Today’s youth set to rewire sporting rules

As previously advised, I contacted Chuck Klosterman last week — author of What If We’re Wrong: Thinking about the Present as if it were the Past. In this new book, Klosterman conducts some interesting thought-experiments about art and culture and society — and sport, and one side-effect of reading it is to be brought up short about the relatively recent development of sport.

For instance, one tends to forget how recent codes of conduct have developed in relation to large-scale team sports in particular, given few of them reach back (in legislated form) beyond the middle of the 19th century.

In that context I proffered an example to Chuck from another book on my nightstand, Crazy ’08, about the 1908 baseball season, in which author Cait Murphy points out that large crowds were still, at that point, learning what was and wasn’t appropriate behaviour, at big sporting events. The eventual disappearance of the grand tradition of battering participants with empty beer bottles was, alas, well under way by then.

While my lengthy chat with Chuck — including his well-reasoned responses to sallies such as mine above — will get due coverage in time here, one train of thought that chugged past in our conversation concerned kids playing sport.

He pointed out that preparing kids for success in Little League baseball or schoolboy (American) football — and our own sports, by extension — can mean reinforcing behaviours and attitudes that would be seriously unwelcome if reproduced in their day-to-day lives, and indeed that such reinforcement often puts those kids in situations where a manager/coach/trainer is screaming at them, for instance: Completely intolerable in any other aspect of their lives.

In parallel with this is a growing sense of what parents want for their kids in a sporting context. Oddly enough, Chuck’s identification of those basic contradictions in how kids are prepared for excellence in team sport was echoed by an All-Ireland medal winner a few years ago in conversation.

He pointed out that since getting involved with his club’s underage structure, he’d been struck by the fact that parents wanted their kids to make new friends, to play well with others. The notion that warriors were being produced for combat with the hated hamlet a few miles down the road (this former player’s own experience of underage competition a couple of decades before) was not so much frowned upon as completely alien to the vast majority of the parents dropping off and collecting their kids at the club gates.

Then there’s the influence of video games. No, don’t roll your eyes. Klosterman isn’t the only one pointing out that a whole other culture of game experience has grown up around the video console. For instance, the ability to restart or reset a game which isn’t going one’s way is now an ingrained part of childhood participation in games and sports; how can that not be working in the malleable minds of the young, the sense that there’s always a chance to start again from scratch without consequences? How can that not be having an impact on how they experience real-world sports events?

You probably think I’m overreacting. But when you’re sitting in the new Páirc Uí Chaoimh in 20 years’ time focusing a binocular app implanted in the retina of your own eye on the two seven-year-olds taking each other on in Call of Duty 84, down in the middle of the field, then I’ll be saying ‘I told you so’.

Or messaging that directly to your amygdala, maybe.

Fourth estate going over the top

It’s funny the way labels get affixed.

If you were asked about the most jingoistic, one-eyed group of hacks covering sport, you’d probably go for English reporters covering the national soccer team.

No better group to overestimate the quality of their team while also preparing to savage those individuals when and if they slip up.

I noticed a pathetic effort down under recently, when the New Zealand Herald came up with a mocked-up picture of Australia rugby coach Michael Cheika. As a clown.

Cheika didn’t take this at all well, which was reminiscent of Johnny Giles on Apres Match: “Everyone thinks it’s affectionate unless it’s themselves,” and the New Zealand rugby authorities said what the press did was nothing to with them (presumably delivered with a straight face).

Some Kiwis pointed to an Australian paper which had superimposed All Black captain Richie McCaw’s head on a witchetty grub. ..

Compliments pass when the quality meet, eh?

We can’t run from harassment stats

Runner’s World magazine revealed that 43% of women running for fitness or pleasure reported being harassed while doing so.

A shocking statistic — only 4% of men reported harassment — the detail in the responses was equally disturbing, such as the woman who heard a loudhailer roaring ‘stop running!’ and turned to find police addressing a man chasing her.

The piece, by Megan Hamilton, is well worth your time.

One of the significant takeaways for a man is the sheer surprise at the percentages involved, which of course is part of the problem.

The Tipps avoid all snobbery

Something that rarely gets an airing here — or anywhere in the Irish media — is class, and snobbery, and associated themes. Too close to the bone. We probably enjoy picking out the snobbery in other cultures — looking down on Trump supporters, for instance — or casting an eye across the Irish Sea. Thanks, then, to DJ Taylor for The New Book of Snobs: A Definitive Guide to Modern Snobbery.

Taylor is a hero not so much for updating Thackeray’s The Book of Snobs (or is that a snobbish point?) but because a) he wrote the greatest biography I’ve read in the last ten years and b) when I rang him once about another book, he said he’d been in Killarney on holidays that summer and a lot of chaps in blue and gold had been there for a game: “The Tipps, was it?” The Tipps is right, DJ.