SPECTATOR SPORT
Is there passion?
Simon Barnes
HERE ARE SOME overwhelming ques- tions. Is Marcel Proust better than James Joyce? Is Buddhism better than Islam? Is rugby union better than rugby league? This last question stands out, because it actually gets asked seriously. It was asked seriously after the rugby league world cup final at Wembley last weekend. One of my col- leagues went so far as to write that he was `longing for a few rolling mauls'.
The final was exactly what rugby league did not need: a bloody awful game. No one denied that, not the most even-handed of sportswriters, not the foremost apologists for rugby league, not even my father, and he was born in Wigan and therefore thinks, both naturally and rightly, that rugby league is the great game. Me, I went to a rugby union school in the south, enough to give me a special love for soccer. But in the wake of that dreary afternoon at Wembley the debate of the overwhelming question of rugby continues.
All right, then. Apply Occam's razor to rugby. You get a game about running, pass- ing and tackling. Or, to put it another way, rugby league. To be truly satisfying, a game should be perfectly simple. Ah yes, but you miss all the frilly bits of rugby union, the line-outs and scrums and rolling mauls. To be truly satisfying a game should be per- fectly complex. And union is — to the point of incomprehensibility, you ask the players. I have read The Laws of Rugby Union Made Simple. Didn't understand a word. Apply Occam's razor to the whole over- whelming debate and what do you get? Absolutely nothing. Pare away the non- sense and irrationality and prejudice and all you have left is the razor. It is not a debate. The test of a good game is that it matters. That is all. It must matter to players, it must matter to the people who watch it. Baseball matters in the United States. One of the most dramatic sporting moments of my life was watching the grand slam homer struck by Kent `Gretta Vowel' Hrbek in the 1987 World Series. But in America it is hard not to get involved in debates about whether or not baseball is better than cricket. It is just too tempting to say it is like chess and draughts. There is no objective way of judging whether any one game is better than any other. In the same way, there is no debating the merits of one religion over another. The question of religion is whether people believe in it; the question of sport is whether it inspires passion. A game that is passionately played and passionately fol- lowed is by definition a good game.
To say that rugby league is a less good game than union is a statement of prefer- ence, not an objective judgment. To yearn for rolling mauls in league is no more ratio- nal than to yearn for boxing-gloves in sumo wrestling, or man-to-man marking in ice dance.
Very rational and fair, yes? But I have a problem with golf. I yearn to see a player run; to whack his opponent's ball back from whence it came; to set about the opposition with a sand-wedge; at least to stop wearing pink polyester trousers. This is not a ratio- nal response. It is the upswelling of atavistic loathing. (I did play golf once, in Kashmir: `Hit ball straight at them! They should not be having picnics on the green!') But I must accept that, extraordinary as it seems, to some people golf matters. It is played with passion, and therefore — hark to the sound of gritting teeth — I concede that it is a good game. It would be better if oppo- 'nents were allowed to tackle, but there it is.
One more point of similar importance to debate: are the streakers in rugby league prettier than those in rugby union? Satur- day's girl at Wembley was comely. But the father of Erica Roe, the famous Twicken- ham streaker, summed up: 'She was lovely. Just like the Pope.' You can't argue with facts like that.
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