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All sporting good reduced

by Simon Longstaff

In the same week that a NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption investigation has revealed deep-seated impropriety in the greyhound racing industry, cricket has gone to the dogs. How that comparison must hurt former greats such as Sir Donald Bradman, who helped develop a game that was, at one time, synonymous with the ideal of decency and fair play.

Today, cricket lies in the mire with the reputation of all indiscriminately tarnished by association with a game that, in its professional guise, risks being seen as spectacle rather than sport.

What needless damage to players, young and old, who love the game for its own sake. And all for a fistful of dollars.

Of course, Hansie Gronje is not solely responsible for what has been done to the game he professed to love. The truth is that cricket has been brought to its knees by a series of public (and not so public) scandals suffering a kind of death by a thousand cuts.

What puzzles so many is how this could have been allowed to happen. After all, the warnings were there. The evidence clearly indicates that a number of senior players and administrators knew, or strongly suspected, that the integrity of the game was being compromised.

Investigations in Australia and Pakistan have pointed the finger at corrupt bookmakers. Yet, Cronje obviously felt that dealing with such people was a risk worth taking. Why?

It has been suggested that Cronje was motivated by nothing more than greed. But why would a man with Cronje's accomplishments risk everything for money? Surely his good name and that of his family and nation, counted for more. It would seem not and perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised.

After all, it is often said that we live in a world in which the measure of a person's worth has been reduced to an estimation of the size of their bank account.

In such a world, integrity is seen as a luxury that the rich can afford to buy only after they have finished building their fortune.

For my part, I do not think things have yet sunk to this low ebb. However, I can understand what leads people to think so.

The elite world of professional sport increasingly presents us with an image that reinforces the cynical side of life. The problem doesn't lie with the fact that people are paid large sums of money to entertain us with their skills.

The deeper issue is that elite, professional sport has become commodified. That is, everything is reduced to a unit for sale – a commodity that has a price but no intrinsic value.

For a long time this process has included even the players reduced in some codes to being units of property that can be traded from time to time. I am reliably informed that cricket's administrators have been past masters of the core disciplines of commodification.

I remember talking about this with one of the game's great players. Years later, he is still furious about the way the Australian Cricket Board treated him and other Test players. I suspect that in some sports, nothing much has changed. A bigger pay packet may be some consolation. However, there is no real compensation for a lack of respect and dignity.

It's not just the players who have been reduced to units of commerce. In many cases, this has also happened to those who follow sport. There are many people who find a genuine sense of community in membership of a sporting club. Belonging is not just a casual relationship. It is a source of meaning.

Yet there are many occasions when these people are also treated as if they are little more than a captive market to be exploited. Worse still, they can find themselves caught up as innocent pawns in power-plays between corporate titans whose principal concern is the bottom line.

In an environment in which people no longer have intrinsic value, winning is everything – the sole currency for success.

Link success to money and it is not surprising that a Hansie Cronje emerges as a fatally flawed shadow of what he might have been. That is Cronje's personal tragedy.

Ours is that Cronje has stolen a portion of the dreams we hold for how the world might be. At its best, sport is supposed to be a fair contest between people in an arena where the game is as important as the final result.

As with so much else in our culture, the ancient Greeks have something to teach us about this. They celebrated sport not just as an opportunity to win but also as a chance to exalt in the excellence of the human form.

For the Greeks, to play sport was to participate in something of beauty. However, there is an important lesson in the way they talked about such things, for their word for beauty, kalos, also signified honour.

In turn, their word for ugliness, aischron, also signified shame. It seems that we have lost this sense of value residing in matters of character as well as form. But perhaps there is a residual sense of this explaining why we naturally recoil from Cronje's ugly deeds.

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