Is there anything more revolting than the spirit displayed by so many contemporary sportsmen in the way they 'play the game'? Yes, of course there is. There are crimes and injustices considerably more revolting. This is low-level stuff by comparison. But how it does reveal, in its own low-level way, the weak side of the human character. I have in mind the never-ending bellyaching by footballers, football managers, cricketers, supporters, journalists, when decisions by referees and umpires go against them. Oh no, we were done; a crucial turning point in the game; how could he not have seen it was a penalty, or wasn't a penalty, it was a dive; how could the umpire have missed the fact that the ball grazed the edge of the bat, or that it was the pad it touched; summon a meeting of the bloody Security Council; outrage; injustice; double outrage.
What is pathetic about this, utterly pukeworthy, is that all these same people who moan so will take any wrong decision that goes in their or their team's favour with equanimity - as just part of the way of things, the rub of the green. Worse, they will even celebrate, jumping or lying on top of each other, running about like beserk and drunken chickens, as if they have just pulled off some entirely admirable achievement. And worse still than that, they will act so as to induce the very errors by the officials which they celebrate when these go in their favour. To term the chorus of moaning a hypocrisy, therefore, is too kind. Hypocrisy generally hides from itself its own inner inconsistency. But in the present case, this is impossible to hide: everybody knows that the aggrieved sportsman was only yesterday joyous about the very same kind of thing he's grumbling about today. Yet numbers of people debate with entirely straight faces whether the grumble has just cause. If you get stuffed by a bad decision, that's an injustice; if they get stuffed, it's their bad luck, and your good luck, and aren't you the brilliant ones? It's not even infantile; most children have more moral sense than this. What is it, then? It's pathetic and worthy of a derision it rarely receives; it's revolting.
To think that sport was once commended to the young, and with some reason, as embodying and teaching certain virtues for the living of life.