Michael Moynihan: Sport, cruelty, and the cruelty of sport

Simone Biles watches the Women's Uneven Bars Final from the stands at the Ariake Gymnastics Centre on the ninth day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. Picture: Mike Egerton/PA Wire.

The cruelty of sport.

This is one of the foundational cliches of sports-talk, one of the load-bearing pillars that was in place from the very start of sports discourse and which has served us well ever since.

The funny thing, though, is this idea has to be teased out. It isn’t a simple matter of having winners and losers so much as an acknowledgement that — in spite of what we think — sport is more often than not an explicable matter of simple advantages.

God is on the side of the big battalions. Bad will always beat worse. Most of us understand this, the notion that a fairytale ending is unlikely in sports most of the time. Consider the discommoding observation that while the race is not always to the swift, nor battle to the strong, that’s still the way to bet.

Damon Runyon is often credited with that observation, and Runyon’s inimitable yarns of life on the fringes of the sporting scene are themselves a distillation of the precise nature of cruelty in sport. To wit, the occasional triumph of an outsider does little to fracture the verities.

Sport’s flat binaries, its winners and losers, don’t allow for moral victories: when it comes to victory there can be only one, despite the best efforts of the high jumpers last week.

I raise the matter of the Olympics because cruelty in sport is visible there in a related field, those raw post-event interviews.

Many of the Olympic participants you see tend to bare and open honesty in their interview technique; it’s all the more noticeable when compared to the soul-scarring banalities you hear after most team sports.

There is a different texture to those interviews now, of course, because of people like Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles speaking openly about their mental health struggles.

The achievements of athletes like Osaka and Biles lend weight to their comments and validate those concerns. Sceptics who question them seem unaware of the contradictions in their own stance - they’d hardly question an athlete withdrawing because of a hamstring tear, yet feel qualified to pontificate about mental health.

Consistency, eh?

A good example of how to comment appropriately on the issues raised by Osaka and Biles was given by NFL player Aaron Rodgers in an interview with Kevin Clark of The Ringer: “I give Simone so much credit for her ability to speak the truth, her truth, and to answer tough questions, and to have the courage to say, ‘I’m scared’ and ‘I don’t feel like I should be out there.”

“She’s the greatest gymnast of all time.”

Rodgers later added, in relation to mental health: “It’s something we should be talking about and ways to help people get through it, whether it’s techniques or therapy or just conversations letting people know they’re not alone.

“And that’s what Simone did.”

Any reasonable person would concur with Rodgers’ considered views. But by mentioning Biles’ status as the greatest gymnast of all time he also raises another issue indirectly.

Where does our basic assumption that ‘sport is cruel’ fit into this particular equation? Is Biles’ situation a final proof of the stresses inherent in sport when even the very finest exponent in one discipline has struggles coping with competition at the highest level?

Are we looking at the end of sport being cruel because we’re more aware of it? Or is it just the beginning of sport being cruel for exactly the same reason?

Referees should also be umpires

Last week I chatted to Donal Collins about hurling in Kilkenny and Cork, but the conversation took a few different twists and turns along the way.

At one stage he was telling me about his teenage weekends helping out a clubmate who was a referee; on free Sundays Collins and pals piled into a car bound for distant locations.

Umpire or linesman?

Always the latter, he said, going on to produce some persuasive logic.

If you were a linesman and made a bad call, there’d be a reaction: the crowd might jeer, or a player might comment pithily, but all things considered it was a rare sideline call that determined a match.

More often than not the wrong call was forgotten 30 seconds later, and canny teams and players were cute enough to build bridges with the linesman anyway, maybe hoping for the benefit of the doubt to compensate for that earlier error.

Furthermore, he pointed out that the players often made up the linesman’s mind: if a player made a desperate, last-gasp effort to stop the ball rolling out of play, then it was logical to presume he’d touched it last, or else the players might obligingly trot into position expecting a particular call.

But being an umpire... Donal pointed out that the game was decided on the basis of transactions in the small square more often than not, and players rarely had a sense of calm detachment about a mistaken call in that jurisdiction.

Which led to an obvious point.

Why, he asked, are qualified referees at big inter-county games wasted - relatively speaking - as linesmen when they might be more profitably positioned as umpires?

This is an idea with a good deal to recommend it. While maybe not practical at lower levels, at senior intercounty level, with everything on the line, couldn’t the GAA provide qualified referees at both posts as well as both sidelines?

In fairness to Novak...

Social media is a cesspit. We all know that. It’s the easiest thing in the world to find something there that conforms to your prejudices, no matter how outlandish they are.

Novak Djokovic, of Serbia, reacts after being defeated by Pablo Carreno Busta, of Spain, in the bronze medal match of the Olympics. Picture: Seth Wenig

For example, you may have seen the meme of tennis star Novak Djokovic appearing to scoff at Simone Biles: Djovokic is quoting as saying: “Pressure is a privilege, my friend. Without pressure there is no professional sport. If you are aiming to be at the top of the game you better start learning how to deal with pressure. And how to cope with those moments.”

Those words accompanied footage of him losing his cool and smashing a racket on court two days later.

As a confirmed agnostic regarding Djokovic’s charms, I enjoyed it.

However... the reporter involved later stressed his query had focused on Djokovic’s performances rather than seeking a specific view on Biles.

Furthermore, the meme omitted the part of Djokovic’s answer which made quite clear he was referring to his own situation, not Biles’.

A cesspit. As noted.

Haughey’s Cork GAA ties to be revealed

I was going to recuse myself from recommending the following book on the basis that the author is a friend of mine, but then I realised that if this procedure was followed in the book world, then nothing would ever be recommended at all.

Charles Haughey remains the kind of figure that attracts plenty of lazy qualifiers - ‘enigmatic’, ‘polarising’ - but the forthcoming biography from Gary Murphy of DCU should offer the definitive portrait of the man.

While I don’t want to pre-empt any likely revelations, I understand a controversial episode concerning a tie presented to Haughey by a Cork GAA club may finally be resolved.

Looking forward to getting my hands on a copy.

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