Sport Versus Art

By Chris Thurman

As a schoolboy, I did not find it difficult to integrate “sporting” and “artistic” interests. My mother patiently shuttled me from soccer practices to music lessons, or packed extra sandwiches for snacks between afternoon cricket matches and evening play rehearsals. This was all made easier, no doubt, by the fact that the headmaster at my high school (who also happened to be my father) believed in the classical credo mens sana in corpore sano – a healthy mind in a healthy body – to the extent that he made the First XV rugby team join the chorus in whatever musical was being staged as the school’s major production each year.

Looking back, however, I can discern the traces of conflict even in this comparatively open-minded school environment. Inevitably, we absorbed some of the assumptions that were widely held outside the school gates; assumptions about, for instance, a national hierarchy of sports. As sports scientist Ross Tucker has noted, the dominance of soccer, rugby and cricket in South Africa means that “smaller sports – sometimes patronisingly called ‘Cinderella sports’ – are forced to make do with few resources. For them, there is often no Cinderella story, only ‘poverty’ and ‘survival’.” (This would imply that, in financial terms at least, minor sports relate to major sports in the same way that the arts do.)

Tucker’s point is an economic one, but there are underlying ideological causes for the promotion of some sports and the demeaning of others, just as for the priority sport is given over the arts.

I am ashamed to recall that my rugby team-mates and I merrily referred to hockey as “mof-stok”. Worse still, as a pre-teen primary school kid whose “nerdy” interests were forgiven by his sports-mad friends because he could also throw or kick a ball, I was one of those who sniggered at a boy who attended ballet lessons after school instead of joining the on-field fracas. These were fairly minor manifestations of a phenomenon that has had – and continues to have – far more serious repercussions in South African society: the dubious patriarchal alliance of sport and masculinity.

There is a brand of chauvinism, common to both township sports clubs and elite private schools, that measures virility according sporting ability. It is arguably part of a broader male pathology in our country that results in nauseatingly high rates of violence against women; the same pathology, it could be said, aggravates the strain of homophobia betraying a conservative national consensus and running counter to the tenets of our liberal constitution. Some of the contributors to Sport versus Art address questions of gender as they pertain to sport (and to the arts). Related issues, which have been more fully explored elsewhere, are the sexual objectification of many female athletes across the world – and, conversely, the stigmatisation of those who don’t fit into neat gender categories, as was demonstrated throughout the protracted Caster Semenya saga.

Many readers will remember Springbok rugby coach Peter de Villiers’s most widely reported press conference blunder of 2009: after numerous incidents of foul play in that year’s British Lions series, he facetiously compared rugby and dancing as “contact sports”. He had forgotten, I’m sure, that not too long ago the Golden Lions Rugby Union invited dancer-choreographer Gladys Agulhas to run training workshops with rugby referees; or that former international rugby players and other athletes regularly appear as contestants on the TV show Strictly Come Dancing. Members of the South African Ballet Theatre (SABT) responded to Div’s disparaging remarks about ballet dancers and tutus by reiterating a previous challenge to the national rugby team’s players to compete in a fitness test with SABT’s male principal dancers. The Springboks declined the invitation. (Here it should be mentioned that former Bok hooker James Dalton, known as a ruffian both on and off the rugby field, did take up the challenge – just as he was game enough to participate in a season of Strictly Come Dancing.)

A number of comments from readers of online articles reporting on the challenge betray the widespread idiocy that a macho sporting culture promotes: “Let the ballet dancers do a practice game against the Bokke … Can you imagine Bakkies taking out ballet dancers at the ruck or the Beast upfront in the scrum against one of these guys?”; “Good one Bokke, let the poofters do ballet and you play rugby!”; “I think the ballet dancers would love to play a game of rugby … men in tights grabbing each other around the neck or picking them up while firmly placing their hands on their **** could probably be referred to as a contact sport … maybe the dancers can’t wait to get hold of some good S.A. Prime Cuts”; “Put those poofters on the field and smash them! They should go and jump on a different bandwagon, one that’s filled with pink tutus, tights and heaven knows what else their crowd is into.” And so on.

Fortunately, there are numerous contributions to Sport versus Art that replace such vitriol with more nuanced approaches to the connections between ballet and rugby, from sportswriters to members of the SABT itself – along with dance critics, addressing the “us” and “them” divisions that exist in South Africa between proponents of different dance forms as much as between dancers and sportspeople.

Some would consider the association of dancing with femininity as largely a “white” or “Western” prejudice. Gumboot and Zulu martial dancers alike – to choose two prominent examples, although these have admittedly become the stuff of touristic cliché – are proof that dance in this country has traditionally been a means to express masculine energy and physical strength. One might say, then, that it is only the “European” dance form of ballet that invokes such prejudice. But this conclusion is not satisfactory either: both because, as local ballet dancers justifiably claim, ballet need not be categorised as “foreign” or “elite”; and because, as leading black male contemporary dancers such as Sello Pesa, Gregory Maqoma or Thabo Rapoo can attest, the stigma attached to male dancers crosses divisions of race and culture.

It ought to be self-evident in post-apartheid South Africa that terms such as “African” and “European” or “black” and “white” cannot be used as simplistic binaries, but relate to one another in complex ways. Yet those who wish to read Sport versus Art through a racial lens may discern, in the various contributions, an example-in-microcosm of what a colleague of mine has dubbed “the gulf between black and white” that still seems to apply to the support of different sporting codes in South Africa.

