Hero Worship

It's a games thing, hero-worship. Games in all their countless variety. The game for me was cricket. Yes, I was cricket-daft in my day.

To be daft about any game has two aspects to it: 1) the player has to be mad-keen on the game for its own sake; and 2) the game itself must have its own succession of champions for the rest of us down the line to dote upon as our role-models.

Only, remember this: our heroes, as of yesteryear, are being supplanted by today's celebrities. Our notion of hero-worship was, not so long ago, essentially local hero-worship. Celebrities are the product of the mass- media - icons created for the whole world to possess. Consequently, our heroes of yore have been ousted for good from the sports pages and from prime T.V. time. Distortion in the extreme.

Worse, the youngsters of today are the unwilling victims of corrupted values. The haloes accorded the likes of David Beckham and Tiger Woods, however worthy they may be as persons, are constantly being tarnished with the latest headline about the colossal sums they earn.

And another thing: organised sport, as we know it, is a phenomenon almost entirely of the Western World. The rest of the globe does not - as yet, at least - feature anything like the equivalent - always excepting, of course, Australasia and the Indian subcontinent, which have had the benefit - or otherwise! - of the traditions of the British Empire.

So, inherited ideas of hero-worship stand in need of closer and wider scrutiny.

I, for one, still hanker after the heroes of our youth - well, of my youth. I long for the days when there was the matchless thrill of looking up and into the eyes of our very own god-like figures.

Cricket, for me, was still a long way away. For I was a Scot, after all. So, for me and my mates, the only game around to get daft about was "fit-ba' ". "Tanner-ba' "fit-ba' " it may have been most of the time, but enough, still, to set us dreaming of being able to dribble like Alec James or heid the ba' like Jimmy McGrory or, glory of glories, be a goalie in the image of the tragic, the immortal, John Thomson.

Mere boyish folly? Never! We were serious in our dreaming. And, anyway, who wanted to be stuck with the label of being "a poor sport"?

Then one day I got the chance - lucky me! - to play cricket. Before I knew it, my dream now was to be able to bat like Hammond and bowl like Larwood. All the while I was soaking up the ethos of my new, if alien, game. Presently, I had learned to deplore any actions that invited the condemnation "it isn't cricket." And, henceforth, that was to be my code for life.

Then came golf. Golf hit the world in the person of that celebrity of all-time celebrities, Bobby Jones. He had done something never done before - won the "Grand Slam", whatever that was. Anyway, here, we were told, was the paragon of all the virtues, from sublime skill to gentlemanly grace. He was never done speaking about the great lesson of golf: "We've got to play the ball where it lies". - And he went on preaching it from the wheelchair which claimed him when still a young man, barely into his 30s.

Jones was American. But golf - wasn't that Scotland's game? It sure was! It evolved, as I see it, out of the rigour of Scottish Calvinism as the perfect sporting metaphor for life. For what can he more rigorous than a game that requires its players to call the penalties on themselves?

ABEUNT STUDIA IN MORES. The Roman adage, roughly translated, means: Our studies, our enthusiasms, our hobbies, our games - all flow into the formation of our character. And not least into our national character. To take but one example: Cricket and Englishness.

Before the Romans, came the Greeks with their unique insights into human nature and whatever else. They instituted the Olympic Games - with one supreme aim: to sublimate that most wayward of human instincts - the competitive spirit. For a start, the nations would refrain from war during the year of the Olympics.

The fundamental fact is that the Greeks saw the stadium, with its athletics, as standing alongside the theatre and the temple. These three, with their attendant experiences, each in its own way, yielded access to the supreme experience of life - the ECSTASY that came with the thrilling escape of the soul from the body, if only for a moment, into the heavenly world of the BEYOND, - into the World of Pure Spirit - with the hoped-for return to earth on having achieved that ultimate in human aspiration - KATHARSIS, the sense of purification and peace.

Why, with their poet Pindar to sing the praises of successive Olympic champions, the Greeks may be seen as the original "fans"!

As to the Sport of our modern-day Western Culture, I have long come to see that phenomenon as a sort of vast raft born out of our Christian faith, for all its history of heinous wars waged in its name, through and in the wider medium of our Mediterranean Heritage - a raft to which all may cling however alien or secular and, perhaps, even give thanks for the inclusion of our Sporting Ethic in its benign planking.

For myself I feel I'd be the better for another read of my copy of Brave New World, wherein Aldous Huxley glorifies the Off-side Rule as the best thing since Magna Charta!

Certainly more relevant today is that we of the West are well free from any culture that honours the suicide-bomber as a hero worthy of worship.

TD