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PAST & PRESENT

They taught the world to play

PHOTO: DPA/POWERPLAY PERMEDIA GMBH

Tremendous appeal: Ferenc Puskas puts Hungary 1-0 up against Germany in the 1954 World Cup final.

In the late 1950s, an enterprising group of historians launched a journal called Victorian Studies. This was meant to celebrate the high noon of British achievement, the great contributions to literature, scholarship and science ma de during the middle decades of the 19th century, during the reign of Queen Victoria.

One of the first articles that the new journal published was on a lesser-known Victorian achievement — namely, the invention of the major sports of humankind. The author of this essay was Charles Tennyson, a grand-nephew of the Victorian poet Alfred Tennyson. Mr. Tennyson began by recalling how, as a young man, he had gone to study philosophy at the ancient German university at Jena. In the spirit of academic exchange, he had brought a football with him. In the evenings, his classes done, he had tried to interest his fellow students in what was for them a novel game. To his sorrow, Mr. Tennyson found that his German fellow students were not properly equipped for the sport. They had neither short trousers nor proper shoes. What was worse, their “ball sense was practically undeveloped”.

So things were in 1899, when Charles Tennyson first went to Jena. Writing some 60 years later, he reflected with satisfaction on the remarkable strides that football had since taken on the Continent. England, which had invented football, had (at this time) yet to win the game’s World Cup, whereas Germany claimed the trophy in 1954, when it defeated Hungary in an epic final. In fact, by the time Tennyson’s essay was published in 1959, football had become the most popular sport all over Europe, including the Socialist Bloc. And its reach was to extend even further. Having acquired a devoted following in all the continents, this invention of Victorian England is now the sport most beloved of humans. Whereas baseball’s “World Series” puts on display players from provincial North American teams, some 150 sovereign nations compete for what is indisputably the most coveted prize in sport, football’s World Cup.

But, of course, football is only one of the numerous games that England “taught the world to play” (to invoke the title of Tennyson’s essay in Victorian Studies). The major team sports — football, rugby, field hockey, cricket — were all invented in England, with the rules and codes that govern them all being forged, specifically, in Victorian England. The same is true of individual sports such as tennis, table tennis, billiards, and squash. Crude forms of boxing, swimming, gymnastics, and athletics have existed since the Greeks but once again, it was Victorian Englishmen who first synthesised and defined their rules, giving these sports their recognisably modern forms.

In his essay, Charles Tennyson justly referred to Victorian England as the “games-master” of the world. His claim that all major sports were invented by his countrymen admits of only one-and-a-half exceptions — these being basketball, which was patented in Springfield, Massachusetts, and golf, which was invented by Scots across the border.

Like many other readers of this newspaper, my own life has been made more palatable by an engagement with the very many sports invented or perfected by the Victorians. I grew up in a government estate founded by Englishmen, to be thus blessed with squash and tennis courts opposite my home, and a magnificently appointed cricket ground just beyond them. A table tennis table and badminton court lay just down the road.

My boyhood was largely consumed by these sports. During school time I played football on the streets in the evenings, and table tennis after the sun had set. In the holidays, I often started with tennis in the early mornings, carried on with cricket after breakfast, squash after lunch, and with football, table tennis and badminton in the later hours.

The two Victorian, British, Indian and global games I did not play as a child were golf and billiards. There was a golf course in the estate, but my father was not prosperous enough to buy me a set of clubs. There was a fine billiards table in the local club, but boys were prohibited from playing, lest they scratch the velvet. Fortunately, as a fan I have come to enjoy those two sports too, in addition to all the ones I once played but can now, in middle age, also only watch. But perhaps “only” is the wrong word here. How much joy and enchantment have I derived down the decades from seeing these games played, live or on television, by their best and most subtle practitioners!

This spring, we commemorate the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth as well as the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. As the son and grandson of scientists, and as an agnostic myself, I suppose I have been shaped by the world that the Victorian scientists made and unmade. But — like so many of my readers, again — I owe a very great debt to the Victorian games-makers as well. The two may be connected — for, the beauty of such games as tennis and cricket is made possible only by the precision of its rules. The swerving aces of John McEnroe would have not been possible had the service box been somewhat smaller. Had the pitch in cricket been more than 22 yards long, the advantage would have rested even more securely with the batsman. The beauty of modern sport is a product in good measure of the symmetry of its rules. And so, while I shall concede that in the history of humankind Darwin is indisputably a more important figure than Pélé, I would still like to believe that it is in the realm of sport that we find the most appealing syntheses of Science and Art.

ramguha@hotmail.com

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