Sports Relativity

Cultural relativity, the notion that cultural practices and beliefs should always be judged/understood within the context of a particular culture, is now largely discredited. To pick a rather extreme example, we are no longer (were we ever?) prepared to accept female genital mutilation as acceptable in the cultures that practice it.

But surely we must allow for something like Sports Relativity. A particular culture's sports obsessions make perfect sense in country; to outsiders they can seem preposterous balderdash.

Many Americans think the UK is not even a sports nation. Hell, they can't even win their own famous tennis tournament and carry home precious few medals in the Olympics. (Perhaps their most famous sports film, Chariots of Fire [Hugh Hudson, 1981], is about the 1924 games!) But that impression is as off-base as the prevalent but wrong-headed American notion that the British are humorless. This land is absolutely obsessed with sports.

Which is not to say that I understand English sport. Like the majority of Americans (even in the era of the soccer mom) I don't get "football." When the tube line I ride all the time stops at Arsenal, I get no thrill from being so near the Holy of Holies of one of London's most famous clubs.

When I pass Wembley Stadium on the Metropolitan, visions of past great moments at a famous stadium do not flash before my eyes.

When, earlier this year, all the media were filled with stories of England's cricket humiliation by Australia in "The Ashes," I felt no humiliation, nor did I understand one whit of what they were talking about. What the hell is a "test" anyway? Why were they bowling in a cricket match? I knew (as a big baseball fan) what a "pitch" was, but did they? (Thanks to John Boorman's Hope and Glory, I at least knew what a "googly" was.)

And I have stared in disblief at the mock epic coverage of darts competitions on the telly here. Darts?!

Back home, of course, ESPN devotes an unhealthy amount of airtime to covering poker. Poker?! American football, seen by the ignorant, can seem terribly silly. (Remember the famous Andy Griffith routine ("What It Was, Was Football"), in which a country yokel describes a football game.) Golf, even in the hands of Tiger Woods, can seem like a "good walk spoiled" (Mark Twain). Even the national pastime of baseball, the sports love of my life, increasingly seems to many as looney (and boring) as cricket.

When a student of mine at Brunel University sat in my office recently and quoted, lovingly, statistics about a legendary cricket star from early in the 20th Century, it hit me: sports may well be the one still valid manifestation of Cultural Relativism. But then this same student went on to tell me of his love for baseball and American football. Is it possible that one day, after many years in the UK, I will avidly follow the "footies"? Watch darts on the telly? Obsess over sticky wickets?