How subtle are the artifices by which human cunning seeks to exploit the past is best illustrated, however, in the purely spectatorial or sympathetic surroundings of sport.To play football is one remove from battle, to watch the game is two removes, to watch the "tape" or follow the scores in the newspapers is three removes.Yet millions of little thrills of satisfaction are got from this simulation of a simulated fight.Blended in various degrees with other zests, of hazard, of petty cunning, and avarice, where betting enters into sport, the sporting interest ranks highest of all in the scale of values among the able-bodied males of all classes in English-speaking peoples.
Added to the pleasure from the output of strength or skill in sport is the general sentiment of exultation, the sense of glory.To what must that be attributed? Not to the magnitude of the strength or skill.A navvy may display greater strength or endurance in his work, a trapper or a common fisherman a finer skill in catching his prey.But the true glory of sportsmanship is denied them.Why? Because their work is useful, and they are doing it for a living.The glory of the successful sportsman is due to the fact that his deeds are futile.And this conspicuous futility is at the root of the matter.The fact that he can give time, energy, and money to sport testifies to his possession of independent means.He can afford to be an idler, and the more obviously useless and expensive the sport, the higher the prestige attaching to it.His personal glory of strength, endurance, or skill is set in this aureole of parasitism.The crucial test of this interpretation is very simple.Let it turn out that a Marathon winner, who seemed to be a gentleman, was really a professional, what a drop in his personal prestige! The professional is a man who has to earn a living, his reputation as a sportsman is damaged by that fact.Can there be any more convincing proof that the high prestige of sport is due to the evidence of financial prowess which it affords?
The hunting and the fighting instincts evidently underlie the pleasure of nearly all the exclusively male sports.Doubtless other instinctive satisfactions enter in, such as the gregarious instinct with its conscious elaboration of esprit de corps.Whenever any game or sport brings the sexes into relation with one another, the mating instincts are evidently involved.
The crossing of war with sex in the theory and practice of chivalry was a conscious and artistic blending of these pleasure motives.
But this treatment of sport as a frivolous pursuit of pleasure ignores one important aspect.Sport, it will be urged, after all has health for its permanent utility.It is exercise for the body and diversion for the mind.It wards off the natural consequences of the purely parasitic life, which a private income renders possible, by providing work-substitutes.
The primal law, 'in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,' is gracefully evaded by games that include a gentle perspiration.Golf may take the place of spade-labour to win appetite and digestion; bridge will save the brain from absolute stagnation.So Nature's self-protective cunning elaborates these modes of sham-work.
§3.The social condemnation of a sporting-life is two-fold.In the first place, it diverts into lower forms of activity the zests and interests intended to promote a life of work and art.The sporting-life and standards choke the finer arts.The sportsman and the gamester are baser artists choosing the lower instead of the higher modes of self-realisation in manual and intellectual skill.This maintenance of barbarian standards of values by the classes possessing social prestige is a great obstacle to the development of science, art, and literature.In the second place, sport spoils the spontaneity and liberty of play, which is a necessity of every healthy life.It spoils it for the sportsman by reason of its artificiality and its excess.For the sporting-life does not satisfy those who practise it.It carries the Nemesis of boredom.The sense of triviality and of futility gradually eats through, and the make-believe realism, when confronted with the serious values of life, shows its emptiness.A heavier social damage is the economic cost which the expensive futility imposes.
For sport involves the largest diversion of unearned income into unproductive expenditure.Not only does it dedicate to extravagant waste a larger share of the land, the labour, and the enterprise of men than any other human error, unless it be war itself, but it steals the play-time of the many to make the over-leisure of the few.If the parasitic power which sustains the sporting-life were taken away, the world would not be duller or more serious.On the contrary, play would be more abundant, freer, more varied, and less artificial in its modes.
The identification of a sportsman with a gentleman has carried great weight in the unconscious settling of social values, and in England has been subtly serviceable as a sentimental safeguard against the attacks upon the economic supports not only of landlordism but of other wealth which has covered itself with the trappings of sport.
