Notes for a Manifesto: Sports

We don't make it often, not in terms of medals nor the greater virtues of sports

Those who encourage children to take up a sport often speak about the virtues. Sports builds character. Sports teaches many things, we have all heard: courage, teamwork, determination, the ability to be gracious in defeat and humble in victory, fairness, integrity, responsibility and respect. Not all of these can be taught or learnt in a classroom, obviously. 

Now almost all children engage in sports and games, either in a formal, structured setting (in a school or club) or informally (in the back garden, village commons, paddy fields, reservoirs or shrub jungle).  The question is, if playing with and against others is such an important part of growing up, how is it that the associated values have not got ingrained into the worldview and practice of the collective? Indeed, how is it that the opposite attributes (timidity, crass individualism, sloth, arrogance, bitterness, unfairness, deceit, irresponsibility and disrespect seem to have triumphed at every turn in every sector?  

Getting these things right alone won’t sort out the issues at the macro level, obviously. However, when sports is such an integral part of school life, and when sport can do so much, we need to ask why the yield is so meager. 

We need to recognize, though, that the word ‘sports’ is for the most part about honing talent, improving skills and winning.  Apart from M.J.M. Lafir winning the World Amateur Billiards title in 1973, Nishantha Fernando winning the world title in carrom in 2012, Sri Lanka winning 5 world championships in carrom, the Cricket World Cup in 1996, the T-20 title in 2014 and a couple of Olympic medals, we haven’t really produced world beaters on a consistent basis. 

Efstratios Grivas, Chess Grandmaster and one of the most respect authorities on coaching chess, a coach himself who helped Sri Lanka win a category gold medal at the 41st Chess Olympiad in Tromso, Norway in 2014, has an interesting take on ‘talent’. The following Facebook post contains a lot of lessons, and not just for chess.

‘In 1984, just before the Thessaloniki Olympiad, a match between Greece and China was played in the Greek town of Kavala. Both countries were considered weak at those times, without any GM in their line-ups. The Scheveningen format match was played only in men boards, as the Chinese didn’t line-up a women team. Greece won by 19½ to 16½ and both teams performed nicely in the Olympiad: China was 12th and Greece 31st. In the coming years China became a super power and especially in women where a lot of World Champions were ‘produced’. Finally, in the last Olympiad China hit a duo, wining both sections, crowing the development program which started in the early 80s. What we can learn from these facts is that ‘Geniuses are made - not born’ and as I have repeatedly written, ‘Talent is the excuse of the failed’. Do not let yourself carried away by ‘destiny’ - try to have quality work with an expert and you will reap success.

That’s for the sportsmen and sportswomen. It’s not just about them working hard, though. About 15 years ago local rugby legend Chandrishan Perera related an interesting story about the skills of Sri Lankan children. Apparently some sports outfit in Australia had done a worldwide study on hand-eye coordination. It was found, he said, that it was Sri Lanka children (up to the age of 15) who had the best hand-eye coordination in the world. That’s it. Only until 15. He opined that identification of the truly gifted, picking the right discipline for the particular child and systematic training are lacking. Naturally, our children don’t do too well at international events after a certain age. 

Systems. That’s key. The issue is not that we don’t have systems, but they are either riddled with holes or are peopled with the corrupt or incompetent or both.  Most sports bodies are plagued with controversy with allegations of financial mismanagement as well as tinkering with the selection process and effectively sidelining and demoralizing the most deserving.  

The principles of good governance such as transparency and accountability are severely compromised. People with competence and integrity keep away or are hoofed out of organizations.  Sports bodies, from the National Olympic Committee to the apex and regional organizations are veritable fiefdoms.  Elections are stage-managed. There’s give and take.  Much of it passes under the radar of those concerned, i.e. if they are actually interested in observing what happens.

Money is part of the problem of course; there are perks involved and there is ample income-earning opportunities for those who are corrupt. Oversight, then, is lacking. A culture of corruption has outlawed all that is good, decent and civilized in sports. It is even apparent in the junior levels in the schools. Much of it has little to do with the particular sport, per se.

