SPORT

People say you shouldn’t mix politics with sport. What they fail to understand is that politics is a sport: with teams, fans, winners, losers and all the rest.

Making a difference and serving people is purely secondary to all of this.

And sport is politics. Sport, like war, is all about power, conquest and glory.

There is far too much pride and money involved for people to conceive of it as merely a game. It is as essential a part of life as the democratic process itself.

Fans base their hopes, their dreams, on how their favourite team will do; punters gamble billions every year on their ‘lucky’ team, or horse; while football hooligans fight, and sometimes die, in the name of their team.

And then we have the phenomenon of the sports phone-in or message board; where a bunch of sports fans argue with great passion with each other.

Which is kind of strange, given that whether your team wins or loses has got absolutely nothing to do with you.

Why are you arguing with such ferocity about something that is completely out of your control?

And which, in the great scheme of things, really doesn’t matter?

Madness.

© Phillip A. Klein March 2008