Reporting the lies
Saturday September 30 and it’s the beginning of a really special weekend for British sport. For a start it’s the day before Eric Cantona returns to the Manchester United team. He has served—need we remind you—his term of suspension for his over-athletic response to an opposition fan’s opinions on him being sent off. Then there’s Will Carling, the captain of England's rugby union team. He’s in sparkling form for his club Harlequins even if the tabloids are in pursuit of him over his relationship with the Princess of Wales. Yes it looks like being a great weekend—for sport, for the players. for the hacks who are supposed to tell us all about the games and for the people whose lives are briefly lightened by reading about them.
But first a word or two more about Cantona and Carling. They are two very different men, with Carling seemingly unable to express himself except in mind- numbing banalities while Cantona is always liable to launch into rambling, obscure epigrams which come from nowhere and lead into nothing. Cantona is swarthy and brooding while Carling—at least until he excited the media as the latest victim of the predatory princess— was boringly clean cut and affable. Each in their way supplied an element essential to the sustenance of attention from the tabloids. Yes. you’ve guessed it—sex and violence.
Romps
Violence is never far away from how the hacks report sport. Matches are “clashes” or "battles"; strikers are “deadly"; teams "pack a real punch"; losing sides are "sunk" like the General Belgrano. Any suspicion that stars of the games have what is laughingly called a private life more interesting than the average will send the tabloids into a hysteria of pursuit, observation and, when all else fails, plain and simple fabrication. This will often involve the discovery of some alleged partner in what are called “sex romps" (celebrities never have just plain sex—they always have "romps") who is willing to tell all, for a price.
One effect of this is that anyone who reads the sports pages of the tabloids because they want to find out what happened during the games will often be disappointed. They will see a lot about those romps or the addiction problems of the players or what has been happening lately between the managers and their wives but not very much about the game. A lot of space is regularly given over to the complaints of outraged managers who are sure that their team was deprived of a well-earned victory by a blundering referee. A lot more is devoted to disputes between managers about whether their players played dirty or, as in a recent match between Tottenham and Wimbledon, over whether one team had the right to use a substitute who had arrived late. Anyone could be excused for concluding that—in the case of the popular sports like football, cricket, rugby, boxing, the actual performances are of secondary importance, except to the long-suffering hordes who have paid to watch other people kick a ball, punch each other or pretend to be injured. All of this revolves around the fact that what is called sport is really big business into some big money involved—money often supplied by a few very rich people who need to be reassured and placated and have their ego regularly inflated by the crowds and the media.
Distractions
But isn’t sport also a distraction? Well yes and very useful it can be for anyone who needs some re-organising after a week in the office or the shop or on the factory floor. And in this the tabloids, with their extravagance and selective wording, headlines and pictures, are important agents. But what do people need to be distracted from? Well for one thing there is the fact that, according to government figures, there are 50,000 homeless households in England (in 1982 there were 9,300) living in temporary accommodation. Barnados point out (as if it were needed) that parents in that situation suffer so much despair and frustration that their marriages may crumble and they may become violent towards the children they love: ". . . and the consequences can last long beyond the time . . ." but realities like that get scant attention in the tabloids and what attention they do get is overshadowed by the page-after-page devoted to sport, with heavy type headlines and hysterical language.
What this amounts to is that this social system is so harsh, so repressive and threatening that its people need distractions and fantasy because reality is too awful to face. How many of the children in those homeless families sustain themselves with dreams of running into the turf at Highbury or Twickenham while the massed fans cheer, if scoring the vital goal or try, or spraying out autographs to adoring kids, or having "red-hot sex romps” for the tabloids to rhapsodise about next week?
Debate
Whether this is preferable to the older style of treating sport as if it were war (and on other pages treating war as if it were sport) is a matter of debate. In any case the end result is the same; no-one gets near the kernel of the matter. No-one grasps the fact that sport is capitalism in essence—ruthlessly competitive sometimes disguised as caring and co-operative. The fantasies it stimulates are a usefully cynical conditioning for a life of exploitation. The tabloid sports pages make a significant contribution to this and the whole sorry, sordid mess will go on until we all blow the whistle.
Ivan
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