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Per Astroturf ad astra
Some boys won't play sport as they think they will look stupid
ON the evening of Manchester United's spectacular victory last week, I was not watching the game. I was sitting with two women friends outside in a garden in the warm evening air, while an assortment of our husbands and sons watched the game on television inside.
Between us we have seven sons, whose ages range from eight to 26. We were talking about them. From time to time we were interrupted by a violent, masculine roaring; the first time I heard it, shattering the early summer peace, I thought for a fraction of a second, since we were next door to the Vietnamese embassy, that some horrible kind of torture was going on: quickly repressing such old-fashioned, cold-warrior responses, I realised that the football must be proving unusually exciting.
After yet another deafening roar we all went in to see what was happening. Manchester United had just scored their first goal, and the game was already in injury time. Within moments they had scored their winning goal, and this time the roar from around the screen was overwhelming. Looking at our nearest and dearest in their excitement, as they jumped up and down, what I felt for them, more than anything else, and especially for the young boys, was sorrow.
This is a hard time to be a boy. That is what we had been talking about in the garden. Although boys all love football, or think they ought to, sports these days present them with many problems. It is no longer enough to fit in with school sports - indeed it is no longer thought necessary, since state schools recently have decided to abandon compulsory team sports. And it is no longer satisfactory simply to mess about with a football. These days you have to be good. What I notice now is that boys who are not particularly good at sport, but who would like to play, refuse to because they are afraid they will look stupid. It all seems odd to me. In the old days, when competition was respectable, it was somehow made less painful in sport. Somehow everyone could muck in, however untalented.
Now, despite a quarter of a century of opposition to the idea of competition, especially in schools, the actual experience of competition is much more pervasive and, I think, much more painful. Somehow the egalitarian educational idea that all must have prizes has been transmuted into the idea that only winners can play. Most people must muck out, so to speak. Perhaps because of the professionalisation of sport, and the appearance of the rich sports celebrity , the idea of belonging to a team, and fitting in somewhere, has been undermined. I cannot pretend to know; I am bored by most sports. But what I do know is that sport is not entirely a source of fun and relaxation for children and teeenagers; it is a source of anxiety.
Children who are not good at sports try to get out of them. Equally, ambitious parents try to force their children to shine at sports; enormous money is to be made out of gratifying their wishes to turn their darlings into superior tennis players and outstanding cricketers, not to mention the vast sums made by football coaches to the very young. Children see quickly that these games are not really games at all, but part of life's wearisome jostling for place. Per Astroturf ad astra. As my Belgian friend said that evening, the pressure to be a hero is overwhelming. And if you are not a hero, you are rubbish. The evil consequences of this were much discussed at the time of the playground massacre in the United States; many of the children interviewed described how the heroes and heroines of their school were the sports stars; those who didn't shine at sport were marginalised, and therefore deeply resentful.
That is bad enough in itself but it is made worse by the celebrity culture in which we live. And that in turn is made more painful by meritocracy. Meritocracy, that holy grail of democracy, has proved to be painful and divisive. In a meritocracy there are no face-saving, comforting excuses for mediocrity and failure. Any ordinary boy can see that the heroes of his fantasies and the heroes of sport and rock were once just as ordinary as he is. They rose as heroes from poverty and sink estates and nothing much. He didn't, and he won't, and he has nothing to blame but his own lack of talent. Yet the opportunity to be a hero, the requirement to be one, has never been greater. You sense it everywhere - in the recent pop song, for instance: "You've got to look for the hero inside yourself."
Meanwhile, to make a boy's life even more confusing, women are confused about heroes. They are not sure that they want them, or that they need them. Yet another report appeared last week claiming that men are suffering new levels of anxiety and illness, as a result of their uncertainties about their role at work and at home. Males feel threatened at school too; it is now accepted that schoolgirls work harder, are more sociable and less disruptive.
I have no idea what the report is worth, but it sounds plausible enough. Boys are receiving horribly mixed messages from girls and women. They are receiving some mixed messages from their heroes, too. It is hard for an ordinary boy to be somebody; if he cannot be a hero, his best chance, probably, of proving himself is to give himself a leading role in the drama of his own life as a villain. After all, as my husband keeps saying, boys are so very much more sensitive than girls.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, May 30, 1999
