One of the more infantile and abused cliches in sport is the adjective, “classy”.
Arguably, there is nothing classy in one human trying with all his or her might to subjugate another. And competitive subjugation is clearly the primary object of sport, regardless of the rituals of hand shaking, post-race hugs, and gracious interviews.
First place wins, others are subjugated. Not spat on or exiled, but still subjugated.
Real class, in this respect, would surely make us forego a recreation where self-esteem and disappointment depend entirely on which end of the see-saw we’re on when plank hits planet.
But, of course, that’s in an ideal world, while the real facts of life find us competing in our first race/fight/match/tournament at an age where we’re merely following family tradition, and far too young to understand good sportsmanship is also a self-serving gesture designed to buoy us when the chips are down. Because sportsmanship is a kind of winning too and beaten juniors who refuse to be good sports lose twice.
Sport’s ideologues even tell us that classiness in victory and defeat is an insurance policy which will stand us in good stead when life’s adult see-saw becomes splintery and a little one sided.
But then we’ve probably all seen kids from non-sporting families grow up to enjoy relatively successful lives free of comparison anxieties, self-loathing, and its dark corollary, violence. And this is simply because they were raised by rational parents who were able to impart life lessons similar to sporting parables, but minus the sweat and bother. In the end, there are no surveys to prove sport helps participants lead more or less fulfilling lives than their less active neighbours.
One of the more shameless abuses of the term “classy” came recently when Serena Williams applied it to Maria Sharapova’s prompt admission to using the drug meldonium.
As Williams would have known, Sharapova had no choice but to fess up. In the potentially binary world of public opprobrium and praise which sporting reputations endure on a daily basis, Sharapova’s reputation and net worth would have taken a far bigger hit had she tried to bluster through that episode with justifications or an outright denial. Her frank response was not about class, but commercial expediency.
That is not to say Sharapova is a reprehensible human being. She is a business person and a hugely charming one at that. I don’t think I’ve heard her utter one ill-considered or ungracious syllable in public, but get between her and a dollar she’s feels entitled to, and Maria’s instinct to win will dictate her response. Yet she will always act with propriety.
Contrast this to a comment made long ago by Jelena Dokic about her then up-and-coming adversary Alicia Molik (“she’s probably the sort of player who’ll never amount to much”) and there seems a world of difference in “classiness.”
Yet Jelena also has her admirers, including me, because the micro-environment she grew up in was one of hostile insularity – the media record of her father Damir’s increasingly paranoid exploits is extensive.
She had demons goading her to say things like that, just as Maria enjoyed the benefits of steady parenting and savvy management from the start. I would not hesitate to meet either, because, at heart, they both started out as impressionable kids who worshipped their opponents enough to want to beat them. And that’s not class either, but a very endearing, humanising trait. The rest is breeding and circumstance.
Consider all the pastoral care invested in swimmers these days (the team for the upcoming Junior Olympics has 30 swimmers and 17 minders). The result is young athletes who should know the consequences of “classless” comments or behaviour. With their older counterparts still behaving badly in public, perhaps all the professional attention being lavished on this new generation will make them different. I hope so.
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