Article
Community
Culture
Football
Idolatry
Sport
5 min read

The decade that defined sport 

What the sports stars of today owe to the eighties.

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

Maradona runs in celebration, holding a hand aloft as an England player sits dejected on the ground.
Maradona celebrates, 1986 World Cup.
Dani Yako via Wikimedia Commons

If the 1980s were your formative years as a sports fan, you will carry many images with you even today.  Dennis Taylor potting the last black after midnight to beat Steve Davis.  Barry McGuigan defeating Eusebio Pedrosa in the ring at Loftus Road.  The races between Coe and Ovett at the Moscow Olympics.  The tie break between Borg and McEnroe.  Botham’s Ashes.  Diego Maradona versus England at the Mexico World Cup.   

You will undoubtedly have other memories, though these will have been controlled by a limited number of broadcast editors.  I clearly recall watching Viv Richards’ astonishing century in one cricket World Cup final against hosts England being regularly interrupted on BBC1’s Grandstand with coverage of a routine horse race meeting.  The introduction of the less fusty World of Sport on ITV was a route in for some sports that faced an implicit class bias, but it was all still far removed from the 24/7 reverencing of sport today. 

The eighties was an era of transition as sport began to gain a place in our cultural consciousness.  It was also a decade in which the relationship between sport and politics became cemented on paths we still walk.  In Everybody Wants To Rule The World, academic and journalist Roger Domeneghetti has written an entertaining and informative book subtitled ‘Britain, Sport and the 1980s’. 

In our branding of the twenties as the decade of polarisation, we forget how deeply divided Britain was in the eighties.  Recent commentary on the fortieth anniversary of the miners’ strike has been a reminder of this and how violent public life proved.  Football hooliganism was pervasive and after a riot at a Luton Town – Millwall game in 1985, Margaret Thatcher asked of football officials: ‘what are you going to do about it?’.  In a pithy and telling response, the FA secretary Ted Croker said: ‘Not our hooligans, Prime Minister, but yours.  The product of your society’.  Perhaps more than any other exchange, it symbolised the braiding of sport and politics, threads that endure to this day. 

The sports stars of today have become surrogate saints, held up as an inspiration for what can be achieved and frequently employed as motivational speakers.

The argument that sport and politics don’t mix has a familiar ring for people who live with the tired old trope that religion and politics don’t either, as if our experience of culture and values are sealed off from each other.  Sporting boycotts in the 1980s - from Olympics to apartheid South Africa – placed athletes in the unavoidable position of having to make decisions about participation that would reflect on their values and could affect their careers; positioning that other people were spared.  These were an early taste of the moral standing afforded to sportsmen and women today; a status that somehow asks more of them, perhaps because other professions have become so tarnished and mistrusted. 

Domeneghetti’s book is also a sobering reminder of how ugly and careless much of our shared life was in the eighties.  The Bradford City fire and Hillsborough disaster were awful losses that showed the low priority of health and safety and the culture of institutional cover up that continues to blight the nation.  The author locates these failings in the wider context of disasters like Kings Cross, Piper Alpha and the Marchioness boat as part of his bid to write a social history of sport. 

Yet in a sense, Domeneghetti chose arbitrary parameters.  Football in particular was on the cusp of a revolution with the introduction of the Premier League in 1992.  Cultural sympathy for the game was about to change with the writings of Nick Hornby in Fever Pitch and Pete Davies in All Played Out.  The nasty face of football was to be transformed into a highly marketable model. 

The ugliness of the era is laid bare in the prolific and casual racism, sexism and homophobia that coursed through every sport.  The Windrush’s second generation broke through in the 1980s, notably in football, but was met with staggering levels of prejudice.  Anyone tempted to think this has now been eradicated hasn’t spent any real time at a football ground or on social media.  Women’s sport had virtually no profile in the eighties outside of tennis and athletics and as recently as 1978, Lord Denning had ruled that an eleven-year-old girl should not be allowed to play competitive football against boys the same age even though she merited a place in her team.  Meanwhile, stars like Justin Fashanu, Martina Navratilova and John Curry were targeted for their sexual orientation.  It remains hard for present day athletes to identify as gay, despite the rhetoric of acceptance.  Sport then, as now, held up an unerring mirror to our faces. 

The sports stars of today have become surrogate saints, held up as an inspiration for what can be achieved and frequently employed as motivational speakers.  But there is the gloss of a hyper-individualistic, neo-liberal culture.  Sports stars succeed because of a combination of innate gifting (which cannot simply be replicated) and material advantage (too many Olympic medals are still awarded to wealthy and advantaged Britons). I won because I wanted it more is a dishonest assessment of sporting success in the UK and in this way also holds up a mirror to other walks of life.   

The powerful personal branding of today’s athletes in many ways have their origin in the 1980s and the way the likes of Ian Botham, Carl Lewis and John McEnroe transcended their sports.  The cult of the conquering superstar is a smart diversion from the reality that money usually wins.  Just look at the Premier League table. 

