A few years ago a student of mine handed in a final-year essay containing the words ‘correlative”, ‘oeuvre” and ‘mandate”. Since I knew the author to be an intellectual pimple who considered literature to be the Cosmo horoscope, a quick Google search ensued. There, replicated across half a dozen sites, were the suspiciously erudite paragraphs. I failed it, reported the plagiarist, and forgot all about it.
Until, that is, I was summoned to appear before a university tribunal. Flanking the troglodyte (who was now in danger of not graduating) were its daddy’s lawyers, briefcases gleaming under faces that contained the humanity and humour of wood-chippers. An hour of hostile cross-examination followed, at the end of which the following had been established.
I, as a tutor earning just under R30 an hour, had been negligent in not taking the victimised client aside personally and explaining to it the subtle difference between plagiarism and original academic research. Furthermore, the child had endured untold emotional trauma through my callous awarding of a mark of zero for its effort.
But most damning of all, I had been both unprofessional and not a little malicious by actually marking the essay in question. Since no plagiarism declaration had been signed by the aggrieved cherub, I’d not only had no right to mark it, but had had a duty to ignore its contents entirely.
My bitterness towards the student has waned: it is a pustule on the spreading bum of bourgeois Cape Town provinciality, and the charity its father buys it will run dry one day. But nobody could be pinned up and hung out to dry the way I was and not foster just the tiniest bit of hatred towards men whose job it is to beat the truth into a shape acceptable to their repulsive clients.
That the child cheated and lied about it was common knowledge in that room. Nobody was denying it. But they were being paid to shift that undisputed blame elsewhere, and for that I will always endorse the old joke. What do you call 50 000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea? A good start.
I should have known better, though. Lawyers can’t afford to leave anything to chance; have loose humanistic or common-sensical ends flapping. Which is precisely why their escalating involvement in professional sports causes the once-bitten jurisphobe to fear the worst.
For in the end, all will be litigation. Consider the case of Manchester United. In 2002 they earned $37,5-million after tax. Let’s say that year they scored 90 goals. Given that at least 50% of a team’s appeal is based on it’s ability to score goals, it is safe to assume (as most lawyers would), that those 90 goals were worth $18,75-million to the club, or $208 333 apiece.
And presto! All of a sudden one has a gold standard with which lawyers and their accountant sidekicks can get to grips; and as suddenly actual play is rendered redundant.
Observe. If a Man U goal is worth $208 333 and a Liverpool goal is worth, say, $150 000, one need only add up the worth of all the players on either side and divide by the average number of fixtures to find a result.
For example, if Man U’s squad tots up to $12-million in potential transfer fees, and Liverpool fields $9-million worth of blokes, you’ve got a situation where 57,6 goals plays 60 goals. Divide by 40 matches, and Liverpool take it 1,5 to 1,44. In the litigated future, fractions will decide tournaments.
The possibilities for legal pantomime are endless. Imagine the confusion following the discovery of a maliciously planted Big Mac carton in a locker room; the implications about health and fitness; the hastily recalculated results, Wolves finding themselves 54-2 victors over Chelsea as panicked shareholders mob the City and burn their Man U options.
A game, to be sure, but not sport.