The Sports Factor

When did all that sporting self-belief, determination and skill morph into selfishness and crass petulance? How come Rod Laver and Lew Hoad seem to be from a different planet to Anthony Mundine and Ben Cousins.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Mick O'Regan: Hello, and welcome to The Sports Factor here on ABC Radio National. I'm Mick O'Regan.

On this Anzac Day we're going to find out where the mutual research interests of defence analysts and sport scientists might lie.

It may not surprise you to learn that it's all about discovering the limits of our physical capacity, personal bests for the sporting boffins, military success for the ADF.

Allan Hahn: We're looking at ways to enhance the performance of athletes through things like nutritional procedures, through equipment that they might be using, so really it's all about trying to understand more what's stopping them from performing better and addressing those issues. The Australian Institute of Sport is interested in maximising the performance of athletes, and the military obviously, wants to maximise the performance of soldiers, and both organisations are really looking at doing that under pretty challenging conditions.

Mark Patterson: Most of the people that work in our organisation in relation to human performance do have backgrounds generally in the sporting area and the way that we see it is that defence is somewhat another sport in essence. We're looking at how far people can go, how we can condition them more quickly, or how we can optimise the performance we can get out of them. So it's not that much unlike sport.

Mick O'Regan: Dr Mark Patterson from the Defence, Science and Technology Organisation and before him, Professor Allan Hahn from the Australian Institute of Sport.

And we'll come back to those gentlemen and to that story later in the show.

First this week I want to discuss the somewhat elusive quality of humility in sport.

The headlines and harsh words of last summer's cricket series between Australia and India seem to have almost overwhelmed the calibre of the cricket played. There was a distinct lack of graciousness on the field, and perhaps honed by the media, a sharp mood away from it.

Maybe the past is made rosy by fading memories, but there seemed to be more players cut from the cloth of the 'humble champion' in days gone by.

To discuss this I was joined by the journalist, author and serious cricket enthusiast, Gideon Haigh, and I began by asking him if the very idea of humility in sport had become an outmoded concept.

Gideon Haigh: It's certainly an antique concept. I'm not sure that it's completely outmoded, I think we still recognise it when we see it, but I think the days when the model Australian sportsman was kind of Cincinnatus-like and returned to his plough with the thanks of a grateful nation sufficient in itself. Those days are probably behind us. But that's not surprising really. We're a society that is comfortable with ostentatious wealth, and we're a society that's comfortable in the display of sexuality in the ways that we're used to; we're quite a narcissistic society, and in some ways it would be surprising if sport had been exempt from that process. And I think the other factor that kind of contributes to it is the media, sport and industrial complex.

Humility doesn't really televise very well, and it doesn't hyperbolise, and in some respects a lack of humility kind of contributes to the theatre or the drama of the sport in the way that kind of abject, fumbling, inarticulacy does not. In fact, some of the early sports big-noters were kind of beloved for the sheer kind of eccentricity of their remarks. Someone like Reggie Jackson of the New York Yankees, when he said the only reason that he didn't like playing the World Series was he couldn't watch himself, that was kind of funny. When Brian Clough of Nottingham Forest said, 'Say nowt, win, it then talk your head off', he became a kind of a cult figure because these people were so unusual in their time.

I guess what's interesting now is that the phenomenon's become so widespread that it's no longer something that occasions remark when a sportsman goes over the top in their own self-assessment.

Mick O'Regan: Now if we use the summer that's now fading, if we use the cricket series between India and Australia as our template, what did this summer's contest say about these issues of humility or generosity or professionalism?

Gideon Haigh: Well it was interesting that one of the things and Andrew Symonds was nettled about before the Test series took place, was the lack of Indian humility after India had won the World 20/20 championship, Australia if you remember went there immediately after for a one-day series and Symonds got a bit sick of having Indian superiority flourished in his face. A lack of humility can be entertaining for the onlookers, but for the people who are kind of confronted with statements about their inferiority, it can be extremely annoying, and I think there was an element of kind of pay-back in the Australian effort this summer and a desire to kind of punish or retaliate against India for the indignity that Australia had suffered.

Mick O'Regan: Now sport is much more professionalised, obviously, and some would argue that if you look at that professionalism, that if you compare it to business, say, that in business the sine qua non of a successful company is to make a profit, that's the idea of what they're trying to do, and if we translate that back to professional sport, which isn't any more just communities recreating, these are people making their living. So is it outmoded, is that antique notion of humility simply out of place when we are training and paying these people to win, rather than to simply play the game?