In schools, for example, there’s a certificate mania. Parents are more interested in their children obtaining certificates than learning basic skills. Certificates are valuable. They can help children make a case for being appointed as prefects. Those who dish out such titles don’t seem to be interested or have the ability to identify and reward the much vaunted virtues of engaging in sports in the first place.  Selections are rackets. There is favoritism. Coaches offer private ‘classes’ and this forces parents to pocket out more bucks because they are naturally persuaded to think that their children could get the short end of the stick if the coach were to be displeased.  

Children naturally pick up on all this. Rules can and will be bent, they learn. It’s sanctioned by one and all. It’s part of the story. Conflict of interest abound. Administrators, referees, umpires and arbiters, coaches, parents and players have tainted themselves. Money talks. Power talks. Even those who are really good at what they do come to believe that performance alone won’t help.  And so it grows. 

Too often, we put all this down to the fact that we are not a rich country.  Then again, there are countries who manage sport much better than we do, even though they are not exactly rolling in gold.  It’s all about doing the best we can with the resource complement we are endowed with.  

Systems. Personnel. Processes that ensure that the right people occupy the right positions. Sri Lanka’s sports sector urgently require systems, personnel and processes that privilege a commitment to fundamentals, discipline and hard work even as they together operate as a bulwark against corruption and incompetence. We may not taste victory immediately, but if we get the fundamentals right, we would be giving it our best shot. Right now, sports is business and a useful tool in furthering other interests unrelated to the sport.  This must change.

Over to you, Messers Nagananda Kodituwakku, Rohan Pallewatte, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, Patali Champika Ranawaka, Ranil Wickremesinghe, Maithripala Sirisena and any other individual entertaining hopes of becoming the next President of Sri Lanka.

Other articles in this series

An introductory note

The State

Justice, Law and Order

Understanding the Executive

State, religion and rationalization

Education Reforms

Reconciliation

Environment, development, caricature and extremism

National Security

Malinda Seneviratne is a political analyst and freelance writer. malindasenevi@gmail.com. 

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Sportsmen and Sportswomen Beware!

YOUR ACCOUNTS WILL BE HACKED VERY SOON

Some get caught, some don't, but those who do the hanky panky know they've done it

When did cheating begin? When did ethics go down the tube? What happened to sportsmanship? When did ‘play up, play up and play the game’ go out of fashion? 

Some may have heard of the last two lines of ‘Alumnus Football,’ a poem by Grantland Rice, an early 19th century sportswriter from the USA:

For when the one Great Scorer comes to write against your name,

He marks — not that you won or lost — but how you played the game. 

Who first gave the finger to that elegant line? We don’t know the answers to these questions. All we can safely say is that when the first rule was made, written or unwritten, breaking it was scripted into the narrative. Some broke, some bent, some crept through loopholes and when they were noticed and plugged found others through which they could get to the other side. The other side, ladies and gentlemen, is a country called Personal Gain where honor, dignity, team, teammates and everything that is wholesome in sports are outlawed.

Now there are people who talk about the ‘good old days’ but the truth is that bad things did happen even back then. There were old boys’ clubs and old girls’ clubs that covered up. There were scapegoats. There was naming and shaming as well as hushing up. The uncomfortable was swept under the carpet, hard drives so to speak were erased. It happened in government, colonial projects, corporates, councils, boards and sports arenas. 

It still happens. There were bookies, punters and match-fixers, then as now. The motive then as now, was bucks and prestige; the amounts were less and the mechanisms of scrutiny were poorer back then. So let’s not kid ourselves about a glorious past where the ‘money-motive’ was absent. 

The existence of hanky-panky does not mean, however, that we ignore it. There are measures that can be taken. There are preventive mechanisms, there are punishments that can be meted out.  In this the authorities have a key role to play and so do fans who want clean and fair competition. Perhaps the biggest burden lies on the shoulders of the sportspersons themselves. 

It cannot be easy. There will be selectors, coaches and administrators who play favorites. There will be a ninety nine shortcuts, all of them shady, and one path of clarity which might be longer than patience can suffer.  It is human to be tempted, and yet it is not inhuman to resist. That is what makes the difference. 

Rice, for example, defended the right of football players to make a living as professionals, but was resolute in objecting to they way money dominates sports to the point that ethics gets footnoted or scripted out of the equation. 

