Sport - Cricket

A ground reality we conveniently ignore

By Nirmal Shekar

The racial outburst from the Australian cricketer Darren Lehmann has once again highlighted a basic truth of sporting life that most of us conveniently ignore, or, fail to make the effort to scratch the surface and see for ourselves. And this has nothing to do with racism per se.

For, as we all know, sport is filled with racists, on the field and in the stands and you don't have to be a Muttiah Muralitharan fielding on the boundary line at the Gabba to realise this.

From the football pitches and stadiums of Europe to the cricket fields in relatively small cities such as Rajkot and Vadodara in India, from the tennis courts in a cauldron called Flushing Meadows in New York to the magnificent sweep of the Melbourne Cricket Ground here, racism exists in some form or other.

You don't have to actually hear Lehmann say "Black ....'' while walking into the dressing room to realise that racism is as much a part of sport as winning and losing.

On the other hand, the point here is not about racism at all. At least it is not about racism alone. It is about how such racist remarks, and the outrage triggered by them, should help us come to terms, yet again, with a basic truth of sport. And that truth is: Sport does not unite so much as it divides.

Sport as a grand instrument promoting unity and harmony is nothing but a myth, a myth perpetuated by men harbouring Utopian ideals who had no clue about the ground realities of the business.

Yes, in a physical sense sport does unite. At the Olympics, at the World Cup of football and cricket, at a dozen other major events, it unites us in the sense that it brings together people and performers of many different nationalities, of all skin colours — white, brown and black. But, almost every single time, we unite only to highlight and celebrate our differences.

"Go Aussie, go''. "God bless America''. "East or West, India is the best''. These are not just harmless words on placards held up by fans. They point to attitudes that have existed from the beginning of sport, attitudes to which jet planes and Internet and television — things that have shrunk the globe — have failed to make a difference.

When Lleyton Hewitt looks across the court and finds out that the poor call had come from a coloured linesman in a match in which he is playing a coloured player, the reaction is spontaneous. Heat of the moment, some would say. But the point is, the stuff is already programmed in his brain, just as it is in Lehmann's. And when push comes to shove, these athletes cannot control themselves.

Sport has two kinds of racists. The emotional ones who cannot control their tongues and the closet racists who have the self discipline not to say what they think in the heat of the moment.

The late Arthur Ashe, who spent more time pondering the issue of racism than any other modern sportsman, once told this writer about the difficulties he encountered in trying to wave down a cab in New York in his early days in the sport. ``It is impossible, especially at night. No cabbie will want to stop if you are black,'' Ashe said. Of course, this phenomenon had as much to do with racism as with the fact that cab drivers in New York, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, harboured the perception that blacks were rather more prone to criminal activity and violence.

Ashe, of course, encountered a fair share of racism in his sport itself and faced it with tremendous patience and grace while all the time attempting to make it a better world for himself and others in professional tennis.

Modern sportsmen such as Hewitt and Lehmann, with their win-at-all-costs attitude, and influenced by the myth that Aussies will always be the best in every sport if only they give 100 per cent, can hardly be expected to be quite as classy as the late Ashe. This apart, the point is simple. Sport does not have the capacity to make differences vanish. If it does, as men such as Baron de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympics, believed, then that function has not yet taken place.

What we have seen time and again in sport is our attempt to establish vastly different national identities. America is the greatest. Australia is the best. India is unequalled. At the superficial level, there may not be anything wrong with it. All this gives international sport a wonderful multi-hued complexion. But it may not be as simple at that. For, clever politicians and incurable racists often exploit the differences to their own advantage.

Adolf Hilter used the 1936 Berlin Olympics as a showcase for his pet belief: Aryan supremacy. ``The Americans ought to be ashamed of themselves for letting their medals be won by Negroes. I myself would never even shake hands with one of them,'' said Hitler. It is another matter that the greatest star of those Games was a black American called Jesse Owens, who promptly said, "I didn't come to Berlin to shake hands anyway.''

Down the road, Darren Lehmann might well shake hands with the Sri Lankan players and share a pint of lager with them to bury the past. Another instance perhaps of sport's endless capacity to "unite''. But this much is sure: sport, such as it is, will continue to divide more than it will ever unite. And don't fool yourself thinking that everything will be fine between the neighbours in the sub-continent the moment India and Pakistan start playing each other in cricket.

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