by Richard Farr
Early in life, when a child’s tender ear is suppos
ed to be protected from blasphemy, I must have overheard someone say it’s only a game.
I went to the kind of English boarding school at which rugby, patriotism and Christianity were serious business, competed with each other for our attention, and sometimes threatened to blur. You sensed that on any damp Wednesday afternoon, just before we hoofed it down to the games fields, a gowned Master might seek to ramp up our enthusiasm by reminding us of Jesus Christ’s game-winning try against the Zulus at Rorke’s Drift. Or that on Sunday the chaplain in his pulpit (we were High Church Anglican, very smells and bells) might decide to hold forth interminably on the significance of the Archangel Gabriel’s surprise appearance in the changing rooms after that excellent match against the Germans at El Alamein.
Whether in chapel or on the sideline it was all about unity, the team, the sense of heartfelt belonging. That was what mattered. And I’m not complaining. OK, I am complaining, because I hated it. But perhaps that really is a good way to socialize adolescent boys. Certainly most of them seemed to take to it like ducks or pigs to their proverbial substances. But I knew early on that I didn’t want the team, or respect it, or feel that I belonged. Unluckily for me, or perhaps not, the more they insisted the more alienated I felt from the whole scheme. Luckily for me, there were other heroic misfits.
The school was divided into Houses and had some hints of Victorian Gothicism in the architecture; Hogwarts without the magic, essentially. My House was named after King Alfred, who according to national mythology was so distracted by the problem of how to repel the Vikings that he burned a batch of cakes while hiding out in the Somerset marshes, only a few miles away. In his honor we would ritually hold down the handles of the toasters in our studies until the bread burst into flames. One of my more simpatico friends was in another House, named after a general or bishop or benefactor, I forget, but I remember my delight when he nailed these demi-nations, into which we had been deposited at random, as “the administrative convenience you’re expected to die for.” Only later did I suspect that he’d picked up the witticism second-hand.
Anyway, he and I bonded like nobody’s business over our intellectual and moral superiority to the brutish regime being imposed on us. During House matches we would subvert the doctrinal system by standing beside each other and cheering lustily for each other’s teams — a gesture towards Individual Liberty of Conscience, or puckish disdain, or the general value of being a pain in the arse, that made us, oh, very popular. It was a useful learning experience actually: an early introduction to the key socio-political fact that when you mess with people’s stuff they become angry with you, but when you mess with their sense of belonging they get to feel virtuous about the prospect of murdering you. We were not only making fun, though. We were also – perhaps like young people who discover other, more profound ways in which their deepest personal essence fails the test of “normal” – exploring whether we had what it took to be out and proud about something widely perceived as shameful.
Not entirely, in my case. When not acting as sappers under the foundations of the school’s muscular teaminess rituals, we tried to avoid them. Camera Club had a darkroom, to which you could repair all afternoon, experimenting with different printing techniques while reading inappropriate magazines and sniffing fixer chemicals. Nine times out of ten, no one noticed. Once, when they did, I was hauled up in front of my Housemaster. He was genuinely angry, genuinely bewildered, red in the face. “Don’t you have any house spirit?” he spat, the warm sour breath of his disgust washing over me. At the time, all I could muster was a mumble that might pass for an apology; ever since, I have been unsure whether I wish I had been — or am glad I was not — the kind of boy capable of looking him in the eye and saying cooly and honestly what I thought, which was no.
They had five years to turn me into a team player, but my condition proved intractable. Indeed it got worse as time went on, mainly because there was so much joy and creativity and interest to be had in posing to myself and others as a rebel, a maverick, a won’t-be-had. Humbling, isn’t it, to think that central features of your adult character can be traced to what felt good in teenage rehearsal?
In any case, here I am: to this day, I find talking to sports fans about their elective loyalties disorienting and odd. I feel as an alien anthropologist might who knows the language but can’t read the social cues. Newly arrived on Terra, I’ve mastered the vocabulary but I’m still in the dark about the customs, the taboos, and the beliefs that underpin the rituals. I sit in my silver podule scratching my head, and entertain dolefully the suspicion that my grant money will run out long before I break through the Earthling veil; that I will return to Sirius Epsilon long before I have the ghost of an idea about the inner lives of the locals. I don’t like that. I want to take people aside, hold them gently by the lapels and say: Look, look. Put the joking aside for a minute and help me get this straight. I need your guidance here, and I want to understand, I do, but I must be missing something. You don’t really care who wins, do you? It’s a kind of pose, isn’t it? Or an inside joke? Or a metaphor, or something? Isn’t it? I mean, the team has your town’s name on it, sure. But neither the owner, who is the billionaire ex-valet of Name Your Dictator, nor the players, who had to be offered sackfuls of cash to relocate from Munich or Magaluf or Montevideo, either have any connection to you or care a toss about you. What is it that I’m not getting?