Despite a slow process of integration, can we deny that there remains a “chasm” between sports fans of different races? This is “the Caster Semenya syndrome”, according to which it is understood that – as the Julius Malemas of this world were quick to point out, when the troubled young athlete returned home with her eight hundred metres gold medal and a suitcase full of controversy from the International Association of Athletics Federation World Championships in Berlin – white people go to the airport to greet “their” sportspeople (rugby and cricket teams) and black people go to the airport to greet “their” sportspeople (soccer and athletics teams). “A similar, though less marked gap” is perceived to exist in the arts, my colleague notes: “Whites read crime novels, blacks read poetry; whites like rock, blacks like gospel.”

It remains a moot point as to whether such “cultural chauvinism” causes sporting codes and artistic disciplines to undermine the project of national reconciliation as much as they facilitate it. Either way, one thing is certain – we have yet to attain a sophisticated understanding of the interplay between sport and the arts.

If some sections of the sports-fanatic public utterly misconstrue the performing arts, it must also be said that artists, writers and intellectuals can unfairly categorise sporting endeavour – and sportspeople – as inherently “unintelligent”, narrow-minded or even fundamentally reactionary. In this sense, sport is demeaned as an intellectually or aesthetically ‘poor’ relation of the arts (I am indebted to Gavin Sourgen, also a contributor to this volume, for referring me to West Indian writer C.L.R. James’s declaration in defence of his favourite sport: “Cricket is an art, not a bastard or a poor relation, but a full member of the community”). As Sourgen and Stuart Theobald both point out in their pieces, the separation of sport and art on intellectual or aesthetic grounds is echoed in artificial sub-divisions between “high art” and “low art”, or “elite” art and “popular” art; Jyoti Mistry notes that art forms such as film are constantly forced into one or the other of these categories.

Then there are those artists and intellectuals who have no real grudge against what happens on the field, but do – and often rightly so – take issue with the way in which sporting events bring to the fore, or are manifestations of, wider socio-political problems. Consider, for instance, J.M. Coetzee’s seminal essay on the 1995 Rugby World Cup, which makes many astute observations about what Coetzee calls “a month-long orgy of chauvinism and mime-show of war among nations”.

The article comments not so much on the tournament itself as on the way in which the opening and closing ceremonies were obvious products of “an industry dedicated to the manufacture and recycling of the exotic, to the construction of varieties of rainbowness”.

As one might expect of Coetzee, he offers a shrewd counter to “the inherent intellectual muddle of the Rainbow Project” (here the Nobel laureate was ahead of most of his compatriots, who have taken another decade to start questioning the over-simplification of “nation building” as it was envisioned in the 1990s). Readers can draw their own conclusions about what Coetzee would make of Invictus, the widely-publicised film version of John Carlin’s book Playing the Enemy, in which Matt Damon (as Francois Pienaar) and Morgan Freeman (as Madiba) recreate the symbolic significance – in one sense profound, in one sense inadequate – of Mandela’s involvement in the victorious Springbok campaign. In the present volume [of Sport versus Art], a number of contributors refer to the seminal events of 1995, as well as to their depiction on the page and on screen. Some affirm the link of sport (and the rugby-Mandela-Pienaar trifecta in particular) with “nation building”, while others reject this as superficial and even cynical.

Irrespective of what one makes of Invictus’ portrayal of a certain historical moment, for many rugby enthusiasts – players and fans alike – the film fails in its depiction of the on-field action: generally, insofar as it is unable to capture what it actually looks and feels like to be involved in a game of rugby; and, more specifically, because insufficient attention has been given to recreating the nuances of the actual matches played by the Springboks prior to and during the 1995 World Cup (supporting actors are poorly cast, crucial details neglected). These particular shortcomings are evident to all those who are both consciously and subliminally familiar with the intricacies of camera angles, soundbites, lighting and colour in the iconic footage that was broadcast live on TV and has since been replayed in countless documentaries, retrospectives and adverts. The re-enactments in a film like Hansie inevitably fall short for the same reason. Over the years, South African cricket fans have revisited – with alternating delight and masochistic gloom – images of famous encounters against Australia (before the “438 game”): Shane Warne being smacked out of the park at the Wanderers in 1994, Alan Donald and Lance Klusener getting their signals mixed during that run-out off the penultimate ball in the 1999 World Cup semifinal.

There is simply no way that a filmic recreation could ever match the visual drama inscribed in the collective memory of the cricket-loving public. If, in some future time, a footballing film-maker decides to shoot a feature on the African Cup of Nations win in 1996 or – who knows? – a 2010 triumph for Bafana Bafana, he or she will be doomed to produce the same anti-climactic effect.

Whether we like it or not, every time we follow the travails of our sporting heroes (unless we’re fortunate enough to have tickets for the game), as sports fans, we are first and foremost media consumers. A few generations ago the media consumed were newspapers and radio broadcasts – then, it was still possible to recreate sporting magic onscreen without inducing disappointment or even bathos in the viewer. Now, however, the artistry entailed in turning real-life sporting contests into an audiovisual dramatic performance belongs to the producer or editor of a TV broadcast, as he or she cuts between cameras and gives us instant slow-motion replays. Film directors and actors must seek their material elsewhere.

This is an extract from “Poor Relations?”, Chris Thurman’s introductory essay in Sport versus Art:

A South African Contest (Wits University Press, 2010).