Lions tours cling bravely to amateur spirit of fraternity
The Daily Telegraph, 30th May 2009
Why would anyone care about playing for his country? Footballers earn infinitely more money playing for their clubs than for England – and arguably care more about them. Jamie Carragher openly admitted that he got over the disappointment of missing the penalty that put England out of Euro2006 with the consoling thought, ‘At least it wasn’t for Liverpool.’
Before this disastrous West Indies tour to England, Chris Gayle extended his IPL jaunt to give himself only two days preparation for the first Test. His team responded by producing the most lethargic Test cricket ever seen in this country.
The England shirt, the West Indies cap – how much does it matter these days? Speaking to a class of MBA students last week about sport and business, I had to work harder than I’d anticipated to explain why representing your country does not fit neatly into an economic category. It is not a unit that can be measured.
Maybe I am out of date. After all, many people say you cannot blame the Chris Gayles of modern sport – with the IPL offering all its riches, isn’t it only natural to change your priorities? We live in an age only to happy to forgive people with an eye on the bottom line. As Chuck Prince, ex-chief executive of Citigroup, said of his firm’s role in the credit bubble, ‘As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance’.
More to life than money? Playing for your country? Patriotic pride? It’s sounds so dated – a bit of an anachronism, all very last century.
So it is with great hope, and a little desperation, that we turn to the ultimate anachronism: the British and Irish Lions. The Lions, of course, is a throw back to the days when rugby was an amateur sport. There was no money to be made by playing for the Lions – just pride, honour, and life-long respect. It was, if you like, the inverse-IPL.
The most enduring tours, like 1971 and 1974, have become part of the Lions’ mystique. Lions often talk about the experience of suddenly playing alongside men who you have always battled fiercely against as adversaries. You need that bond of foe-turned-friend when you are up against a national team, like South Africa, that is far more used to playing together.
There is also the question of amateurism. A Lions tour was the pinnacle not only of rugby, but also amateur sport. Legendary Lion J.P.R. Williams heard the news of his selection on the radio while he was a student of medicine at St. Mary’s in London (the same hospital where another doctor, Roger Bannister, had been held aloft after breaking the four-minute mile in 1954). Would Williams have been any better if he had been taken out of academic education as a teenager and sent to a rugby academy to learn predictable lines of running? Williams was a defiant, free-spirit who proved that the amateur era had nothing to do with being soft.
The amateur days may be over, but their spirit lives on in the Lions. At least, we hope it does. After the disappointment of the 2005 New Zealand tour, these Lions, who play their first match in South Africa today, can revive the great tradition of skill, passion and fraternity.
How we need a great tour. Sport is at a cross-roads. Will it go head-long into commercialism and short-termism? Or will sport return to the values that made it so important in our society in the first place? Perhaps there will not be a choice at all, and the two roads will split off and separate, one called ‘celebrity/riches’, the other called ‘longevity/respect’ – a little like the fissure between pop fiction and serious writing in the literary world.
As Clive James argued in his essay The Meaning of Recognition: ‘There is a difference between celebrity and recognition. Celebrities are recognized in the street, but usually because of who they are, or who they are supposed to be. To achieve recognition, however, is to be recognized in a different way. It is to be recognized for what you have done.’
The Lions who beat New Zealand in 1971, and South Africa in 1974 and 1997, were known for what they had done.
After what can only be politely called a difficult spell for international sport, this summer, first with the Lions and then the Ashes, provides a priceless opportunity (I use the phrase carefully) for the case to be made that sport still matters in the way we hope it matters.
The winning has never counted less; the spectacle of a good contest memorably played out has never mattered more.