Methadone for belligerence

Is sport really necessary? I suppose the truth of it is that deep down we all want to kill one another. We are competitive angry animals who see whatever rolls over the hills as an enemy. So instead of training our students in the typical Spartan way and giving them a long spear to wield and a Helot to victimise we teach them how to throw, and catch, and kick and jump and run. We give them the competition, no, the belligerence equivalent of methadone. You’ll never kick the habit, so let’s just make sure you don’t hurt yourself in the meantime. As a society we are on the longest comedown from an addition to violence and sport is just a way of drawing it out.

When you look at it - Throwing a ball in baseball or cricket is akin to hunting for rabbits or hurling rocks at any interloper. A bat or a racquet is no more than a sword with which today you slay the fluffy yellow of a tennis ball, but could easily well be something drawn in battle. Athletics is simply training for war alongside the other martial disciplines (Shooting, Archery the modern pentathlon for heaven’s sake!!).

Why do we put so much stock in this as an outlet for our young people? The economic arguments alone could drown me I know. Even the health arguments are there – but I would counter that – what has sport got to do with health – we live sedentary lives: so get up and put down the fork – you don’t have to plough your disposable income into watching Chelsea every weekend, you just have to expend the same number of calories you ingest – that’s maths and once again I’m brought back to the importance of a classroom over a sports field.

In an age where we are hoping to renew all our ideas and build a better world, what kind of planet is it where a man who can throw with accuracy will make $10,000,000 a year while a woman who saves lives every day gets just enough to keep a house over her head.

Why the hell don’t we have competitive math, and why isn’t it popular? It’s a simple question that you hope will get a long and thoughtful answer, but in truth it’s because we would rather see two men tear it up inside the octagon or batter each other with their Queensbury rules.

I ask again. Why do we worship the physical and make it a cornerstone of our society, why do boys put up posters of footballers rather than scientists? I said above that this craze, this culture was simply a methadone for our belligerence, maybe I got it wrong, maybe it is simply a new drug.

Anything can become an addiction if it’s taken to extremes and like all things a little bit of sport is good. Healthy, confident young people engage in sports, but when a society becomes obsessed with the way their national, local or even school team  is doing, when it becomes the obsession, when it replaces religion as the opium for the masses surely we have to stop and ask ourselves: to what end?

In education everything should have a purpose, every second of every day should have a reason behind it and an aim for the young people involved. But with a world ever more reliant on great grades, fantastic minds and intellectual pursuit I wonder why we as a nation are so obsessed with superstars or the fact that Rangers might go bust. We live vicariously through these people instead of accomplishing what we can in the gym or with our friends. It is tribalism: with Alpha males kicking balls instead of taking heads.

I don’t want people to stop playing sport, stop being healthy or spend all their time on fractal equations; I’d simply like sport to be about the individual instead of the individual being about the sport. Let’s live our own lives, not David Beckham’s.