Gideon Haigh: And indeed I think also the media kind of encourages people to perform for the cameras, or for the newspapers. They want figures who will kind of provoke and excite and annoy. The media specialises in creating heroes and villains, and in some respects it sets up villains in order that they might be brought down to earth, in the 'bigger they come, the harder they fall' theory, but I wouldn't want to say that sporting humility has necessarily gone into decline. What we see in front of the cameras or what the media performance that these performers come out with is not necessarily the way they are as individuals, it's kind of a personality or a costume that they assume for the purposes of their own presentation. It's also not to be underestimated how the role of sports psychology has probably played in the self-perception of sportsmen. Sport psychology over the last 10 or 20 years has emphasised positive thinking at all times, and a very solid self-estimate of one's own ability. So public professions of modesty kind of sit ill with an attitude that privileges mental disintegration and psychological dominance.

Mick O'Regan: Well that mental disintegration which of course is the great phrase that Steve Waugh, the past Australian cricket Captain used to in a way justify sledging, saying ugly and rude remarks to your competitor in the hope that he or she might not be able to concentrate, but have we got to that point where anything goes? I've read accounts of the Australians, and I think Graeme Smith the South African Captain recently came out and said that he's had experiences where all the close-in fieldsmen relentlessly sledged him. Is sledging an indication of an insecurity or is it a strategy?

Gideon Haigh: I think it's evidence of a less-inhibited society, a society that regards doing whatever it takes as an important aspect of trying to win the important contests. I think there's also, certainly in the Australian approach to mental disintegration, a degree of conformity. There's an expectation that one will contribute to the common wheel and to the Australian effort and in some respects, the noisiest players acquire a prestige or a prominence in the team. It was interesting, towards the end of last summer to hear Adam Gilchrist talking about the great respect and esteem in which Matthew Hayden is held in the Australian team, precisely because he is such a combative and competitive and noisy cricketer on the field.

Of course the way in which players who are involved in a performance and people who are watching a performance, they're often antithetical experiences, and I think one of the reasons, just to return to sports humility, that we value sports humility is that we have such a high regard for sporting achievement. We think that if someone can be humble about something that so many of us dream of, then they must truly be touched by grace.

Mick O'Regan: That even though their achievements are simply sort of indomitable, they reveal a humanity, I mean it makes me think of Sir Edmund Hilary and the oft-repeated phrase that when he walked down, when he and Sherpa Tenzing descended from Everest that first time in '53, that he apparently said to a British companion, 'Well we've knocked the bastard off'. I mean it was this simple, prosaic assessment of this extraordinary feat, and then of course Hilary, who literally had achieved what no-one else had achieved, or together with Tenzing at least, then went on in a very humble and quiet way to devote decades of his life after that to looking after the people of Nepal and Tibet and from that area of the world that he thought had given so much to mountaineering.

Gideon Haigh: Yes indeed. I mean I guess if you're a mountaineer and you were kind of constantly sort of confronted by the sublime, you were constantly confronted by the daunting powers of nature, it would feel a little bit like hubris to provoke nature into retaliation. It's different when you've got a human competitor who you feel as though you can psychologically get the better of if you talk yourself up. At the same time I think there's a case to be made that sports humility sometimes, or at least sports braggadocio can serve purposes other than simply being a noisy irritant. I mean I guess the first apostle of kind of the egotistical sportsman was Muhammad Ali who constantly told watchers and listeners about his greatness. Although with Ali it was a matter not only of kind of emancipating himself, but also emancipating his people, you know imbuing Afro-Americans with a pride that they'd not previously been able to express.

I mean previous leaders of the black population of the US had stressed equality, but here was Ali talking about superiority and preaching it, saying that it was possible not only for black to be the equal of white, but to be his better. And I think even now you hear in the effusions of someone like a Shaquille O'Neal or a Dennis Rodman, traces of that, and likewise you hear it when Anthony Mundine is invoking the spirit of Muhammad Ali and talking about himself in the third person.

Mick O'Regan: Which is interesting when you compare him to his father Tony Mundine, a fighter in the 1970s, who always seemed very reluctant in front of the media, and in that classic phrase of boxing, he let his fists do the talking. Are we talking about a generational change, or simply different personalities?

Gideon Haigh: Different personalities, different times, and I also don't think the media would be satisfied these days with someone who merely let their fists do the talking, or merely let the bat do the talking. There is a tremendous pressure on athletes to talk a good game. We were talking before about whether sport is principally about winning these days; it's actually about a little bit more than winning. It's actually about marketing, it's actually about selling yourself into the free market for entertainment. You know, Anna Kournikova can earn a very good living being a sportsman who loses a very great deal because she has this sort of pin-up cache that she's acquired. Professional athletes don't necessarily have to win, they just have to be good enough in order to earn a reasonable income.

And it's interesting that in the assessments of the players that were being auctioned in the Indian premier league recently, the money didn't necessarily flow to the players who were the best, or the outstanding practitioners in their particular skills, it went mainly to those whose properties were most easy to leverage. I think Andrew Symonds, by $1.5-million of Andrew Symonds, is being promoted partly because he's a very good one-day cricketer, but also because he's a very recognisable figure in India, perhaps for some of the wrong reasons, perhaps he's being set up as a kind of cardboard cutout villain. But there certainly was a premium paid for recognisable sportsmen, sportsmen whose faces could stare out from billboards and appear in television advertisements, things that because of the fundamentally commercial nature of the IPL were probably more important to that competition than, say, Test cricket.

