Opinion | Columnists
Sport shouldn't dominate news
The only thing a country proves by staging a major sporting event is that it can stage a major sporting event
- By Michael Skapinker, Financial Times
- Published: 00:00 June 10, 2010
- Image Credit: Jacob Hernandez/Gulf News, AP
- Ellis Park Stadium in Johannesburg. The soccer World Cup matters so much to South Africans because they want to persuade the world that their hopeful story is not over.
Who cares about the World Cup?" Nadine Gordimer, the South African novelist, said of the fiesta that begins tomorrow in her (and my) native land. The Guardian, which relayed her comment from the Hay Festival, reported that "a thousand people in the audience roared their approval".
I can see her point. If you do not care for football, a month of it is a lot to bear. But I would be surprised if Gordimer, a Nobel Prize-winning story-teller, failed to see the World Cup's narrative potential.
All major sporting encounters are dramas, with sudden astonishments (Zola Budd colliding with Mary Decker at the 1984 Olympic Games), affecting vulnerabilities (Paul Gascoigne's 1990 World Cup tears) and heroes reduced to villainy (France's Zinedine Zidane headbutting Italy's Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup final).
Blockbuster potential
If each match is a story, a global tournament is, in the hands of a skilled narrator, a blockbuster. Nelson Mandela grasped this when he stepped on to the field at Johannesburg's Ellis Park wearing a Springbok jersey before the 1995 rugby World Cup final — a gesture that persuaded many Afrikaner die-hards to accept the new order and inspired this year's Hollywood movie Invictus.
The soccer World Cup matters so much to South Africans because they want to persuade the world that their hopeful story is not over. For all its democratic achievements, South Africa is still notorious for car-jackings, power cuts and continuing divisions.
Presenting a cheerful face to the world, ensuring the visitors' safety and keeping the floodlights on will be something to boast about. Anything else (and a stampede at a pre-tournament friendly on Sunday was not a good start) will not.
Where the World Cup resisters are right is that sport has no impact on what happens next. The Olympic Games are over in weeks, the World Cup in a month. Life then goes on, and a successful Games or Cup is no guide to how countries live it.
It has been said that the only thing playing chess makes you better at is chess — and the only thing a country proves by staging a successful sporting event is that it can stage a successful sporting event. It is not easy, but it is no guarantee of the future either. Greece hosted an accomplished Olympic Games in 2004, and, as those die-hard Afrikaners say, kyk hoe lyk hy nou — look at it now.
What happens to the teams tells us even less. That South African World Cup rugby glow gave way to everyday reality. Italy's winning of the 2006 football World Cup did not save it from national debt.
Yet the sense that life is a series of stories, with beginnings, ends and morals to learn, lies deep. When the US plays its opening game against England on June 12, many Americans will be looking elsewhere — and not just because soccer is not yet as popular in the US as its promoters had hoped. It will be because there is a more urgent drama: the oil spill from BP's well in the Gulf of Mexico.
When the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in April, killing 11, it did not, at first, attract the attention it merited, probably because we thought it would be swiftly dealt with. Those of us who remember John Wayne playing Paul ‘Red' Adair in the 1968 movie Hellfighters knew that daredevils had been capping wells for decades.
The first few BP efforts failed, but that did not stop people plotting the movie's next scene. We even had its title — Top Kill — which is what BP called its plan to stem the oil by pumping heavy drilling fluid into the leak.
A promising lead character, Pat Campbell, a one-time associate of Adair's, told The New York Times from a command centre in Houston that the well needed to learn who was boss. It had to be told: "I'm here, I'm touching you, I'm telling you you're dead".
Failure
If only. Top Kill failed. Instead, we had BP's placing last week of a lower marine riser package containment cap, which is not as catchy a movie title, but looks, finally, like being able to siphon off some of the escaping oil.
Even if it works perfectly, the damage will continue for months, if not longer, afflicting sea and bird life, beaches, fishing and tourism.
The damaged communities, understandably, want someone to pay a price. Hence President Barack Obama's vow that BP will not only make good all the damage but will, if necessary, face the might of the criminal law.
If anyone has been negligent, it is right to hold them to account. There is another possibility: that drilling 5,000 feet underwater, we, as a species, are out of our depth.
The story of how to reconcile our unslakeable thirst for oil with our collective abhorrence of risk would be a complex and subtle tale — a late-career challenge for Gordimer, perhaps. She is right: by comparison, football is only a game.
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