Team Spirit

We all learnt that at school, didn’t we?

In my case, and probably in yours (assuming no millenniums read this blog), team meant sport.  Which meant competition.  Our team, because it was a team, had to develop spirit, which was what would enable us to beat the other team.  (The fact that the other team was usually a random Wednesday afternoon selection of one’s classmates, and so didn’t really have time to do that, wasn’t important.  The concept was the lesson.)  Team spirit enables the team to compete and win.

(It didn’t work that way in practice for me, because competing in a sporting team turned out to mean competing mainly against one’s teammates in order to improve one’s chances of being noticed and so advancing one’s social status, something I could do much more easily indoors.  Although one couldn’t totally duck, I generally managed to avoid contact sports, because I didn’t like getting hurt, of which there was a more than fifty-fifty risk because, although I wasn’t physically weak or small, I resisted acquiring the skills needed to avoid getting hurt without running the risk of getting hurt, which I didn’t like.  And cricket was for privileged boys.  So I never properly learnt team spirit.)

I now, I think, see the fallacy in all this.  Out here in the real grown-up world, most teams aren’t, or shouldn’t be trying to beat another team, never mind their own.  They are, or should be, trying to get the job done.  But that bloody competitive sporting team spirit they learnt at school does nothing but get in the way.

Lord Murray of Wimbledon

Or: Lord Cameron of Wherever?

Anyone remember Sir Fred Perry?  I thought not, because Fred wasn’t knighted for winning Wimbledon three successive times back in 1938.  He didn’t even get a *BE.  Perhaps Neville Chamberlain had a better sense of proportion than our current Prime Minister, who is on record as believing that he ‘can’t think of anyone more deserving of a knighthood [than Andy Murray].’ 

I can, but I’m not going to start the list here, because that would be to open up a can of all sorts and sizes of worms. 

I wouldn’t dream of denigrating Andy’s achievement, he’s a superb athlete and may well turn out to be one of the greatest tennis players ever.  But to be awarded a K for being the guy who broke a 76-year record of failure isn’t the marker I’d want to put on my CV. 

Especially if I were to acquire this honour for being the guy who broke the Curse of Cameron.

Still, a Mail headline is worth a few thousand votes, innit?

Who do they think I am?

We’d been having a conversation about the Olympics, because everyone’s interested, aren’t they?  They’d been to the rowing at Dornay, and were excited and enthused about the experience.  I haven’t  been watching any of it on the telly but I have been keeping up with what’s going on, more or less, although I’m not usually that interested in sport – because I feel impelled to join in with the national mood.  We debated a few fine technical points, like whether men’s football, tennis and (as is being proposed) golf should be included – consensus, no – chatted about some recent results, and then moved on to a review of the opening ceremony, which we all agreed was splendid.  I suggested that the best thing about it was its quiet subversiveness, culminating in the choice of seven of the next generation to light the cauldron above any of the peevish aging laureates.   

At this point, I started to sense that I’d lost it.  “Seb Coe should have lit it,” I was instructed.  I ran my objections to this preposterous suggestion rapidly though my head and decided a gentle head-shake was the wisest response.  This got picked up.  “I know you’re not interested, but can’t you find anything positive to say about the Olympics?” I was asked angrily.

 

Later on, we watched some boxing.  “I really don’t like boxing,” I said, going on to explain that I’d been quite good at it at prep school because I’d been forced to be.  “Well, we do,” I was told.  “I know you don’t like sport, because you’re more interested in music and stuff like that.”

The fight could have started then; but I thought of Wittgenstein and kept my silence.  So now you know.  I’m the guy who isn’t interested in sport because he likes music.