Cricket: no golden age of innocence |
Amateur: A person who practises something, especially an art or game, only as a pastime (Shorter OE.D.)
The O.E.D’s definition reads almost like an elegy for the type of resilient and principled Englishman who explored the poles, and learnt his cricket at Eton. In our market-driven, commercialised world, he seems as remote as horse-drawn carts and Latin primers. Yet, a new book by Warwick researcher Lincoln Allison reminds us, his disappearance or, at least, the erosion of the principle of amateurism is a recent, and profound, social phenomenon.
Amateurism in Sport examines the rise and fall of the idea of the amateur, arguing that the idea has come to be misunderstood, through confusion with its various meanings of ‘unpaid’, ‘gentlemanly’ and ‘incompetent’. ‘Amateurism’ now has strong associations of second-rate or outmoded practice, as opposed to ‘professionalism’ which sets the standard. As Amateurism in Sport points out, however, it’s possible to argue the reverse that doing things ‘for the love of it’ rather than for money represents the higher and more meaningful human value. Allison argues that the decline of the amateur is damaging not only to sport, but to society in general, and that without true amateur values society cannot be improved.
Allison argues that the amateur players who once dominated sport lacked neither competence nor competitiveness he cites the English cricket tour captain, Douglas Jardine, as an example: the aggressive “bodyline” bowling he employed on a tour of Australia was as focused on winning as any modern-day professional. Allison also questions whether sports players improve their abilities once they are paid.
The book goes on to explode some of the myths of a golden age of innocence in UK sport. It details, for instance, the history of the third Lord Tennyson (grandson of the poet) who prided himself on being the amateur unpaid captain of the English Cricket team in the 1920s, but wrote the cricketing book Sticky Wickets as a means of getting out of debt and even demanded a £100 fee for a cricketing poem he composed for a national newspaper.
Though the amateur ethos of British sport has sharply declined, it has not yet been completely overwhelmed by professionalism and big business ironically, the recent poor behaviour of UK football stars shows strong signs of UK sport’s amateur roots. Allison argues that the vast sums footballers are paid may, in fact, partly undermine the culture of professionalism in football, and give those players some of the sense of freedom enjoyed by amateur sportsmen.
Allison writes: some footballers “are paid so much that they do not have to worry about the future. They can afford to enjoy their football and have to worry much less than their predecessors about pleasing their employers & by the late 1990s football managers were frequently complaining that it was difficult to discipline or control players who were not already multimillionaires.”
Amateurism points out that sport’s amateur ethos and roots were, and are, crucial for the development of almost every sport in the UK particularly as communities came to together to develop sports clubs and facilities. Far from fostering a spirit of community, UK sport may actually be undermined by the commercial pressures and constraints of today’s lottery funding.
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