A Sporting Life

I am aware that what passes for Sports in our schools is now little more than larger scale soft play. Over the last three decades the competitive element of school sports has been whittled and eroded away in the interests of equality, liberalism, laziness and the culture of cotton wool wrapped health and safety.

What better way to avoid claims for injury or worse by not letting the little darlings do or participate in anything involving a bat and ball, or with any prospect or possibility of contact with another human being.

I am sorry but life is a contact sport from day one and to give the impression to our youngsters that competition is not necessary is just a case of selling them one huge fat lie that will not serve them any use in their subsequent adult lives.

I find it interesting that the Public School system in the UK still maintain a rough, tough and bloody sports regime and wth their graduates going on to dominate positions of authority in government, industry and commerce. Meanwhile, those who have endured a non-sports upbringing are pliable, manageable and very capable of being controlled and manipulated by those of a stronger competitive mentality.

My own secondary schooling and in particular the sports we partook of very much formed part of the process of natural selection.

Take, for example, the activity of the Long Jump. The long and narrow rectangle of the run-up and sandpit was, at our school, on the far side of the playing field, close and paralell to the fence line with private houses and under willow trees. The long jump only came into the curriculum in the summer term and its actual use could be measured in terms of a few hours only in that period. For the rest of the academic year the sandpit served the neighbourhood cats as a large litter tray or as a dumping ground for lawn and hedge trimmings from the adjoining houses. The sandpit was also handy for the under-age smokers as an ash tray and the boozers as somewhere to bury and conceal cans and bottles, intact or sharp jagged edged. Under such conditions the fear of i) Tripping on a run up, ii) Pulling a muscle iii) Twisting an ankle, paled into insignificance compared with the distinct possibility of contracting hepatitis, blood poisoning, actually bleeding to death or swallowing most of the large cloudlike haze of flies that favoured the sandpit for its primordial environment.  

We were also allowed free and usually unsupervised access to classical sporting weaponry including the steel javelin, leather clad discus and cannon ball dimension shot put.

There was a briefing way back in the first year of secondary school about not running up to retrieve a thrown javelin as this could lead to a painful case of being impaled through which your sports kit could become damaged and with some implications amongst parents should this occur. The etiquette of throwing in strict turn was also covered and well away from the running track or where the fatter kids would congregate after dropping out of the 800 metres heats. This was common sense after all but did not make any allowance for the one pupil in our class, a Traveller by descent, who we suspected was actually about 16 years old in a class of 13 year olds . He was catching up on a sketchy educational background. He had amazed his peers upon his arrival in school by being sufficiently tall enough to pee out of the window above the urinals in the boys cloakroom, a feat much copied by subsequent pupil intakes but never actually achieved. His magnificent although not altogether conventional javelin throw caught the fatter kids by surprise and scattered them with some sprightliness from what they had been told and understood as the safe zone on the playing field. 

The discus was a strange concept, a bit like an ancient frisbee. This sport did discriminate against those in our year who had smaller, feminine hands but we had our suspicions anyway at an early stage.

Shot Put was a chance to show off love bites on the neck from scuffles with the High School Girls but again fresh ones from the night before or even lunch time liaisons did introduce the potential for transmission of blood related maladies.

Pole Vault was available but without a mattress to land on it was not that popular. Only one pupil in our year embraced that discipline from the first year until school leaving age and had accumulated a nice cabinet full of certificates and awards for his, I must say frankly, stupidity and reckless self-endangerment.

Climatic conditions did not really impact on our being marched out onto the field for sports lessons. Exceptions being when the field was flooded, snowbound or cloaked in fog or on that one occasion, smoke, when someone set fire to the groundsmans shed. The indoor Gymnasium had similar torture equipment such as the vaulting horse( ex- Prisoner of War surplus), wall bars and climbing ropes. The sensation on legs and groin of using the ropes was quite an attraction for adolescent boys but with,again, some scope for the spreading of contagious conditions.

Most of us survived the competition and hazards of school sports with little or no mental or tissue damage. I am strongly of the viewpoint that through such activities we became well prepared for that ruthless and heartless, selfish and debilitating assault course that is everyday adult life.