Sports

Certain sports, such as golf, tennis, and cricket, have traditionally been governed by strict codes of decorum and silence, the only acceptable comments being compliments. Others, such as football, soccer, rugby, and baseball are more robust: trading of insults and stand-up fights are quite common. Polo, one of the most exclusive sports, is marked by copious swearing. Whatever its provenance, sport has not always been gentlemanly. The Puritan Philip Stubbes, in his Anatomie of Abuses (1583) wrote: “I protest unto you it may rather be called a friendly kind of fight, than a play or recreation; a bloody or murdering practice, than a fellowly sport or pastime.” He was describing football, “whereof groweth envy, malice, rancour, choler, hatred, displeasure, enmity and what not else” (in Dover Wilson, ed., 1944, 38-39).

It is generally conceded that in modern times traditional sporting codes have eroded as competition has become more intense and prize money more lucrative. Golf alone has remained free of the taint of the audible obscenities that have come to disgrace both tennis and cricket in recent decades. John McEnroe’s notoriously long and shameful record of public obscenity on the tennis court culminated in ejection from the Australian Open Championship in 1990 for telling the umpire, amongst other things, to “fuck off!” A similar outburst at Wimbledon led to banning from the All England Tennis Club for several years. McEnroe was an extreme example, and it would appear that these strong disciplinary measures did have the effect of reducing instances of public obscenity in tennis.

“It’s not cricket,” first recorded around 1851, has become a quintessentially English ethical saying applied to any situation, originally endorsing fairness by condemning any infringement of the spirit of the game. However, an ugly modern development has been the growth of “sledging,” the deliberate use of provocative, abusive, personal, and intimidatory language directed at a batsman by close fielders and bowlers to distract him or undermine his confidence. The word is first recorded in Australia, according to a report in The Sydney Morning Herald (November 4, 1982): “The court has been told by Ian Chappell [the Australian cricket captain] that the expression ‘sledging’ had come into vogue among cricketers in 1963–64. It came from the expression ‘subtle as a sledgehammer’ derived from a popular song.” The practice has now spread throughout the modern game, being especially prevalent in one-day cricket, the highly lucrative “limited-overs” or abbreviated version initiated in 1975. Umpires no longer make any attempt to limit this use of foul language as a weapon, even though comments have become generally audible through microphones installed near the wickets.

An extreme instance of a different kind led to the cricket Test Match between England and Pakistan in Faisalabad being halted on December 8, 1987, as a consequence of the English captain Mike Gatting referring to the umpire Shakoor Rana as a “bastard.” The umpire regarded the insult as being of such gravity that he refused to continue, reportedly explaining: “Calling me a bastard may be excusable in England, but here people murder someone who calls another man a bastard” ( The Star , Johannesburg, December 11, 1987, 20). The following day’s play was abandoned while a written apology was sought from Gatting, and continued only after it had been forthcoming. However, the other side of the verbal engagement emerged only in the British newspaper, the Independent , which reported that “the umpire had allegedly called the England captain a ‘fucking cheating cunt’” (Harris, 1990, 417).

Certainly the greatest public outrage of recent decades was provoked during the Soccer World Cup of 1986 when Diego Maradona scored for Argentina against England by means of a blatant foul, using his hand to palm the ball into the goal. When asked after the match about the incident, Maradona said that the goal had been scored by the “hand of Diego,” using a basphemous pun, since “Diego” means “God.” Maradona eventually confessed to the foul on his chat show on August 24, 2005.

As in other social areas, ethnic slurs continue to surface in sport. In an ugly new development, Australia’s spectators abused South African players in cricket test matches, calling them kaffirs and kaffir-boetics (“nigger-lovers”) ( Cape Times , December 1, 2005, 1). As a penalty, Lehmann was suspended for four matches. Racist abuse has also become an increasingly serious issue in football, notably in the United Kingdom. The report by Lord Justice Taylor into the state of English soccer in 1990 recommended the banning or suppression of “obscene or racist chanting” by football spectators. However, in a match against Spain in Barcelona in 2004, a black English player “was subjected to a barrage of monkey chants and booing whenever he got the ball” ( Independent , November 18, 2004). A number of leading clubs have started to enforce measures to eliminate the practice, under the aegis of the antiracism campaign Kick It Out. In 2004, FIFA, the Federation of International Football, started to publicize the slogan “Say No to Racism.”