules and a stable climate for individual economic activity. The creation of a network of regional governments in Italy in 1970 has allowed a detailed comparative analysis which provides strong empirical support for these propositions.
The “Civic Experts” survey showed that in Australia non-political voluntary associations are, not surprisingly, far more important than political parties. Only 5 per cent reported any involvement in political parties, while 23 per cent reported some participation in sporting club activities, 23 per cent in community work like meals on wheels, 23 per cent in Neighbourhood or Rural Watch, 22 per cent volunteer work at school, 15 per cent in charitable organisations, 11 per cent in environmental groups, etc.
Of the total community, 65 per cent were involved in one or more of the 12 major groups. Some participated “a lot” — 1.84 per cent of the community participated a lot in sporting clubs. Only 0.05 per cent, that is only one person in every 2,000, participated a lot in political parties. Apart from demonstrating how unrepresentative our political parties are, and how crook therefore are their preselection processes, this shows how important the non-political associations are. This is the essence of what the Europeans now call “civil society”, and the core of our life as a community.
Choral societies do not specifically appear — but they are significant in the Australian community, and the kind of selfless co-operation for the love of music and the pleasure of singing which they represent now appears as one of the most essential of “social glues”. Once a “social glue” becomes compulsory it loses its value and harms the community, especially as it loses the characteristic of horizontal equality and adopts the top-down mode. Thus trade unions, which once were of immense social value, have become harmful to community solidarity.
All activities in which people voluntarily participate for the sheer love of the activity, for charitable or religious or other motives, constitute the essence of a workable, prosperous community. A sporting club is a far more valuable social institution institution before it is corrupted by professionalism than is a trade union with virtually compulsory membership. And it is a chilling thought that compulsory universal social welfare might actually be destructive of civil society.
Probably sport has passed its peak as a social glue, though amateur sport may retain its value.
But it is clear that a healthy political and economic system depends on the continual formation of and participation in voluntary activities and associations which bring people together. Paradoxically, perhaps free capitalist societies work best when there is a climate of social co-operation.