He observed all this thus:

"Money to the left of them and money to the right

Money everywhere they turn from morning to the night

Only two things count at all from mountain to the sea

Part of it's percentage, and the rest is guarantee”

And yet, Rice insisted that men and women can rise above all this. They are the heroes, their heroics keep sports alive in ways that money just cannot. We all remember how Tamim Iqbal, came back to bat, cast on his left wrist fractured by a vicious delivery from Suranga Lakmal. We saw this opener turned last-man stood tall helped Bangladesh push the score from 229 to 261. People still remember Anil Kumble bowling with a broken jaw in Antiqua and Graeme Smith’s one-handed battle at the SCG in 2009, and of course Murali; taunted, vilified and no-balled, smiling through it all. 

Rice in fact celebrated such things. The first two lines of the well-known verse read thus:

Keep coming back — and though the world may romp across you spine —

Let every game’s end find you still upon the battling line

To go back to ‘the good old days’ if one was halfway smart one could get away with most things. Today, money will bail you out, but then again you are always on camera and you never can tell who has crept into your laptop, tab or smart phone. There are benefits and there are costs. If you err on ethics you can err on anything else. You can twist the rules but you can also trip or be made to trip. 

In a world where there are grandmasters of hacking even as there are code-writing wizards, perhaps it’s good to look to the end, respice finem  as the Trinity motto goes.  The question is simple: where do you want to be at game’s end. Standing or cowering or slinking away into the dusk? Do you want to be a by-hook-or-by-crook victor? Would you rather be able to stand ramrod straight at the end of the day’s play, with the right to be humble in victory and unbowed though gracious in defeat?

Rice got it right. He didn’t elaborate on the identity but it’s clear that ‘The Great Scorer’  is  unpretentious and nevertheless extremely powerful. The Great Scorer can have many names. Conscience — a name as good as any other. That cannot be hacked, friends.

This is the 2nd in a series of articles published in the SUNDAY MORNING newspaper under the heading 'Interception'

Also read:
The importing mania in school cricket

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Mark Field, and the forgotten dimensions of misfortune and unfairness

The United Kingdom’s Minister of State for Asia-Pacific at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Mark Field, is upset, we hear. He believes that it is unfortunate and unfair to represent the Geneva Resolution as inter as interference by the international community in Sri Lanka’s domestic affairs.’  

He is upset because he believes ‘the UK, along with many other friends of Sri Lanka, continues to warmly endorse the government’s principled decision to co-sponsor a resolution that provides a valuable framework for peace-building and reconciliation.’

So let’s talk of principles, that subjective notion which lends itself to abuse in diplo-speak. What gives Field an edge here is co-sponsorship. After all, if the government, which technically represents the people, have signed some document, objectors can be dismissed as spoilers. That the government did not have a mandate to be flippant about sovereignty is pertinent, but that’s easily ignored.   

Since Field is attached to the Commonwealth Office he would know a lot about such things. Simply put the entire enterprise was about enslavement attended naturally by plunder and ethnic cleansing. He would know that the bloody operation could count on one thing: some slaves would be willing to trade body-chains to mind-chains. Such slaves there were and such slaves there are. They are the ones who are ready for cooptation; happy accessories after the fact of domination, one way or the other. They ‘go along’ simply because that’s what is dictated by the servility they embraced. 

As for ‘Friends of Sri Lanka,’ Field should know that in international politics friendship is probably the cheapest word around. There is no friendship as such outside of appearances and courtesies; there is self-interest, period.   

In fact he has let it slip. He has called for the replacement of the Prevention of Terrorism Act with a new Counter-Terrorism Act ‘which meets international standards’ (which of course the UK and it’s partner in international crime, the USA, regularly dip in the blood of the disposable, shall we say?). The reason? Well, Field says it’s what ‘the diaspora and others in the UK’ ask him about regularly, and therefore makes it something they [the diaspora, others and the UK] like to see. Now that is undisguised, honest, self-interest. The constituency is back home, not here in Sri Lanka.

Moving on, Field, who is visiting Sri Lanka, wants to focus on ‘finding the truth’.  ‘It is fundamental’ he says. The truth, he says, is essential to restoring real confidence among communities. To this end, he wants to see ‘progress on accountability and truth-seeking mechanisms which (the mind-chained representatives of) Sri Lanka committed to in 2015.’

