You’ll be aware by now that of all the frenzied crowds that trouble my uneasy sleep, sporting ones bother me the most. I mean to say, to be crushed to death by a mob that is rampaging because tyranny flies at its backs has a certain justness, but to be stomped on by people driven berserk by a ball game would be a pitiful end. Sporting events by their nature embody the worst excesses of late capitalism: the spectators are mere passive consumers of the commodified prowess of the athletes and the seasonal character of the spectacles mimics the cyclic time that this new peasantry is trapped in, while the masters of money and power forge ahead. No wonder sports fans are so often pissed off: they’re the victims of a massive con.
When I stopped going to sporting events, the crowd at the Arsenal still strongly resembled an LS Lowry painting: rank upon rank of mufflered and capped men, raising their Bovril cups to their chapped lips with the monstrous synchrony of a group mind. Around this time – the early 1970s – I also went to Wimbledon a couple of times. This was a different sort of crowd – blazered and frocked, bourgeois – and the Centre Court also had a sort of hushed intimacy: the net stretched decoratively across the carpet of grass, the tiered seating somehow G Plan.
Nevertheless, here was the same disturbing unanimity, the eyes sliding back and forth like those of automata, the counterpoint of players’ grunts and spectators’ groans suggesting – even to my pubescent mind – participation in some mass act of sexual congress. (I may have been reading Brave New World at the time.)
Still, at least tennis had the virtue of a certain individualism – single combat, armed with catgut, wood and rubber – and I think I went on watching it on TV until at least the middle of that decade. Plonking myself down in front of the set some 35 years later, I was heartened to discover that little seemed to have changed with the Wimbledon crowd: there were a few more handmade signs and some garish tam-o’-shanters that I didn’t recall from the days when Ilie Nastase flipped his wig, but otherwise it was business as usual. (Andy Murray was even drinking what was unmistakably Robinsons Barley Water.) Yes, you guessed it, the Championship bid by the down-home boy from Dunblane had lured me out of my sporting retirement.
True, I wasn’t court-side but the way the BBC chose to cover the Wimbledon crowd was surely indicative of this aspect of the zeitgeist: the distraught relationship between the particular and the many. Murray’s authenticity as a sporting hero derives as much from his intractability when it comes to the usual skill transfer of celebrity as it does from his prowess. As yet, there’s been no smelly water line or pseudo-styled sunglasses – his product placements at least superficially appear to be out of necessity and he even (for which I could’ve kissed him) appeared to pooh-pooh the idea of a knighthood when old buttock-face had him straight round No 10 the day after his win. I suspect that lurking behind this is a deeper level of crowd consciousness, because if modernity teaches us anything, it’s that the seeming omnipotentiality of the notorious – so you’re a cabinet minister: why not chance your arm at ballroom dancing? – rests on a correlative loss of true expertise. If you can be anything, how can your ability at one thing be credible?
Murray is a personification of the most physical possible impact between the anomie of the individual and the madness of the crowd; he is thus a hero twice over. No wonder, as the camera nosed about the arena, we were treated to the disgusting spectacle of Messrs Cameron, Miliband, Clegg and Salmond-with-saltire almost sucking each other off, such was their desire to repose in the crotch of the champion.
Murray, meanwhile, submitted to the bizarre court-side interview – a ritual I cannot remember from the 1970s and one in which the well-known faces in the crowd, picked out by the camera, are integrated into the mass to reinforce the hoary new delusion that they’re just like us, really.
You may have detected a certain soft, emollient tone in this week’s column – but have no fear, readers, remember: Murray the Minted is a sports “ambassador” for none other than RBS. It’s given the feisty wee chap thousands of our pounds to play big pingpong, so mind, we own the fucker. Now, new balls to kick, please!
