Umpires and atheism

The degradation of sport goes on. There is the scourge of performance enhancing drugs and other bio-medical ways of cheating, and there is also, more destructively, the long march of technological intrusion the purpose of which is to remove the element of chance from games. This has reduced otherwise noble sports, such as cricket, to a farce. We saw this last night in the first test from Trent Bridge. In the end, the game came down to England needing one wicket to win and Australia needing fifteen or so runs. Controversially, the Australian batsman played a ball that carried to the keeper and the umpire ruled 'Not Out' but was over-ruled by the technological Decision Review System which detected the faintest of snicks and declared the batsman caught behind. In a terrible finish to an otherwise great contest, everyone stood around waiting until the forensic technologists made their call. The action moved from the field into the laboratory. It was the machines that declared England the winners.

It is things like this that have alienated me from professional sport. I very rarely watch sport anymore. I object to what I see as a creeping culture of sporting "atheism." This is the mentality that refuses to acknowledge the limitations of nature and it takes the form of undermining the authority of the umpire. Increasingly, umpires are being replaced by machines. This is because umpires make mistakes, and mistakes are no longer counted as an inevitable and acceptable part of the game. When I was a kid, the sanctity of the umpire was one of the great moral lessons of playing sport. We were taught that the umpire was God. If the umpire said you were out, you were out. Arguing with the umpire was not only pointless it was unsportsmanlike, contrary to the ethics of the entire game. It didn't matter if the umpire was manifestly wrong: you took the bad decisions with the good and you accepted that this was just part of the natural order of things. When an umpire made a mistake it was deemed, as it were, an 'act of God'. Acts of God are not necessarily fair. Now, the entire tendency is to remove acts of God from the playing field.

As it happens, my reading of Leo Strauss touches on exactly this matter. In his short essay 'The Three Waves of Modernity' he makes the point that modernity is characterized by a disbelief in nature and chance. For the ancients (Plato), Strauss points out, man is the plaything of the gods. He writes:

"'Man is the measure of all things' is the opposite of 'Man is the master of all things'. Man has a place within the whole: man's power is limited: man cannot overcome the limitations of his nature... This limitation shows itself in particular in the ineluctable power of chance. The good life is the life according to nature, which means to stay within certain limits: virtue is essentially moderation."

He goes on:

"In classical thought justice is compliance with the natural order; [and] to the recognition of elusive chance corresponds the recognition of inscrutable providence."

But modernity, he says, over-turns this order. Chance can be conquered. The political problem, as he says, "becomes a technical problem." He sums it up as: "Modernity started from the dissatisfaction with the gulf between the is and the ought."

This is what is happening in sport. The political problem - the authority of the umpire - has become a technical problem. We no longer accept that there is an "inscrutable providence" corresponding to "elusive chance." And we no longer accept the limitations of nature. Those limitations are traditionally set by the fact that the umpire is human and therefore fallible. There are natural limits to the human sensorium and human powers of judgment. In the past, if the umpire could not see the deflection of a ball from a bat, or could not hear the sound of the ball snicked by the bat, then there was no case. The umpire was God. If he was, in fact, mistaken, then that was "inscrutable providence". Bad luck. We all accepted that sometimes the cards would fall our way and sometimes they wouldn't. Now we no longer believe in God, or chance, or providence. Instead, Man is the master of all things. The batsman plays the ball. The umpire - standing only 22 yards away - cannot see or hear anything. If there was bat-to-ball contact, it was beyond the range of the human sensorium and the powers of human judgment. Or perhaps the umpire, being human, just missed it. Our attitude to that these days is, "Not good enough!" Natural limits be damned. Now we subject every stroke of the bat to infrared analysis, microscopic examination and a barrage of technological tests to establish whether, at a microscopic level, there was even a hair's breadth of contact. I regard this not as an advance but as a degradation.

Another controversy from the same cricket match underlines this point. The English batsman Broad refused to "walk" after he clearly hit a catch but was given not out by an umpire. When cricket was still a gentleman's sport, the convention of "walking" was a natural complement to the natural limits of the umpire. If you hit the ball, and you knew you hit the ball, but the umpire missed it, you walked. It was not only an act of fair play, it was an implicit acknowledgement of the umpire's authority. You walked because the authority of the umpire was paramount and the batsman was helping him out. It was more important than your team winning. Now the noble practice of "walking" is disappearing from the game. The English claim that the Australians were the first to abandon "walking". Maybe so - in fact, probably so - but it reflects an entire philosophical shift in how we see umpires and, by extension, chance, providence, nature and finally God. The batsman who walks is a true believer. The batsman who refuses to walk is an atheist. He won't walk until a scientist proves he hit the ball.

There seems no cure for it, though. The technological intrusion into sport is likely to get worse and worse. The sanctity of the umpire is a fond dream of a by-gone age. To see it another way, instead of the theocracy of umpires we now have a technocracy that caters to mob rule. The crowd has always hated umpires. Partisan supporters always cry 'We was robbed!' Accordingly, the structures and rules and conventions of games worked to hold off the baying mob and to put the umpire above their indecent clambering. That's why umpires wore white. Pure. Untouchable. Transcendent. It is no accident that these days - ostensibly for the benefit of the television cameras - umpires and referees no longer wear white. White represented the limits of colour and therefore the limits of nature. We no longer observe such limits. Umpires now are just imperfect tools that need to be replaced with more accurate tools wherever we can. We've given in to the baying mob. They can argue with an umpire, but they can't argue with a scientist.

This disease has now taken hold in almost all professional sport. The difference between victory and loss is now microseconds of time or millimetres of space. What we have lost is a sense of human scale. We are in rebellion against the whole idea of natural limits. Once, if you were born blind it was an invitation by Fate to become a musician. These days we cheer the blind man who wants to be a film director or a photographer; we cheer the man in a wheelchair who wants to climb Mount Everest. We no longer acknowledge natural boundaries, the boundaries set by providence and chance (or God). To get Pythonesque about it, there's the man who wants to have a baby but he doesn't have a womb.  This is now just a technical problem, not a boundary set by nature. "Don't you oppress me!" Umpires aren't perfect. We now find that an unacceptable limit and it is to be overcome by whatever technological means we can. Increasingly, the sport becomes about the technology. We don't really cheer the man in the wheelchair who climbs Mount Everest - we cheer the scientist who made it possible.

I find most televised sport unwatchable these days for that reason. It's not about cricket - it's about the endless array of gadgetry that pollutes the coverage: "stump-cam", "snick-o-meter", devices to measure the moisture in the pitch to the thirteenth decimal place. How utterly dreary. And meanwhile the whole moral order that cricket once embodied - arguably more than any other sport - is eroded and the nobility of the game, founded upon the pre-modern acceptance of natural limits (where "virtue is essentially moderation"), is lost.


- Harper McAlpine Black