Loss of sportsmanship

I saw, somewhere, the unlikely statement that half the world would have watched or listened to Wimbledon before its hundredth anniversary was all over. I fancy I hear the high, protesting voice of Muhammad Ali crying, 'No way brother! Not one tenth of the world is going to watch that tennis but the whole world watches me because I'm the best, the prettiest!'

Well, never mind the percentages, let's hope simply that many more thousands, or millions, saw Chris Evert correct the umpire's ruling in her favour than saw Connors snub the parade of champions and spend the time of the ceremony practising 50 yards away with his partner in boorishness, the inimitable, if not unspeakable, Nastase. Miss Evert reached to lob a return of Miss Wade and, according to the umpire, made the return and won a point. But she shook her head and pointed out that she had not reached the ball before its second bounce. It's a small thing and would have gone unremarked ten, twenty years ago but today, in the money jungle of professional sports, it shone like a candle in a naughty world. 

Some months ago, some time in the autumn, I think, I tried to say something useful about the increasing embarrassment of having to use the word 'sport' about the greedy branch of show business that is professional games playing. Well, since the autumn, many things have happened to make some of us think a little more about the topic. The organisers of sports events seem powerless to do much about the growth of the sports industry. They either shake their heads or rub their hands. But some sportswriters have started to say that enough is enough, that throwing your racket on the ground in a spasm of temper is one thing and making obscene gestures at the umpire, the press and any other protestor in sight is another. Bill Tilden, about – oh about 50 years ago – threw his racket at Wimbledon and was warned that one more tantrum like that and he would be thrown out of the tournament. And he didn't do it again. 

Whereas no more than two years ago I saw one of the most famous of women tennis players reel with shock at a linesman's call. She stopped play. She walked over to her chair, gathered the four or five rackets which now seem required to play one game of tennis, tucked them under an arm, raised her forefinger at the umpire in an obscene invitation and walked off the court. She hadn't quit, she was just biding her time and temper until the officials came running, or kneeling, and begging her to return, which, about five minutes later, she graciously condescended to do as the thousands of spectators came to their feet to pay tribute to her bravery in giving the umpire his comeuppance. The umpire didn't take her out and paddywack her. He didn't fume or shout. He cowered. He knew he'd behaved badly. He seemed truly sorry and the crowd applauded their heroine again and forgave him. 

And it's this sort of thing which led an American political columnist, at the end of last year, to offer some pointed advice to Mr Carter, who was then about to begin his term as president. At the end of 20 numbered tips, most of which had to do with political tactics, the writer put down three: don't use football lingo by way of encouraging your political party, don't talk about team play or coming through in the last quarter, or giving it that old one-two, don't invite athletes to the White House for dinner. Don't invite athletes to the White House ever, but have the courage to decide, with Harry Truman and I quote, 'that sports is a lot of damned nonsense!' 

Now, this attack of bile may have been brought on by unpleasant memories of Mr Nixon, for nobody in American history I dare say has ever used the language of sports and sportsmanship so often to describe a strategy of crookery. It sent us back 20 more years ago to a famous old American baseball manager, Leo Durocher, who really wrote the text by which so many athletes today seem to conduct their professional lives, 'Nice guys come in last'. 

At the end of last year too, the most gifted, the raciest writer and the most knowledgeable of American sportswriters wrote a piece called 'Whatever happened to Frank Merriwell?' Frank Merriwell was, a couple of generations ago, the fictional hero of all American small boys. Today, I suppose, he would provoke loud and raucous laughter as a square and a sissy because, to use the quaint old phrases, he always played fair, he lost with grace. Sports to him was synonymous with what we used to call sportsmanship. 

Well, it now seems ages ago since we had such a character looming large on the American sports scene. The tone of the 1970s is now set by the most popular, the richest, gamesman in America. Not baseball players by a long shot. Baseball now ranks about fourth in popularity behind, in ascending order, ice hockey, American football and, at the top, basketball. The basketball stars get prodigious salaries, they are admiringly interviewed, given the same adoring space as rock stars about their lavish pads, their king-size beds with the sable quilts, their ceiling mirrors, their European cars, their sleek girls in every port. 

