By Phil Williams

George Orwell once wrote that serious sport “is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.” Football games in the park and Olympic feats of strength might not seem like heinous acts of war, but is part of why we do them to avoid killing one another?

Sporting activity has been recorded as long as records have existed; from thirty-thousand-year-old cave drawings to Ancient Egyptian monuments, all humanity’s earliest images concern our physical aptitude. Archery, swimming and wrestling were all there before we learned to write. People kept fit and active for survival, but with monuments and international events present thousands of years ago, there is more to sport than necessity; it seems to be the source of our greatest pride.

Team sports are thus often used as a proxy for more serious confrontation. In Mesoamerican civilizations, games similar to volleyball could involve human sacrifices and decapitations, but war was avoided through playing them. The tenth-century Toltec king Topiltzin gained the territories of three rivals through victory in the sport, and Mayan culture tellingly revered ‘ballplayer’ as a title of kings, a role found frequently in their mythology. Modern ballgames haven’t been so dramatic since the Middle Ages, when European football was a mass event involving teams of up to 1000 people and occasional murders, but the spirit of territorial pride still survives. The drive to better other groups in sport is fervent, evident enough in flag-flying and chant-singing, whether it’s another town, another country or even a rival gang of schoolchildren that we’re trying to shame. Many would argue that a team’s loss in football’s European Cup is more humbling than any fist-fight could be, and it certainly seems more capable of drawing tears from the toughest of men.

It was with the power of sporting pride in mind that the Olympic Games found a resurgence after being damned as pagan ritual during Roman times. Decades of effort were necessary from the likes of Pierre de Coubertin, the French founder of the International Olympic Committee, before the games really regained momentum in 1906.

Sport remains a convenient way to avoid bloodshed in fighting one’s way to the position of The Best. It also provides an occasional humbling blow without fatal consequences. Communities and nations battling for honor are no more serious than children playing for fun when everyone respects the winner and losing doesn’t mean death. For whatever violence Orwell might have seen in it, it is nevertheless true that if men couldn’t flex their masculinity through organized physical activity, we’d probably have to hit one another a lot more to prove ourselves.

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