Norman Geras:
Five out of 10 to Germaine Greer. She’s giving sport its due, as belonging - like opera or Wuthering Heights - in the category ‘culture’. But then, get this:
“Football unites all those people who love the game, whether in agreement or disagreement, at the same time as it divides the supporters of the different clubs. The more you know about the game, the deeper the enjoyment; the more passionately you support your club, the deeper your involvement. The amount of intellectual energy generated by football is unimaginably massive; the effect of such passion is to dramatise the lives of people who might otherwise be snared in disadvantage, poverty and disability, with very little to look forward to if not their club’s promotion.”
I suppose football does sometimes bring something into the lives of people whose lives are difficult; but what an insufferably patronizing remark. Wuthering Heights has probably also added something to a difficult or disadvantaged life here and there; likewise, the wider world of fiction, a BBC drama, Duke Ellington, Howard Hawks or Michelangelo’s David. Yet it is not often that these examples of culture are commended to us for the uplift they provide to people who have little to look forward to. It’s more common to be presented with their qualities, their intrinsic worth.Just so, competitive sport. It is loved the world over and by millions of people. This is not because these people are either deluded or have cramped little lives. It’s because, at its best, sport is simply brilliant. It offers those who love it something they get nowhere else - a combination of drama, spectacle, great skill, the observation of individual character under pressure, a contest that seems at the time to matter even if (when all is said and done) it matters only in a limited way, and moments of thrilling beauty. Those who treat it as merely a compensation for limited lives or horizons, or, worse still, look down their intellectual noses at it as some form of vulgarity, don’t as a rule know what they’re talking about.
