Gone are the days of fair play?

Robert Philip

• Last Updated: November 30. 2009 12:58AM UAE / November 29. 2009 8:58PM GMT

I stood on the touchline at an amateur football game in my local village in Scotland last week. In terms of skill and entertainment it is fair to say that I have seen better. Imagine 22 carthorses being given a ball to play with and you will get the idea.

But it was reassuring to discover that the butchers, bakers and bagpipe-makers clodhopping around the pitch had picked up something from the superstars of the game.

In the 45 minutes I endured – I would rather have undergone root canal treatment than suffer the second half – we were treated to three blatant dives inside the penalty area, four highly theatrical portrayals of feigning injury and two sneaky Thierry Henry-style handballs.

Sweden?s Mats Wilander is about to contact the ball playing in the first day of the U.S. Open, Aug. 29, 1988 in New York. He faces Greg Holmes at the National Tennis Center. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Choose any game at any level in any country – from schools’ football to World Cup finals – and you will encounter similar chicanery.

And it is not just the so-called beautiful game that is besmirched; drug taking, bribery, match-fixing, whatever your chosen form of cheating then rugby union, motor racing, horse racing or tractor pulling will provide it.

It would appear that only golf is above these assorted shenanigans. Perhaps golfers are still inspired by the memory of the great Bobby Jones, who lost the 1925 US Open by a single stroke after imposing a one-shot penalty on himself when he inadvertently touched the ball with the face of his club in the rough.

** FILE ** Australia's captain Mark Taylor walks away in despair after being caught in the slips by England's Mark Butcher off the bowling of Devon Malcolm for seven runs on the the first day of the 1st test match at Edgbaston in Birmingham, in this June 5, 1997, file photo. Former test captains Mark Taylor and Allan Border are part of a five-man panel chosen to select Australia's next cricket coach. Incumbent John Buchanan has announced he will not seek reappointment after the cricket World Cup in the Caribbean next March and April. (AP Photo/Rui Viera, FILE)

No one else witnessed the incident – not his playing partner, not the gallery, not the tournament referee. When the official said: “Well, Bobby, it’s up to you. Do you think you touched the ball?” Jones replied: “I don’t think I did, I know I did.”

After losing his chance of winning a 14th major, Jones forbade reporters from mentioning his honourable action with the immortal words: “There’s only one way to play the game. Otherwise you might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank.”

Robert Tyre "Bobby" Jones Jr. is shown blasting his way out of a trap in a practice match on the Pebble Beach links located on the California coast, Aug. 30, 1929. Jones prepares for the U.S. Amateur Golf Championship matches to take place on the same course from Sept. 2 to 7. (AP Photo)

In these days of sporting bank robbers, whatever happened to Bobby Jones’s notion of sportsmanship, which, according to my dictionary, means: conduct and attitude considered as befitting participants in sports, especially fair play, courtesy, striving spirit, and grace in losing?

We all cherish our own memories of such actions. Think of Jack Nicklaus during the 1969 Ryder Cup at Royal Birkdale where he sank a treacherous putt on the last green in the final singles then conceded Tony Jacklin’s knee-knocking two-and-a-half footer for a half and a 16-16 tie.

“I knew you could make it,” said Nicklaus, draping an arm around Jacklin’s shoulders after the US had retained the trophy, “but, under the circumstances, I wasn’t about to make you try.”

Mats Wilander is remembered as the winner of seven grand slam tennis titles and the most gentlemanly of champions. At the 1982 French Open at Roland Garros the then little known 17-year-old Wilander reached match point in his semi-final against the fourth-seeded Argentine, Jose-Luis Clerc.

After a prolonged baseline rally Clerc hit a forehand which the linesman called out. The umpire, Jacques Dorfmann, proclaimed, “Game, set and match,” and had climbed down from his chair before he noticed Wilander crouched ready to receive serve.

After a prolonged debate during which the teenager pleaded “I can’t win like this, the ball was good,” Dorfmann returned to his perch to announce that, at Wilander’s insistence, the point would be replayed.

The Swede went on to win the match a second time then defeated Clerc’s Davis Cup compatriot Guillermo Vilas in the final to become the youngest winner of a men’s grand slam.

“That’s the way I was brought up,” Wilander explained, rather in the manner of Bobby Jones.

“As a child my parents taught me that it was wrong to steal. If it was wrong to take something which does not belong to you in the street, then it must also be wrong to do the same on a tennis court.”

And who can forget Mark Taylor declining the opportunity of beating Sir Donald Bradman’s Australian Test batting record of 334? Captaining Australia in 1998, he declared his team’s innings closed when on the same mark against Pakistan in Peshawar.

One more run would have sufficed, after which Taylor could have been reasonably expected to eclipse Brian Lara’s then world record Test score of 375, but the captain put the chance of team victory above personal glory. “Anyway,” Taylor said, “that 334 is the only way I’ll ever get to be ranked alongside Sir Don.”

Speedway, too, provides a fine example of sportsmanship. It happened at the White City, Glasgow, where my speedway hero of the 1960s, the Australian rider Charlie Monk, was riding against world champion Barry Briggs for the Golden Helmet, the British match-race championship.

On the third lap of an epic wheel-to-wheel duel, during which the lead repeatedly changed hands, Briggs was brought down in an entirely accidental collision, whereupon Monk switched off his engine and cruised to a halt.

“What did you do that for, Charlie?” asked Briggs before the re-run. “I wanted to win, but not that way,” Monk replied.

Has that sentiment – I wanted to win, but not that way – been confined to the dustbin of sporting history? I await your e-mailed thoughts with interest.



rphilip@thenational.ae