He is correct. Truth helps. Accountability is important. The mechanism, however, cannot work if it is designed by outsiders on account of pressure from non-nationals and agreed upon by ‘nationals’ without a mandate and moreover wedded to colonial ghosts. In other words, what’s unfortunate and unfair is for the likes of Field to whine and act as though history never happened, as though there was no bad after-taste, as though structures of domination are things of the past and as though politics of the moment and politics of the homeland (UK) have nothing to do with all this.

But he’s correct. Truth does help. Accountability is important. And charity begins at home. And that, takes us to a more inclusive discussion on misfortune, unfairness, accountability and truth-seeking. 

Let Field, his ‘international friends’ and constituency reflect on the following:

‘A catalogue of antiquities and other cultural objects from Sri Lanka (Ceylon) abroad,’ is the title of a book by P.H.D.H. De Silva, published in 1974.  It lists a considerable set of known artifacts stolen from this island.  There are over 15,000 items listed.  The loot it seems has ended up in 23 countries and 140 holding facilities.  The vast majority are in Britain.  Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Berkshire, Leicester, Liverpool, London, Sheffield, and Windsor all have ‘Little pieces of Ceylon’ so to speak.  All stolen goods.  For antique and historical value, each and every amulet, the tiniest statuette, the most fragile manuscript with hardly legible lettering, is priceless. 

Perhaps it was an evacuation agreed upon. ‘Co-sponsored,’ if you will by the ideological ancestors of the current set of tag-alongs. However, if we abandon, as we should, the semantics, we are left with the immutable truth of theft.

There are truths Field would be more familiar with, such as the Theft Act of 1968 in the United Kingdom. Let’s go to Article 22, ‘Handling stolen goods’. It refers to ‘a person handles stolen goods if (otherwise than in the course of the stealing) knowing or believing them to be stolen goods he dishonestly receives the goods, or dishonestly undertakes or assists in their retention, removal, disposal or realisation by or for the benefit of another person, or if he arranges to do so.’  Article 22(2) declares that ‘A person guilty of handling stolen goods shall on conviction on indictment be liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding fourteen years.’

The curators of all the facilities including the British Museum holding anything taken from any colony should therefore be incarcerated. More truths: The British Museum acquired in 1898 a collection of 2,227 manuscripts (prose and verse) mostly in Sinhala, Malayalam, Tamil and Pali gathered by Hugh Nevill between 1864 and 1897. Nevill never completed the critical catalogue he had set out to produce, but K.D. Somadasa compiled a detailed description in seven volumes which the British Library Press published in 1987.  

It is unlikely that these were the only manuscripts ferreted out of the country by the British. The Cornell University Library, for example, holds the original of a ‘Catalogue of the Sinhala Manuscripts in the British Museum’ compiled by Don Martino De Zilva Wickremasinghe and published in 1900.

If Field wants truth and accountability, since he’s right there in the Commonwealth Office, he can initiate a full investigation into these despicable thefts sanctioned by the British Governments of the time, so that confidence can be built between Sri Lankans and British citizens. Then, Field’s logic forces us to be more optimistic about true friendship. It is fundamental, to use the term Field prefers. Fundamental includes returning all things robbed from this island in the name of remorse and in the hope of reconciliation. 

And so, in the name of possible friendship, let Mark Field make a full statement of disclosure. And in the process, let us hope that this gentlemen who waxes eloquent about the miseries, real or imagined, suffered by Sri Lankans, answers the following questions:

Would shipping out anything from this island constitute theft? Will the Theft Act be enforced to the letter with regard to goods stolen from this island? Will steps be taken to return the ‘Hugh Nevill Collection’ (sic) and all items detailed in De Silva’s catalogue be returned?

The United Kingdom’s Minister of State for Asia-Pacific at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Mark Field seems fascinated with the truth. It’s ‘fundamental,’ he said. Once truth is known, once accountability chairs discussion, we need to talk reparations. The good Mark Field will spare no pains to reinstate honor, dignity and civility to relations between Sri Lanka and the UK, I am sure. The ball, as they say, is in his court. 

Malinda Seneviratne is a political analyst and writer. malindasenevi@gmail.com. www.malindawords.blogspot.com

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