Well, I exaggerate. For one thing, it’s perfectly clear to me what “it” is: suspension of disbelief, the very bargain you enter into every time you open a novel or turn on the telly. What’s so strange, to a writer of all people, about needing and celebrating fictions?
And I do enjoy sport. To a limited extent. Sometimes. My family has a hair-thin connection to Wimbledon, because my mother’s parents were club members back when rackets were wood and skirts were long. So I’ll always watch the finals, at least. And a good soccer match too from time to time, and even a few randomly-chosen bits of Olympic.
You’ll notice that what I’m saying to myself here is roughly: see, you do at least admire the individual athletes! Good job! You’re not as weird as you think! But the truth is, I can’t have wholly escaped that team spirit either. Oh sure, I’ll still puzzle and carp about the weirdness of so many sports events being organized around nations at all (“I get that he’s from Brazil. But why do we have to engage in this collective pantomime / dramaticule / psychosis of saying that he’s pole-vaulting for Brazil? Why isn’t he just pole-vaulting for people who like pole-vaulting?”) Yet something in me hurts a little — I identify too, a little — when (pick your team sport at random) England is clinically dismantled in front of the cameras by Croatia or Bhutan. I’ll even experience a twinge of depression when (speaking of Wimbledon) Simon Flatfoot-Grunter, the highest hope in English hearts since Aelfric the Aceling beat Lorenzo the Lombard in that four-hour thriller in 763, is reduced to a pile of grass clippings in straight sets by 179th-ranked Ivan Turdovim.
But I always worry that these fleeting pains are a sign of self-deception, of moral weakness. For me to feel bad that the English have lost, as I did in the recent final of the Women’s World Cup, is for me to be guilty of feeling good if they win. I can feel good if they win only if they are, in a tenuous and not-to-be-examined sense, mine, but out here in the real world where we do examine such things they are very completely and thoroughly not mine. Like their Spanish counterparts in the final game, and like all the other young women in that tournament, the Lionesses are brilliant young athletes. I, on the other hand, have never been any sort of athlete, and indeed have reached a whole new stage in my development at which I can’t even run three miles before my arthritic effing right knee adopts its predictable but always successful strategy of whining piteously and begging that I stop. If the Lionesses had won in Sydney, I would have celebrated their win and felt good about their winning, as if I too had infinitesimally won. But that feeling would have been tripped up and fouled by another — that in truth I was merely shop-lifting the bottled scent of their excellence.
Against this, I feel an urge to state something that’s supposed to be obvious, and state it precisely because, being not quite 100% obvious to me, it needs constant rehearsing. The sense of belonging you get from being a fan, or even an actual member of the team, may be a fiction of sorts, but like the other kind of fiction it brings joy to millions of people, and is harmless, and is therefore something wonderful that should be celebrated, and if you don’t get that then you should at least have the decency to keep your mouth shut.
Short pause.
I mean, hey, what could possibly be wrong with taking impressionable young people and dedicating large chunks of their education to the project of indoctrinating them into the idea that it’s not only natural but downright virtuous to have hotly irrational group allegiances that make you feel good about beating the crap out of the people over there in the other uniforms?
And besides! Besides, I tell myself loudly — because I feel confusion coming on at the mention of uniforms, and I want urgently all of a sudden to change the subject — maybe I hoped England would win because at least that would have been one nice thing for us English, collectively, to feel good about? Which small fictional indulgence surely we deserve, don’t you think? Having had our country vandalized and diminished and impoverished these past years by our willingness to find plausible all the lies — packaged as emotional appeals to unity, and sovereignty, and well-justified resentment against people with different colored, um, shirts — that have been offered up to us by (forgive me: these things inevitably spew forth after you’ve eaten something rotten) the worthless, morally repugnant, unforgivable cabal of self-dealing thugs, chancers, arrogant incompetents, and downright sociopaths who constitute our ruling caste?
Sorry, sorry. Becoming emotional. Drifted onto politics. Must get a grip.