I don’t attend sporting matches. I can't abide the shouting. I’m deeply unsettled by it – the yelling, the cheering, the waving of banners, the manic-depressive cycle of win and loss, the joy and anger of it all. I like sport. It’s the spectacle in the stands I avoid.
Part of what I dislike is the colour-coded solidarity of sports fans, their team jerseys and flags. ‘It’s all theatre,’ they may say, ‘it’s not really us against them.’ Even so, there’s something atavistic about roleplaying a thin, dualistic identity that makes me nervous. Like battle re-enactors, sports fans leave me feeling… strange. A full sports stadium feels like a Stanford Prison Experiment waiting to happen. I don’t hear a crowd jeer. I hear it howl. It’s a muted battle cry that echoes off every suburban cricket pitch and footy oval on the weekend, our arenas of socially acceptable blood-lust-letting.
‘Get over yourself,’ I hear the crowd roar. ‘We’re just letting off steam.’ Could be. Maybe I’m oversensitive, reading too much into it – perhaps I just don’t like crowds.
But there’s one sport I can and do attend. Tennis. Admittedly, I love the game, the combination of physical and mental endurance that players need to win.
But I also enjoy the crowd. I like that something is required of them too. In tennis, the spectators – even if there are twenty thousand of them – must be quiet between points. It’s part of the game. Tennis demands a level of civility from its audience that is absent from most other sports, save perhaps golf or billiards, hardly stadium fare. Most stadium sports encourage the crowd to offload their accumulated tensions in carnivalesque displays of rapture and insolence. Tennis asks its audience to show restraint, to display measures of focus and self-control (attributes that also make great tennis players).
There's a pleasing symmetry about that, as if tennis encourages sportsmanship on and off the ‘field’ of play. After all, tennis players can hear what people in the stands call out to them.
This dynamic between player and spectator in tennis underlines, generally, the importance of maintaining social decorum. As a civilisation, we are not just watching. We are collectively and individually involved.
My father – at my urging – once took me to a (Canadian) football game. I was eleven. We got seats in the family section, a small area of the stadium put aside for families to enjoy the game at a safe distance from the sport’s more ardent fans. Two drunk guys sat behind us. It didn’t take long for them to settle in to their game faces. Minutes in, they threw peanuts onto the field, yelled obscenities at the referee and relished, in detail, what they’d do to the cheerleaders if they ever got them into a dark room. If this was the family section, I could only imagine what Dantean circle of hell awaited spectators who sat outside of it.
But we were stuck, assigned to seats 14 and 15 ww (or whatever it was) having paid for the privilege of sitting within earshot of those two idiots. That experience can easily be read as a metaphor for broader society, you don’t choose your neighbours etcetera.
There’s something to be explored there. Our experience of ‘the public’ is better when we all remember that our behaviour affects others and that society is not a winner take all proposition. Maybe it’s worth us doing more to champion, reward and admire displays of restraint, of empathy, of social responsibility. Boring, I know, but spreading the glue of civil society appears increasingly urgent and necessary.
Are we better or worse off when we allow ourselves to treat public space as private space? Are tennis fans good citizens?
– Yannick