Grace in victory and gallantry in defeat: It’s an alien concept of sport

THIS Monday morning, trying to explain Ireland to a visiting Martian would be quite a challenge. Any alien from another planet would ask you to start with sport, since he wouldn’t have been able to get away from it this weekend.

Of course, you’d start by helping your Martian tourist to understand that sport is the pastime everybody should care about, because it’s so good for health and fitness.

Never mind the fact that the guys who limp, who get to their old age only through luck and prosthetic intervention, are the ones who engaged in serious sport all their lives, whereas the unscarred ones with the fluid movement are the lazy sods that never played anything but poker.

You have to join the benign conspiracy that sport delivers immeasurable health benefits for the players, doing your best to minimise the close association between sport and alcohol (at least the close association between sport and cigarette advertising would have been a bit before the Martian’s time).

Apart from health benefits, sport is vital, you’d tell the Martian, because it teaches fair play and frowns on foul play.

Well, yes, you would have to admit, there is this thing in rugby called a spear tackle, where two guys gang up on a third guy, grab him by a leg apiece, lift him up and try to plough up the pitch with his head. It’s a way of softening the player up or scaring him. The guys who do it know that the player to whom it’s done won’t forget them. So if he has his eye on the ball and in his peripheral vision sees one of the spear-tacklers coming, then the earlier ploughing championship will serve as a warning to him.

You’d just have to hope that the Martian hasn’t come across a copy of the book written by one of the players who did a spear tackle to one of the Irish guys during the Lions Tour of New Zealand not so long ago. The Irish player got a bit upset. A Martian could understand that, once you explain that two guys trying to plough a field with the head of a third could have broken the spine of the third player, turning him into a wheelchair-user for the rest of his life.

But the visiting alien might get a bit confused to read one of the spear-tacklers describing the potential wheelchair-user as a “sook”, meaning “crybaby”. Surely the crybaby was only looking for fair play, fairness and respect to the highly trained physique he had worked hard to build up?

“Look,” you’d have to say to the Martian, “don’t focus on irrelevancies like sook insults. Just pay attention to the way sport creates loyalty among the supporters. See the pretty paint they put on their faces? See the matching outfits they wear and the cute hats they don? See the amount of money they spend to travel to watch the national team play in interesting foreign countries?”

If this argumentative Martian asked how all this mass air travel could be tolerated, at a time when airplane emissions are contributing so lethally to climate change, you’d have to tell him climate change is a separate issue to be discussed later. The important thing about all these supporters is how they exemplify one of the great sporting values.

“It’s not about winning or losing,” you’d tell him. “It’s about taking part. It’s about understated grace in victory and gallantry in defeat.”

OF course you might have a bit of a problem if you let him view the footage of supporters crying their eyes out every time we lose, but as long as he hasn’t seen any of those tear-stained disappointed faces, you’d be flying. It would be no bother to you to convince him that we humans bring up our young to look on triumph and disaster and view both those imposters the same. It would be important, in this context, to make sure your little Martian didn’t get to attend any school matches, lest he see daddies yelling their heads off at their own offspring for failure to score a goal or make a try. The contradiction might confuse him.

You’d also have to watch out for surprises. If he asked, for example, “Are the Irish cannibals?” that would be a surprise.

“No,” you’d respond, scandalised. “Why would you ask such a silly question?”

“Well, they always bay for the blood of the manager of the losing team,” he might observe. “I thought consuming managers might be a cannibalistic ritual, like savage tribes used to eat the brains of their vanquished enemies, in order to gain their strength?”

Nah, you’d say, laughing lightly at this primitive interpretation of our sophisticated sporting culture. The baying for blood is just figurative. The managers are really heroes. Look at the money they get paid. That shows how much we value them.

The Martian would nod his little green head and ask you why the rugby manager would get a three-year contract on this high pay, and then a few weeks later be vilified as a rigid, inflexible, dogmatic, bullying dictator. When you paused to think up a good response, he might go on to ask you if that game with the egg-shaped ball wasn’t the one played by the guys who’d gone to the elite schools?

Yes, you’d admit, with exceptions like Cork, Limerick and parts of the west, this egg-shaped ball game is the one played by the elite. The big bright bruisers who qualify as accountants and orthopaedic surgeons. The minute you had confirmed this bit of information for him, you’d know what was coming.

“Well, if they’re that bright and confident and educated, how come they let themselves be bullied by this one highly paid individual?”

While you were considering this, he might let you off the hook by talking about the insights he had gained through watching TV commentary on sport. Particularly on that other game, played using the round ball. Played by lads who suffer from impulsivity: they tend to kill off their grandmothers whenever they get a bit stressed.

He might wonder aloud about the fact that in Ireland you are considered old- fashioned if you call women ‘ladies’, yet women’s football is called ladies’ football (if you come up with a good explanation for that particular archaism, do let me know).

Then, still drawn by the possibilities of cannibalism, he might finish by telling you that, in soccer, they don’t eat the brains of the managers of vanquished teams.

“Very good,” you will say encouragingly. “And how do you know that?”

“I have seen an angry man on TV named Dunphy and it is clear he would not eat the brain of the manager of the national team. But I am told that the real reason for this is not that the Dunphy man is against cannibalism. In fact, he has bitten off and spat out other parts of the manager. It is just that he does not believe the manager HAS a brain.”