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| Good men don’t always finish last | | |
By R Mohan |
A tearful Andre Agassi taking his bow and his better half Steffi Graf, who has many more Grand Slam titles, and their son joining him in lachrymose display of tenderness at Flushing Meadows will remain one of sport’s abiding images of 2006.
Such moments help reaffirm faith in sport and the few good men who have graced it with an unfailing courtesy and good manners through many a sporting season of ups and downs.
The 24-touch goal that a couple of virtually unknown Argentinians scored against Serbia-Montenegro to light up a football World Cup that was otherwise to be blighted by such events as the Zizou head-butt was a touching reminder that sport, when played by world-class athletes without their losing sight of honour and decency, makes a statement of its own on humanity.
Sport, we are told, is about opposition and it should surprise no one if athletes get opposed to each other, which is a simple enough reason why ill will is seen in such abundance on the sporting fields. Even so, the fact remains that all sporting confrontations are vastly exaggerated and the eagerness with which they are seized upon by a media feeding frenzy tends to make them look far worse.
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Hunting with Hair and running with Inzamam’s fast bowlers who do know a trick or two about the cricket ball also represent a common enough moral dilemma that the world of sport often poses. So deeply divisive does the trivial become that it assumes the contours of a debate over life and death rather than about right and wrong. At moment like these, sporting hostility also crosses the line to jingoism.
The point to all this is whether the Corinthian values that everyone aspires to is at all possible to attain, in life or in sport. Is the whole question of sporting ethics such an Anglo-Saxon obsession that the ones most often transgressing them are the very people who advocate those ethics?
Let us not forget that the genesis of ball tampering can be traced back to the Vaseline incident in 1976-77 when Tony Greig’s Englishmen were thought to have tried everything to get the ball going in the flat conditions of India. A certain R A Woolmer, an opening batsman in that side, is said to have defended John Lever and company then by saying that his team had already experimented extensively with Vaseline and such other substances in the nets only to find they have no effect on the ball.
Consider the fact that Tiger Woods, born to a black father and Asian mother, Andre Agassi, to Iranian émigrés to the US, and Roger Federer, to a French-speaking mother raised in South Africa, are about the greatest sportsmen on the planet at the moment who reflect the fundamental fact that good men do not necessarily come last in sporting encounters.
Does the lack of Anglo-Saxon giants at the world champion level of sporting achievement with also a claim to being absolutely nice people like Woods, Agassi, Federer and Borg signify anything other than the fact that sport has become so universal there are no particular stereotypes anymore.
Of course, this does not preclude the Asians from being typed as a sub species who must think nothing of cheating to get ahead, or at least that is the fashionable view in the western sport media. The funniest part of the argument is, as Wasim Akram says so vociferously, it is ‘reverse swing’ if England bowlers make the old ball move, in reverse or converse fashion, and it is ‘ball tampering’ if Pakistan bowlers achieve the same phenomenon.
These are impossible contradictions to which cricket cannot find solutions and should not even try to pretend it is possible to make a level playing field for all. For instance, can a white cricketer bowl the doosra with the felicity of a Muttiah Muralitharan? If that is a given, why then ban a delivery that is perfectly legal, since a leg break, by all accepted definitions, cannot be chucked?
From a distance such controversies must seem very unimportant, as they really are when compared to life’s great issues like poverty and AIDS, and it is a pity that the sporting world goes on and on with its peculiar moral policing, in which the letter of the law is sometimes seen to be all important.
In contentious times, what we look for in sport is grace under pressure. There are only a few good men who manage to master that quality.
Rare as such personalities are and rarer such displays of true sportsmanship, we savour them all the more when they happen, as they do when great champions play on without raising a hue and cry anytime they are wronged on the field of play.
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