Mick O'Regan: Just to come back to this generational thing, and I want to wheel out yet another oft repeated example, and that of course is of the late Keith Miller. Now is there a broader question here that players of a previous generation who had to make their lives in other contexts, and who had these great and sometimes terrible experiences behind them, that sport had a looser, almost flippant quality, or frivolous quality, whereas nowadays it's all so unerringly serious, that that's changed it?

Gideon Haigh: It certainly felt like a relief from dull care. You can imagine what it would have felt like to play cricket in 1945 during the Victory Tests, a player like Graham Williams for instance, who'd been a p.o.w. until just a couple of months before. But of course that's the case, I mean it would be unnatural were it otherwise. A modern sportsman these days will probably spend most of his career in a kind of protective bubble, being made to feel very special, being made to feel that he is touched by God, and he will grow up with a very solid sense of his own entitlement. I think sometimes it would be unsurprising if it were otherwise, in that we're creating kind of a generation of moral monsters in sport, with a completely disproportionate idea of their place in society and their value to their fellow man.

Mick O'Regan: And yet the one person in this recent summer who seemed to me to strike against the mould was actually Sachin Tendulkar, whose performances were sublime, effectively winning the one-day series, but also in the Tests, some of his centuries were simply the benchmark of great batting, yet there never seems to be any hubris or unreasonable sledging, or gratuitous insults that come from Sachin Tendulkar. He seems to embody both great cricketing skills and be a very personable human being.

Gideon Haigh: I think for so much of his career, Sachin Tendulkar has tried to keep the public at arm's length, because the public in India is such an overwhelming presence. Tendulkar has found it very difficult to concentrate on his cricket at various times in his career, because being a cricketer is such a celebrity occupation in India, and he is the chief celebrity in the whole of the country. I think sometimes when you see him at the wicket, it's as though this is his sanctuary from all the other sort of complications of his life, the opportunity to kind of just sink himself in his game and to practice his technical excellence, which is clearly something that he's dedicated a lifetime to, is such a relief to him that there's a kind of a spontaneity and a joy about his cricket that you don't necessarily see with other players.

I wouldn't want to necessarily say that Tendulkar is the only player that we've seen evidence of grace from this summer. I think Brett Lee's set a very good example in the Australian team of playing the ball rather than the man, and I think there's something contagious about his pleasure in the game, which I think spectators, both Australian and Indian, have related to.

Mick O'Regan: Indeed, and of course that photograph of Brett Lee being consoled by Andrew Flintoff in the Edgbaston Test in the 2005 Ashes series in England, became it seemed to me, the leitmotiv of a whole range of discussions about sportsmanship, that here we had two competitors who had gone hammer and tongs in that game, but at the end there was a moment where the human qualities of a sense of loss or a sense of victory, or empathy, came though. Is that what we can't generally afford to have in sport these days, that there's a lack of empathy because we need to see our competitor as the enemy rather than just a competitor?

Gideon Haigh: Competition between Australia and England on the Test match field has 130 years of tradition behind it, and of course a very strong sense of sort of shared heritage and shared humanity between the two countries involved. In fact I recently saw some film of Flintoff speaking at a sportsmen's night in England where he was asked about that particular incident, and he was asked, what did he actually say to Lee? And he sort of made a joke of it; He said, 'I said one-all you Aussie bastard'. So in some senses the players actually I think have actually felt slightly embarrassed by the way in which people have talked about that moment as being so sort of spiritual and so transcendent. They don't want to feel as though they're getting bigger than their boots, they actually want to feel as though there's a certain sort of - there's still a mano e mano aspect to their competition.

Mick O'Regan: Are there national differences do you think, or are they overwritten like for example do you think that the Australian cricket team, to use it as an example, that it plays this hard game, this hard-talking game, more than other teams, more than the South Africans or the Indians or the English?

Gideon Haigh: They've certainly become kind of the embodiment and the personification of that style of play, and of course the perverse compliment that they're being paid now is that other countries have to come to see that as kind of intrinsic to the Australian battle plan, and they've started to emulate it. There are other countries around the world who probably sledge just as badly as Australia, and who probably practice exactly the same sort of forms of gamesmanship. But it's Australians have almost established - they've made it their own, and by exhibiting their resentment when other people emulate it, they've actually managed to make themselves seem a little bit precious about it at the same time.

Mick O'Regan: Gideon Haigh, journalist, author and enthusiastic amateur cricketer.

Guests

Gideon Haigh
Journalist & author.

Presenter

Mick O'Regan

Producer

Andrew Davies