The audience was now openly hostile, its mute boredom transformed into a continuous murmur of discontent, like angry bees massing in the heat of summer. He thought he saw the glint of a dagger under a toga. It was time for the pontification to end. Just two more minutes, he thought, and plunged on —
Nice guys come second: An aphorism easily mistaken for Cosmo carnal etiquette, it is probably true as an observation on sports. However its converse is rarely aired: if nice guys come second, winners are schmucks.
Rebuilding: Any period when a team isn’t winning. Bangladesh cricket has been rebuilding since its inception, a process not helped by annual monsoons and a complete dearth of talent.
Sport and politics shouldn’t mix: Government and politicians shouldn’t mix either; but some marriages will never be annulled, however miserable the relationship becomes. Those who pine for a sporting Reformation, a separation of Sacred Turf and State, also tend to be those who secretly hope that the wireless is just a passing fad. However, one can only hope that sports stars will be less eager to enter politics than their fellow celebrities in Hollywood: witnessing Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins commune with their righteousness, like two monks prostrate before an altar of middle-class morality, is still preferable to the prospect of Jabu Pule urging world leaders like Paris Hilton and Bono to save the little children of Chad.
Sport knows no race: Classic white denial in the face of overwhelming evidence that black athletes, specifically those of sub-Saharan decent, are streets ahead of their honky rivals. Genetics is everything. American basketball is black, American football is black; before it imploded the best cricket team in the world was black. The two-time holder of the highest Test score, Brian Lara, is black. Boxing is black. The Williams sisters are black. European football, once the preserve of pasty shaggy-haired lads from Scouser housing projects, is faster, harder, and stronger thanks to the arrival of Francophone Africa. When their economic clout catches up with their physical prowess, black stars will dominate Formula One and rugby too. The future of sport is black and bright. As for whites, there’ll always be Putt-Putt.
Sport tolerates no racism: But it does eagerly promote racial difference, while denying genetic difference. Euphemistically called ‘national character”, racial difference saturates every sport’s lore. The French have ‘flair” (read highly emotional Latin temperaments not suited to logic or warfare). The West Indies never played cricket with aggression and energy (God save us from angry, focused blacks!) but instead partied like merry sambos, if white commentators and their ‘Calypso cricket” label are to be believed. Indian cricketers are ‘wristy”, an adjective that somehow always seems combine an innate limp-wristedness with an allusion to something deeper in the Indian character, perhaps an ethical flexibility. Hard, leathery Australian rugby players, ice-cold Russian gymnasts, inscrutable Oriental ping-pong ninjas — the list and its racial classification is endless.
Weak opposition should never be underestimated: A phrase adopted by falsely modest captains before routs. Zimbabwean and Bangladeshi cricket teams should always, without fail, be underestimated.
Winners give 110%: Those who continue to endorse and perpetrate this intellectual flatulence should be made to write out all the prime numbers with their tongues on a saltpan. It really isn’t rocket science. If you give 100%, you’ve got 0% left. You can’t run a brain and basic organ functions on 0%. Id est, a 100% donation equals death and the other 10% is impossible. Vice versa, if you’re thanking the glazed corporate suit for your winner’s cheque, you’re not dead (although there’s no evidence that he isn’t), and therefore you clearly didn’t give 100%.
But then again, the honest version doesn’t sound quite so dramatic: ‘I gave 100% of the 40% I keep in reserve so as not to go into the 60% I keep for mental processes like pacing myself and balancing my cheque-book over the last few kilometres.”
Here endeth the lesson.