The Problem with Sport - 2 January 2004

This is the time of the year when every columnist, political pundit, financial writer, book critic sits down and with an absolutely straight face tells you what are the most significant political and economic events that happened during the past year - which were the best books, movies and so on.

In case you feel intimidated by this annual exercise of authority let me remind you of a couple of remarks by two old codgers who in their day were thought pretty cool as soothsayers.

One is an old, Italian book critic, name of Longinus. He lived around 200AD, and this is what he had to say about the critics who were able so confidently to tell you what was first rate, second rate or rubbish:

"The judgement," wrote old Dionysus Longinus, "The judgement of contemporary work is the last and ripest fruit of much experience and rarely happens."

The comparatively modern Dr Samuel Johnson - that hulk of ill-health and robust common sense - said: "Few things are more laughable in life than literary fashions."

May I, a stripling in such company, dare to say that I believe the same to be true of political, economic, fiscal judgements about why something happened and what's ahead.

Indeed if any one of the learned bred is deigning to hear these words, he/she might well be reminded of the immortal comment on pundits and punditry by a superlative handler of the American language, now I'm afraid totally forgotten, who was himself a bi-weekly columnist and, in the 1930s and 40s, gave us the eerie sense that Mark Twain had been resurrected and had turned New York columnist.

This is what one Westbrook Pegler had to say about the trade which he and I happen to follow.

The piece was called Myriad Minded Us, and he wrote: "I've been trying to figure out how we came to be." And he decided to do his own quiet enquiry into the gifts and qualifications of these polymaths.

He came up with the discovery that we include experts on the budget who can't balance an expense account, economic experts who can't find the 5.15 on a suburban timetable, labour experts who never did a lick of work in their lives, pundits on the mechanical age who can't put a fresh ribbon in their typewriters, and resounding authorities on the problems of the farmer who never grew a geranium in a pot.

Well, I hope that will be enough for me to side-step any report on this past year's mighty issues, mainly I find because you very often don't discover what was mighty until many years later.

So instead of reviewing people and things which we now believe to have been most significant in 2003, I thought rather it would be more useful - and certainly more agreeable - to review some lighter topics, notably an historic change in three sports, the first of which will I hope interest people who play or watch no game whatsoever.

First then: a movement has started which I'd hoped to see in motion many, many years ago and by now I'd given up all hope.

Something any foreigner could notice after the shortest time living in this country is the enormous cultural status enjoyed by college football and its coaches. The coaches ride the daily headlines of the sports pages.

At least a score of universities and colleges are known first, not for their learning but for their football prowess and their standing in the national leagues.

In my earliest days I used to ask college friends what specialty a given university might be famous for - in scholarship, I meant.

Not the remotest idea - but, I'd be told: "they have a sensational offence" or "best quarterback alive".

To this day I couldn't tell you in what branch of learning the University of Michigan excels, if any. Everybody knows it has a champion football team.

There are 22 colleges, each of whose football coaches - nationally renowned - earn over $1m a year, to the envy of the university president or chancellor, who may be spotted hiding behind a bush in the groves of academe.

My very first week at Yale, in 1932 - when Yale was, among scholars, famous for its law school and its studies in the earliest days of the English language.

I recall my surprise at practically no undergraduates' knowing this but they could call off the positions and special talent of every man on the football team whose weekend exploits absorbed the attention of many an undergraduate who might have been doing his homework.

Seventy years later a thunderbolt came hurling out of Chicago and shocked the nation.

Chicago - one of the four top American universities - was famous for several scholastic specialties including, I recall, the greatest living Chaucerian, name of Manley, whom my Cambridge tutor had begged me to call on as an act of piety.

The thunderbolt issued from the mouth of the university's president, a handsome, square-jawed, crew-cut, 32-year-old Robert Maynard Hutchins.

He suddenly announced: "No more football at the University of Chicago."

Maybe some guys would like to play for their own amusement but Chicago was checking out of the college football circus that was distracting the university from its main job, which is, he said, scholarship and higher education.

I didn't appreciate at the time the magnitude of this taboo but I do remember that an elegant monthly magazine featured a full-page photograph of him with the, to me greatly puzzling caption: "Presidential timber?"

And true enough he was thought of as a likely presidential candidate for a time.

Unfortunately it was Roosevelt's time. No other Democrat had a look-in.

Robert Hutchins is long gone, but 70 years later his insurgency is being remembered.

There is at last a lively new movement among university presidents deploring the importance of football at the universities and wondering why, when it comes to the budget, football coaches and stadiums and the public exposure of the game outbid physics, biomedicine or space research.

Next: at the end of the year I found myself caught up in discussions with friends who follow a little tennis or golf, or both.

Golf surely does not impinge on scholarship, though it may well and often does replace the days a student might spend in avoiding a third class degree.

The first question among, shall we say, laymen is why are men tennis players hitting serves that touch 130-35 miles an hour and many of the women rating a creditable 100, 105?

It's the same question people ask about golf. They produce low whistles at the very thought of Tiger Woods hitting a drive 300-odd yards.

By the way, many men on the tour do that. Tiger is 47th in driving distance.

To both awe-struck questions there is the same, oblique answer: the main aim of tennis is not a very fast serve nor is the main aim of golf to hit a very long ball.

There's an ancient saying in golf: drive for show, putt for dough.

But for some unexplained reason, the preoccupation with speed in tennis, distance in golf, infects not only all spectators but even people who take up golf - until their teacher gets them going on pitching, chipping, putting, bunker playing, run-up shots and the rest that compose a decent score.

But people go on saying, why do the tennis players hit the ball harder and the golfer hit it longer?

Are they stronger than previous generations, is it the new regiment of weight-lifting, jogging and stretching they subject themselves to?

Partly. But the answer in both tennis and golf is: equipment.

The end of the wooden racquet marked the beginning of the 120 mile-an-hour serve, and the end of the wooden club, with its persimmon club head, and the introduction of what we have had to call, clumsily, the metal wood, has made a difference to everybody from Annika Sorrenstam to every Sunday hacker.

At the age 88 I switched from my old woods to three aluminium shafts and titanium heads.

Titanium is the magic. To match my kneecap.

And my old pro told me: "That new seven iron of yours has kept you in the game."

I had the pleasure that last time I was down at the Key Biscayne, Florida, tournament to have a chat with the one and only Rod Laver about this very universal curiosity - why the length, why the speed, why hard-hitting women?

He said without hesitation the new racquets and new ball had done it.

That if Bill Tilden or Donald Budge had had the new equipment, they would be a match for Sampras, for now Roger Federer.

And when I brought up the incredible athletic routine that the Agassis and the Roddicks and the Hewitts follow, Laver said: "You know, we lived normal lives and played tennis a little more than most people."

But he didn't think he could ever have gone on tour with a running partner, a body builder, a playing coach.

"No thanks," he said.

As for the other essential member of the touring team: a sports psychologist?

"Shall we have another drink?" he said.

I wish you all a bearable New Year.

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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