Basketball stars now earn more money than the President of the United States. That has got to be the reason, a primary reason anyway, why the insulted umpire sent his officials to beg the slut of a tennis star to return to the court and go on with the game. She earns a fortune. The fans pay to subsidise that fortune. The fans come today not merely to see a game superlatively played, they have learned to expect high jinx and very low jinx as part of the show and any sports promoter will tell you that 'hell hath no fury like a sports crowd spurned!' 

In other words, the officials, who sometimes seem so cowed, so poltroonish, must have in mind the maintenance of public order, which has come to have nothing to do with public courtesy. In America, for no good reason I can see, we have not yet had baseball, or even basketball, crowds breaking the barriers and indulging in violent free-for-alls. The crowds that swarm up to Yankee Stadium or other baseball grounds do not yet break up trains or rip the tubes apart. I don't know why this hasn't happened since we read with dismay of the hooliganism bordering on criminal assault of British football crowds and such desperate proposals to meet it as walling in the playing field and ringing it with a few hundred cops. 

Now, I may have seemed, so far, to be reacting in a standard, fussy fashion to the decline, the practical disappearance of amateurism in first-rate sports and it's true that, in tennis particularly, much of the genteel air of the sport in the old days was due to the comfortable fact that most players at Wimbledon were upper middle-class offspring who didn't have to work for a living. The same, at one time, was true of international golf. 

Plainly, it's not only absurd, it's unjust to expect people who earn their living at a game to have the same nonchalant code of behaviour as the loitering heirs of city directors who could afford to go to France or America to play a game, while professional footballers, at that time, were paid at the going rate of plumbers' assistants. 

I applaud the fact that games can now be a career, and a profitable one, and that the experts should be considered like any other star, public entertainer and be paid accordingly. But six figures seems to be a turning point. A youngster who earns a hundred thousand, dollars or pounds, in a year, sees himself, and is encouraged by the press to see himself as a movie star entitled to adoration, the pamperings of luxury and no questions asked about behaviour on or off the court, the field or the course. 

I suppose the television satellite has had a world to do with it. Boxers know that the manager will take in $20 million, so they don't pause long before saying,’ some of those millions should be mine!' And if the difference between winning even £40,000 and £20,000 turns on an umpire's call, it would take a superman of a sportsman to make no protest when the umpire might be wrong. 

Well, it doesn't take a superman! It takes the type of human who, I'm happy to say, in one sport at least, is still extant. To me, golf remains an oasis in the desert of gold and scruffy manners. Maybe because it doesn't allow for team play in-fighting. It's you and the ball and the course, and the rules. A single act of cheating, or moving a ball, a few years ago, caused a well-known pro to be suspended from the tour for good. And three years ago, Jack Nicklaus and Johnny Miller were offered one million dollars to the winner of a head-to-head 18-hole game. One round. One million dollars, to one of them, in an afternoon. They promptly turned it down as being, as Nicklaus put it, 'not in the best interests of the game'. Let us only hope that his tribe may increase. 

And ten years ago, Arnold Palmer was offered by a promoter his own tour – pick the 30 best players and they'd all be guaranteed more money than they'd get on the regular PGA tour which includes about 160 players. 'Great,' he said, 'but it would ruin the game for the other 130.' 

A year or two ago I watched a young Tiger, a promising golf pro, hitting balls on a practice tee at a famous tournament, and afterwards we had a drink and he talked about his ambitions for the big league and the big money. He chafed about the extreme severity of the rules in golf and I told him about the time the late Bobby Jones drove his ball into the woods, far from any spectator or marshal. He went in after it and then reappeared and made a signal. And a marshal came running and Jones told him that he had, deep in the woods, accidentally just touched his ball when he stood to address it. He asked for a two-stroke penalty to be imposed on himself. 

The young pro I told this to looked at me in disbelief. 'What', he said, 'was the matter with the guy? Was he nuts or something?' Well, at the time, Jones – who incidentally lost the tournament by one stroke – was highly praised for his sportsmanship. He was incensed. In his soft Southern accent, he said, 'You might as well praise a man for not robbin' a bank!' 

If there are any such young on the million-dollar circuit today, will they please stand and be praised!

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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