http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8303-1310520,00.html


Best of Barnes

October 15, 2004



Beckham trapped in a moral maze, if truth be told
By Simon Barnes

NOW we have all had such fun working out exactly what kind of eejit David Beckham is, perhaps we ought to establish what crime he has committed. That, after all, is the problem facing the FA. It must work out whether or not to punish him, and if so, what for.

Beckham himself has helpfully provided an apology, so presumably he reckons he has done something wrong. But he hasn’t told us what. His apology contains just about every one of the uncertainties catalogued by William Empson in his seminal Seven Types of Ambiguity.

Some of the more emotional commentators, led by Sir Geoff Hurst, insist that Beckham should be stripped of the England captaincy for his crime. Let’s do it, just as soon as we have worked out what the crime is. One thing is clear: many people think that Beckham has behaved in an immoral fashion.

It is an interesting idea. Beckham broke the laws of his sport, then claimed to have manipulated the rules that govern his sport to his advantage. Is this immoral? Do the rules of a sport have a moral force? Is offside immoral? No-balling? Failing to retreat ten yards?

Roy Keane told us that his challenge on Alfe-Inge Haaland was intended to hurt the player. Most of us would agree that this was an immoral act. Interestingly, the greater storm was created by Keane’s admission of intent rather than the act itself; the punishment for the truth-telling was more severe than the punishment for the crime.

But Keane certainly broke the rules in what most of us would consider an immoral fashion. Do other rules have a moral force? Offside again — is it an immoral act to pinch a yard’s advantage, fool the referee’s assistant, score a goal? Many would praise you for such a deed, especially if they supported your team, even more so if they were in it.

Most people consider themselves moral; most people are selective about the laws they adhere to. Everyone breaks speed limits, regardless of the fact that accidents in town would become virtually unthinkable at a true, universal 30mph.

Thirty years ago, many people used to drink and drive. These days, being caught just over the limit is considered a mixture of bad luck and personal incompetence. Driving at twice the limit — whether you get caught or not — is widely regarded as immoral.

Morality is not absolute in real life, or for that matter in sport. Thirty years ago a batsman who didn’t walk when he knew he was caught behind would be regarded as a cheat. These days a batsman who doesn’t walk is a batsman doing his job. He daren’t walk. It would be letting the team down. It would be unacceptable. It would be immoral.

Michael Atherton is rightly regarded as a decent man. In his autobiography he writes of the famous duel with Allan Donald in 1998. Atherton won, but only because the umpire missed the ball he gloved to the wicketkeeper. Donald asked Atherton for the glove as a souvenir. Atherton gave it to him, with a signature over the red mark the ball had left.

Yes, we allow ourselves a wry grin at that one. We accept that sport is played by two sets of rules. The first is the set that is written down, the second is the informal consensus of acceptable behaviour under which we actually play. My old friend Eddy once told me: “I would die rather than cheat at golf. At cricket, I used to cheat occasionally. When I played football, I cheated all the time.” So is Eddy moral in golf, naughty in cricket and evil in football? Or is he just respecting the different ambient moralities of different sports?

It is legal to bowl a bouncer at a batsman’s head. But is it moral? Or is it immoral only if you succeed in hitting him? The great John Woodcock condemned the morality of short-pitched bowling, in this case at a nightwatchman, in his Editor’s Notes in Wisden in 1985. “It was a woeful piece of cricket, entirely lacking in chivalry,” he wrote. Lacking in what? These days, a fast bowler who failed to bounce a nightwatchman would be regarded as a fool. Has the helmet changed morality? Or did changes in morality require the invention of the helmet?

With the Beckham case, the question of intent is central. Mostly, the rules of football do not differentiate between crimes committed by accident, negligence or deliberate purpose. A mistimed tackle is just as much a foul as a deliberate assault; your leg is just as much broken by a hideous accident as by a hideous crime. Conventional morality has a sliding scale for such matters; irresponsible actions are immoral, but not as bad as deliberately violent ones.

But the referee is morally impartial. He is not the judge of intent, he merely punishes the foul. He has to judge only intent — in effect, make a moral judgment — in the case of handball. Ball to hand or hand to ball? Matches can turn on such a decision, but it is not a question that gets people agitated on moral grounds.

Beckham claimed that his foul on Ben Thatcher on Saturday was deliberate and that it was done in a deliberate attempt to manipulate the rules. This sort of thing happens often enough and it is impossible to prove.

Unless, of course, you talk about it.

So, if the FA punishes Beckham, it punishes him not for his crime but for his admission; not for deception but for truth- telling. A society that values the lie above the truth is — well, rather like the society we live in, come to think of it.

We all have a nostalgia for nursery morality, such as the character in the Woody Allen film who asked: “Who were the bad guys in Schindler’s List?” One of sport’s continuous joys is that it takes us back to the nursery: England v Argentina, England v Australia, even England v Azerbaijan on Wednesday; good guys beating bad guys. Any Celt knows who the real good guys are in any match involving England.

But if we look at things even slightly more closely, we discover that not even sport can offer a simple and absolute morality. Soon we find ourselves facing the unacceptable truth: that even in sport, there are no good guys and no bad guys. Just guys. Just guys, groping unthinkingly, like the rest of us, in the moral maze, trying to find the way home without waking too many Minotaurs

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Dr Andy Miah
http://www.GMathletes.net
http://www.andymiah.net
http://www.paisley.ac.uk/mlm

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