The president should stop
watching Fox and cable news and watch some sports on TV. Politicians talk often
in terms of sports analogies. What this reflects is the deep roots that sports
sink into our souls as young people. Sports are the place where we learn the
rules of the society in which we live and each society has its own special
sport. If one looks at the world, soccer is the most dominant sport, but each
country has some variation particular to the people of that country.
Cricket is the game of
England: a complex, slow-moving game played in a leisurely fashion over many
days. It is thought to be a gentlemanly and polite game of the effete upper
class. But I recently read a story of a cricket batter being killed by bowler
who used the method of “Spinning.” It turns out that outsiders don’t know you
can legally kill an opponent, using this technique but English cricket bowlers
know about. It isn’t considered
“cricket” but there is no rule to stop it.
Irish football has its own
set of rules. But hurling is the true Irish sport. It became their national
sport when the English tried to ban it. In confrontations with ill-equipped
Irish peasants, the English observed that the methods the Irish used to throw
stones that killed them was identical to the game of Hurling. The British wanted to prevent them from practicing
the game because they simultaneously
became adept at throwing rocks with deadly speed and force. Preparing for combat
and practicing hurling became a sporting
way to prepare to deal with the hated
English.
Melbourne Australian football
is played on cricket fields but is totally different .Australian football is a
combination of rugby, soccer and some
elements reminiscent of American football except it is played without the
American football armor(pads). Sending thousands of Irish and English prisoners
to Australia and dumping them as far from as possible from civilization had an
effect on the Aussie national personality.
The first thing that strikes you as you enter the stadium is that the
game is played on the oval cricket pitch.
The message of disrespect for the English national game is clear.
Many years ago, I met a man
named Whitney Azoy who was a long time USAID contractor in Afghanistan. He had
long and distinguished career in Central Asia. Before we attacked Afghanistan
in the late 1990’s, I was visiting an Afghan refugee camp in the Peshawar, Pakistan.
One night over beer with him he told me, “You will never bring democracy to
Afghanistan. It is a country whose national game, Buzkashi, has few rules
except for the one that says you cannot knock your opponent off his horse with
a whip. The goal of the game is to get the goat which has been thrown into the
middle of the field among multiple teams of horsemen. There is no time clock.
There are no sidelines or goal lines. When the sun goes down the game is over.
The rule of law is a western idea that is foreign to how Afghanis see the
world.”
That conversation got me
thinking about the way our politics differ from country to country. And then I
began to look at the United States. Our national game before the Second World
War was baseball. After the Second World War our national game began to be football.
Baseball is a game where one person stands
60’6” from another and has a ball thrown at him or her as hard as possible. It
is an individual game, in which one person, seeks to dominate another. It was a
game of individual courage and strength like knights of old, jousting.
After the Second World War we
adopted the martial feeling of war to such an extent that we accepted football
as our national game. Teams line up like armies on both ends of the field and
then run at each other, attempting to smash the other side into
submission. Increasingly we have
armored football players in order to protect them but to be honest, we don’t
really care about injuries. Irony of ironies, president Trump announced on the
day of the Super bowl that football is alright for the ordinary people, but he
was wary of allowing his son to play football.
We
start each game with a kickoff where 11 men from one side run as fast and as
hard as they can at 11 men from the other side and
smash into each other to begin the game.
Of late they is some hand wringing over head injuries but it reminds me of our attitudes
toward PTSD and veterans. It only becomes an issue when we can’t avoid it any longer.
We accept casualties in war or sports, as long as, we win.
A recent event highlighted by
a story in the Economist about soccer protest in Turkey illustrates the
principle of the connection between sports and politics. Like our President, the Turkish leader,
Erdogan was upset by protests by soccer fans at a match in Istanbul. But he couldn’t figure out who the guilty
were. His answer was to require fans to have a ticket AND a government card
that could tie their identity to their seat number. Thus, he could identify who
the fans in Section 105 were, who were holding up banners or signs opposing the
great leader.
Protests by sports figures
like those who “take a knee” similarly seem to perturb our great leader. The people of the country that support him
feel threatened by a non-violent protest.
Right now, we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the
birth of Jackie Robinson who showed us all what a true hero is. By his merely
showing up at Ebbets field in Brooklyn every day and playing magnificently, he
demonstrated what our politics should be. Colin Kaepernick is the modern day
equivalent but the President and the football owners are afraid. There no one
of the character of Branch Rickey in the whole group of Football owners. They are all fearful millionaires/billionaires
who take a knee to a President who believes
that our national sport is, “Who is the biggest Bully wins.” Maybe he thinks Buzkashi is our national
sport.
