The decade that defined sport

What the sports stars of today owe to the eighties.

Simon Burton-Jones

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

America

Conspiracy theory

Culture

Politics

10 April 2024

5 min read

Will America succumb to the undertow?

A returning expat asks if an exhausted majority is, in fact, asleep.

Jared Stacy

Jared Stacy holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

A sleeping voter sits and snoozes next to voting booth.

'Which One?'

Nick Jones/Norman Rockwell/Midjourney.ai.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously made a decision to return to Germany before the outbreak of the Second World War. The year was 1938, and he was visiting America for a second time. Instead of taking a theology teaching position in New York that would’ve kept him above the fray of a deteriorating social world in Germany, Bonhoeffer’s sense of spiritual responsibility drove him to solidarity with the German situation.

I’ve thought about Bonhoeffer a lot these last few months as our family is making a transition back to the States during an election year. Not because I’d ever directly compare our move with Bonhoeffer’s. But because I’m anticipating the “shock” of returning to a deteriorating social world. Unlike him, our decision to return is far more modest and expedient. Still, we’re often asked by our friends here in Scotland, “why go back?”

My immediate answer is straightforward and entirely different than Bonhoeffer: we did what we came here to do. Our visas are up; I’m defending my PhD this month. But behind these questions of expediency, I do feel the weight of an existential question, one directed towards myself as much as it is towards America.

And that question is “who is going back?” Because after three years, America has changed to us as we’ve changed ourselves.

The persecution confronting white Christians in America is the soft persecution of opulence diffused in the ordinary.

With that change comes new choices and new questions that didn’t confront us years ago. Returning to America has us asking questions like, how do you talk to your school-aged kids about active shooter drills in their new school? How will we navigate the racialized social scripts that pervade not just American communities, but also American churches? How will we re-enter a job market that ties production to basic health care?

We’re bracing for the shock of going back to America. It will be more difficult than leaving ever was. Not just because we’ve changed, but also that the American situation has grown more extreme while paradoxically denying that change.

We’ve discovered that if American Christians are persecuted at all, it’s not from President Biden’s “corrupt regime” seeking to jail Trump or secure power through another “rigged election.” No, the persecution confronting white Christians in America is the soft persecution of opulence diffused in the ordinary.

As an expat returning to America, I wonder if this exhausted majority is, in fact, asleep.

Perspective changes everything. The outsider’s view of America careening towards a crisis of democracy and a social fabric rent at the seams isn’t felt as much by those who live within its social world, whose experience of the mundane obscures the poly-crisis pressing our social fabric at the seams. How did we get here?

Researchers discovered an interesting demographic cohort in American life, you might have heard of it. It’s called the “exhausted majority.” It refers to an ideological diverse cohort at the center of American life that has all but disengaged politically. Researchers began to talk about this “exhausted majority” in 2018, before the pandemic, before a less-than-peaceful transfer of democratic power. The hope was, then, that this “exhausted majority” might be mobilized to fend off polarization and extremism. As an expat returning to America, I wonder if this exhausted majority is, in fact, asleep.

What has become of this exhausted majority? In the wake of 2020, America underwent significant backlash and retrenchment. This affected churches, too. Friends who are pastors tell me churches in their communities have “re-sorted” along partisan lines. One pastor suggested the election might not divide churches this time, as much as partisan-determined churches might contribute to social division. Polarization has worked its way from the outer edges of American life to the very center. It does this work silently, mediated by our reliance on algorithms, a life conformed to and captured by digital architecture.

There’s an element of surprise here, at least for us as we return. Because what we experienced as the collapse of our social world in white evangelicalism—a world that we no longer are at home in— I’ve found is still very much active, very much automated—like survival reflexes—still providing an artificial coherence and plausible deniability amidst a deteriorating social situation.

This retrenchment and backlash creates a dangerous condition: an undertow. For so many, life goes on as normal on the surface, while democratic institutions are pulled apart beneath. America is caught in a rip current, but asleep on the surface. This undertow partly explains, at least to me, why all the talk of “the crisis of democracy” doesn’t register with many Americans.

A recent survey found that more than half of Americans haven’t heard the term “Christian Nationalism”—in spite of a flurry of academic and popular discourses on the term, often at the center of “crisis of democracy” rhetoric.

The fact is, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it didn’t fall in a day, either. The Senate handing over power to Caesar one day didn’t do much to alter the mundane early morning routine of bread makers in Rome the next day. Tyranny dawns, but the ordinary continues. The routine of the mundane and ordinary, of bread and circuses, makes talk of a democratic collapse seem just another political game, a distraction from all the amusement that Neil Postman observed might be our death.

As we return to America, reflecting on who we’ve become and the responsibility of faith, I’ve found myself considering the difference between being fated and being holy.

Fate confronts us as necessity. The holy confronts us as something other. And this “other”—at least for Bonhoeffer—was the freedom of God. And I can think of no better prayer for the church in America in the coming years to maintain in ourselves the crucial distinction between fatedness and holiness. To not confuse the expediency of partisan games with the responsibility made visible in the light of the central claim of Christian faith in the body of Jesus Christ. The Crucified One, not the fate of Western Civilization, determines what it is to be the ekklesia, the “called out” community, both free and responsible, never fated.