Will Self is only the zillionth aesthete to sound this patrician note about the vulgarity and mindlessness of sport, but you need to read some of it to appreciate the depth of its contempt for a great portion of humankind – those of us who spend some of our time enjoying sport. Here he is:
You’ll be aware by now that of all the frenzied crowds that trouble my uneasy sleep, sporting ones bother me the most. I mean to say, to be crushed to death by a mob that is rampaging because tyranny flies at its backs has a certain justness but to be stomped on by people driven berserk by a ball game would be a pitiful end. Sporting events by their nature embody the worst excesses of late capitalism: the spectators are mere passive consumers of the commodified prowess of the athletes and the seasonal character of the spectacles mimics the cyclic time that this new peasantry is trapped in, while the masters of money and power forge ahead. No wonder sports fans are so often pissed off: they’re the victims of a massive con.
And there’s more if you want it: not just the excesses of late capitalism, the passive consumers and new peasantry, but also ‘the monstrous synchrony of a group mind’, the ‘disturbing unanimity’, ‘the eyes sliding back and forth like those of automata’ and so forth, fifth or even sixth.
Let’s get two things straight. One, you don’t like sport, you don’t have to like it; nobody’s forcing you. You can like what you want, and we can like what we do, likewise. Two, in a capitalist society, sport is affected by commercial imperatives: just as breakfast cereals are, movies, music and a whole lot of other spheres of human endeavour.
But to use either or both of these circumstances to insult the intelligence and imagination of others who don’t happen to share your philistine attitudes towards a range of skilful, sometimes beautiful, often riveting, occasionally thrilling human pursuits, to have the cheek to dehumanize these others by questioning their claim to thoughtful individuality, by treating them as captives of a monstrous synchrony, mere automata, and all on account of a difference in aesthetic preferences – this is to be a bit too bloody full of your bloody (will) self, and nothing more.