Article
Books
Culture
Morality
5 min read

Never Let Me Go: 20 years on

Ishiguro’s brilliant novel is the perfect Frankenstein story for today.

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here

Four young people peer through a window.
Carey Mulligan and Keira Knightley in the 2010 film adaption.
Fox Searchlight Films.

This article contains spoilers. 

Human beings are creative. For good or for evil, making new things out of raw materials is something that we can’t help doing, whether that’s writing new books, creating new recipes, or building new houses. Why are we born this way? Christians would say it’s because of the imago Dei: because according to the book of Genesis, the first book in the Bible, we are made in the image of God. If God created the world and every one of us, and if we’re made in his image, then it follows that all of us have this creative impulse within us, too.  

But if creating is something natural to us, does it follow that it’s also core to our identity as human beings? In other words, is making something that we do, or something that we are? Are we different from all other living creatures in this world by being creators ourselves?  

Although he doesn’t call himself a Christian, these are precisely the kind of theological questions the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro asks time and time again in his books. And nowhere does he ask them more powerfully than in Never Let Me Go, which was published 20 years ago. 

Never Let Me Go starts off as the story of three children at a boarding school. Kathy, one of three friends, serves as our first-person narrator; it’s through her eyes that we slowly realise something sinister is taking place. As Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth grow into teenagers and then young adults, it’s finally revealed that they are clones, brought into being thanks to advancements in cloning technology in a dystopian post-World War II Britain. They are brought up for the sole purpose of being organ donors. Or, to put it more bluntly, they’ve been raised for slaughter.  

Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy have a happy childhood at their boarding school, Hailsham. Their future is hinted at by their teachers, but they’re largely shielded from the truth. All around the country, we later find out, clone children are being raised in horrific conditions. But Hailsham is different, because its Headteacher, Miss Emily, is part of a group that believes the clones deserve to be treated humanely – at least until someone needs a kidney transplant.  

But, though treated in a ‘humane’ way, society doesn’t see the Hailsham clones as ‘human’, and that’s precisely what Miss Emily is trying to prove: that they are not unlike real, normal people. So, she encourages the children to make art. ‘A lot of the time’, Kathy tells us, ‘how you were regarded at Hailsham, how much you were liked and respected, had to do with how good you were at “creating”’. The children don’t understand why they must always paint and draw, but they’re told that Madame Marie-Claude, a mysterious figure, will collect their best artworks for a seemingly important ‘gallery’.  

Years later, Tommy and Kathy have become a couple. Before dying – or ‘completing’, as they call it – after her second ‘donation’, Ruth tells them that she believes a deferral is possible for couples that are truly in love. Kathy and Tommy go to Miss Emily’s house, their former Headmistress, certain that, as children, they were encouraged to produce art precisely to be able to prove, one day, their true feelings.  

They are quickly disappointed. Miss Emily reveals that Hailsham has now closed down, but that while the school stood, it was meant as an experiment, aimed at convincing the public to improve living conditions for the clones: 

‘We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all…we demonstrated to the world that if students were reared in humane, cultivated environments, it was possible for them to grow to be as sensitive and intelligent as any human being.’ 

Equating creativity with human identity does make sense, to an extent at least. In The Mind of the Maker (1941), Christian novelist and critic Dorothy L. Sayers argued that the closest we can get to understanding God as our Creator is through engaging ourselves in creative acts: ‘the experience of the creative imagination in the common man or woman and in the artist is the only thing we have to go upon in entertaining and formulating the concept of creation’. In creative acts, from a Christian perspective, we partially grasp God’s creation of us.  

Ultimately, however, being creative in imitation of God, is not enough to get to the very core of what defines a human being. There are all kinds of factors, from old age to mental or physical disability, that make any form of traditionally creative act highly unlikely for some people. By that definition, someone in a coma or a newborn baby is not fully human. 

That’s exactly the definition of humanity that underpins the cruel society of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. We need a better definition, and Christianity provides a unique tradition to help us on the way. A Christian concept of the human person is one that looks both at why we were made, and what we were made for. Christians believe that God made us out of love, and for the purpose of being in communion with him. He made each one of us as a special and irreplaceable individual, and for each of us our telos – the end or aim of our life – is to join him in heaven.  

If we embrace this definition of what it means to be human, then the extent to which we are able to express our intelligence or creativity while on earth doesn’t really matter anymore. If we believe that merely to exist is good – not to exist and fulfil our potential through this or that accomplishment, but just to exist – then we can’t deny that each member of the human family is, in fact, a ‘person’ in the fullest sense of the word.  

It is precisely this God-shaped hole that makes the concept of human dignity so fragile and slippery in Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro’s brilliant novel is, ultimately, the perfect Frankenstein story for the modern day. It warns us about the consequences of what might happen if we try to treat other human beings as things we have paid, but even more powerfully it shows us the danger of valuing human life for its creativity, instead of loving it as the creation of God. 

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