General sport

Peter Oborne gets into the spirit of the Olympics, reviewing Mihir Bose’s The Spirit of the Game: How Sport Made the Modern World.

The Telegraph

By Peter Oborne, Chief Political Commentator

Almost exactly 125 years ago, a young Frenchman made a pilgrimage to Rugby School. Armed with a copy of Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays, he headed across the quad and into the chapel, only stopping once he reached the altar beneath which Thomas Arnold, the school’s legendary headmaster, was buried.

There, as he was later to write, “in the twilight, alone in the great gothic chapel of Rugby, my eyes fixed on the funeral slab on which, without epitaph, the great name of Thomas Arnold was inscribed.

“I dreamed that I saw before me the cornerstone of the British Empire.”…read the full article

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The Independent on Sunday

by Simon Redfern

Those critical of modern society are fond of harking back to supposed golden pasts. Pre-industrial Merrie England and the imagined court of King Arthur have both been extolled as utopias.

Now Mihir Bose has chosen the Victorian era of Tom Brown’s Schooldays as the sporting equivalent. His argument seems to be that Britain, and specifically England’s public schools, championed the virtues of good sportsmanship, fair play and pluck, then exported them around the world. But in the 20th century this Corinthian ideal was steadily subverted by greed, commercialisation, politics and the cult of celebrity, leading to a morally bankrupt sporting present…Read the full review

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OPEN Magazine

Sports may be big business but sport did not start as a business. It started with the noble idea of improving human beings. This spirit of the game was unexpectedly illustrated in last summer’s Trent Bridge Test. The Indians, having run out the English batsman Ian Bell, withdrew their appeal. Not because Bell was not properly out, but because they felt appealing was against the spirit of the game, Bell having strayed out of his crease thinking play had stopped for tea.

I doubt if Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the Indian captain, has heard of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, let alone read it. Yet, that Victorian novel forms the starting point of how modern sport developed. The novel emerged at the height of the Victorian era. What is more, it came even before the laws of most sports that we play had been codified. So, sport acquired a philosophy before the actual rules….Read the full article

The Spectator

by Ed Smith

There was a time when sportsmen fretted about the morality of being paid to play. Now the question is whether you are taking money to win, or taking money to lose. Mervyn Westfield, the Essex fast bowler, was only 20 when he accepted £6,000 to bowl deliberately badly in a county match. Three Pakistani cricketers, of course, are in prison for the same offence. How quaint the old distinction between the amateur who plays for love and the pro who toils to make ends meet now appears.

How did sport become so morally complicated? It was the Victorians, as Mihir Bose explores in The Spirit of the Game, who decided that sport had to be good for you. The Georgians, in contrast, had been content with sport’s more obvious pleasures of gambling, blood-letting and licentiousness. The Victorians, with an empire to run, wanted sport to educate the officer class. No matter that Thomas Arnold, allegedly the founder of ‘muscular Christianity’, didn’t even like organised games. With Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the idea that Britain became great by playing sport hardened into folklore….Read the full review

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Evening Standard

by Michael Prodger

The infiltration of sport is such that the 2010 football World Cup final was watched by 700 million people. Amazonian Indians and Kalahari Bushmen notwithstanding, that is one in 10 of the world’s population.

What they saw was a match of minimal finesse and maximum thuggery as Holland and Spain forsook the laughably titled beautiful game and reverted to what Philip Stubbes in his 1583 tract Anatomie of Abuses called “this murthering play”. Kicking an opponent’s shins was only banned from the sport in the 1860s but it looked as though the rule – on shins and other body parts – had never been passed….Read the full review

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