Professional sport is too corrupt too often

THE Corinthian view of sport, one that imagined it a test of courage, skill and honour, may seem hopelessly, pathetically romantic today.

The continual debasement of one of humanity's most excting and uplifting endeavours by commerce, corruption, relentless greed,  a complete lack of any recognisable sense of perspective - and  dodgy  sugar-daddy team owners with bottomless war chests - suggests that a rose-tinted view of earlier sportsmen and women, and their achievements, may be as delusional as a spotty 19 year-old who  believes he is worth €200,000 a week becasue he is better than most of his peers at steering a ball into a net.

Not only have the great corruptions of today - epitomised by Sepp Blatter and the once haughty and untouchable Lance Armstrong and all other defrocked  champions - ruined today's sport as a spectacle acted out on a supposedly level playing field they  force us to ask if we were  deluded too when we basked in the reflected glory of champions from another time.

Maybe we were but it is  difficult not to  remember Jesse Owens' achievement at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin as one of the most elegant and articulate refutations of the Nazis' evil theories on race and their own superiority.

It is hard too to deny that Muhammad Ali, originally under what he described as his "slave name"  Cassius Clay, began a life-long campaign of inspiration and defiance  that empowered African Americans  and other minorities, a process that culminated with the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States in 2009.

One of Ali's contemporaries, the only one many pundits imagined could equal him in the ring, three-time Olympic gold medallist Teófilo Stevenson who died three years ago next week, marched to the sound of a very different drum and resisted the lure of professional sport.

"What is one million dollars compared to the love of eight million Cubans" was his mantra. Though that decision was  was a little more complicated, a little more nuanced  than that,   it is all but impossible to imagine any world champion taking that position today.

In our own history sport, specifically Gaelic games, were used to foster a sense of proud and participatory nationalism. The skills of team work and organisation honed  at the local  hurling and football club were often transferred to the world of business where they contributed to wealth creation and social progress.

That contribution reached one high water mark when England played  in Croke Park in 2007 and we realised that extending the hand of friendship was as enriching for us as it was for our visitors.