{Playing the Game [continued (4)]}[12th December 1987]

[Redbook4:215][19871212:2250d]{Playing the Game [continued (4)]}[12th December 1987]

19871212.2250

[continued]

There are many international sportsmen – including, apparently, the Pakistan cricket captain* – who believe and state that cheating is acceptable in international sport in order to win. (This might be the distinction between sport and games: [that] there is no such thing as cheating in sport,** where winning is everything; [but] there is no game if cheating occurs, since playing is everything).

This is why the impossible distinction between amateur and professional was crucial.*** (It is another linguistic give-away of our own corruption that whereas 'amateur' was once a word of praise and 'professional' slightly suspect, the position is now exactly reversed.) So far as I can see, all you can do when a game loses its 'spirit' and is taken over by competition, is to abandon it to the cheats and invent another one.

So far as the Pakistan umpire**** is concerned, there must come a point where incompetence can no longer be excused, in the light of the truthful man's necessity always to seek and speak the Truth. What's good for Science, for Business, and indeed for Religion – for the life of Man in general – is certainly good for Games.

*It seems that this may have been a sarcastic comment on England's attitude last time in England. <880114>

[& cf. Bodyline? See next entry.]

**('Sport' did not always have this connotation: cf. 'sportsmanlike'.)

[& cf. The answer by an Oxford undergraduate sitting her final exams who ran out of time to answer the last question: “What is the difference between sport and play?”, so wrote simply: “To play with Amaryllis in the shade# would be unkind”. I think it may have been William Rees-Mogg who recounted this in an essay, article or review, adding: “The examiners awarded her a First, and quite right too.” – a remark which (whoever was the author) has always seemed to this writer to border on the sententious.]

***(i.e. the love of money is the root of all evil.)

****captain? <930607> [& see fn * above.]

#[

Alas! what boots it with uncessant care

To tend the homely slighted Shepherds trade,

And strictly meditate the thankles[s] Muse,

Were it not better don as others use,

To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,

Or with the tangles of Neæra's hair?

Fame is the spur....

– John Milton (1608–1674),

Lycidas: A Lament for a friend drowned in his passage from

Chester on the Irish Seas, 1637 (lines 64-70 (part)).

]

[continues]

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