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Gamesmanship and arrogance - where to draw the line?

Former UFC heavyweight champion Brock Lesnar is returning.
Roar Guru
23rd April, 2014
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Despite current expectations for champions to display both off-field class and arrogant on-field ascendancy, their combative instincts are rarely far from the surface.

Former MMA star Brock Lesnar set a new bar for tone-lowering when he dismissed opponent Shane Carwin’s division two collegiate wrestling credentials by saying, “division two is only there so kids don’t hang themselves”.

Lesnar, a former division one champion credited with lifting the profile of a faltering UFC heavyweight division, very likely regretted this lapse into rhetorical barbarism. Yet there was no apology.

Oddly, the comment failed to ignite an appropriate storm of indignation from sporting administrators and teen support groups. The only censure I came across was limited to online forum tut-tutting.

Perhaps it was so beyond the pale of even the most gauche trash-talk standards that commentators felt unanimously compelled to deny it oxygen.

That someone like Lesnar, who is familiar with traditions both of sportsmanship and showmanship, could make such a massive faux pas shows how close elite sportsmen can be to the jugular of uncivil urges.

This is hardly surprising. It has been argued that a desire to subjugate your fellow humans via an implicitly competitive pursuit like sport is an uncivil gesture in itself.

Multiply this denunciation by several degrees for those who actually possess the talent and bile to succeed, and you have a human being likely to walk on the dark side from time to time.

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When Jelena Dokic’s star was in its early ascendancy, she once commented that her little known opponent on that day, Alicia Molik, would ‘probably never amount to much’. It is a matter of history that both girls amounted to a good deal, yet each ultimately without the career-defining grail of a slam win.

For what it’s worth, Dokic amassed around $4.5 million in career earnings, Molik a million or so less. The only surprising thing about Dokic’s comment is – given her father’s outrageous antics – that she did not commit many, many more clangers.

In light of what can only have been an arduous childhood under a tyrannical papa, Australians were generally forgiving of Dokic’s later ambivalence about nationality. Few sports fans would be churlish enough to deny her a special affection.

Then there was Serena Williams’ alleged threat of grave violence to a lineswoman. The incident is widely recalled but rarely regurgitated in press interviews, as if the public grants a special one-off dispensation to those whose life energies are tormented by a killer hubris.

Of course, the desire to be front and centre of your own life narrative is not limited to sportsmen. In his book The End of History, author Francis Fukuyama argued that very few of us lack a ‘thymotic urge’ to rise to prominence at the expense of others.

It’s just that sport addresses it most exclusively and in its least nuanced form.

He claimed those who had this urge in its earliest forms and found opportunities to exercise it instituted our first aristocracies.

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Whether today’s examples are millionaires, elite sportsmen, academics, politicians or artists, some of their ilk will act occasionally as if there should be a red carpet rolled out in front of them and get away with it.

Those who behave likewise without special abilities, privilege or charm, run a good chance of ending up not on court, but in it.

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