Book reviews

Cherry-picking the good bits while turning a blind eye to the dark sides of sport

March 19, 2024

Malcolm MacLean
University of Gibraltar; The University of Queensland

*Andrew Leigh*
**Fair Game: Lessons from Sport for a Fairer Society & a Stronger Economy**
91 pages, paperback
Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Publishing 2022 (In the National Interest)
ISBN 978-1-922633-47-7

The notion that sport is a model for how we live life is nothing new. In the British world, at least, it is woven into the very culture and meaning of sport as a modern practice. We see it in the amateur ethos and its notion that it is how we play the game that matters. Similarly, we see it in imperialism’s ‘games ethic’, where being good at sport, especially team sport, was seen a solid basis for practitioners going out to build the empire and maintain its outposts. CLR James evokes the ideal in discussing his schoolboy cricket,[1] and our local bookstores regularly promote titles such as cricketer Ed Smith’s What Sport Tells Us About Life[2] advancing the notions of sport’s metaphorical value for things beyond the boundary.

Elsewhere we see sport held up as a quintessential good. It’s presented as a way to save young people from a life of crime, and provides an outlet for social frustrations. It’s seen a place where we can meet groups and others whom we would not ordinarily encounter. Sport participation also helps sustain our health, keeping us fit and able to remain physically active. It celebrates, in the oft repeated terms of Pierre de Coubertin, “not the triumph but the struggle”.

Yet these panegyrics to sport seldom remind us that sport builds a brutal sense of competition – ‘second is just first loser’ – and in its performance form with all of its global inequalities of access to elite sport infrastructure is profoundly and systemically unfair. There is an overwhelming silence, or at best quiet whispers, about sport’s links to gender based violence, or the ways its form and organisation maintain white supremacy. Discourses that surround, substantiate, and flow from sport sustain gender discrimination and deep seated racist practices and outlooks. There are alarming associations between some forms of sport participation and long term brain injury, other serious medical conditions, and early death; conditions that elite sport’s organisers and promoters have gone to extensive lengths to deny.[3] And yet sport remains widely seen as a social, cultural, and personal good.

On the one hand, he celebrates athletes’ struggles to build a more just world of sports while, on the other, he de-emphasises sports’ systemic inequities in invoking it as a model for ‘a fairer society and stronger economy’.

What’s more, the language of sport is deeply embedded in our everyday speech, to the extent that its metaphors are ubiquitous. We frequently see sport evoked for this metaphorical power. An event ‘kicks off’; we aspire to build a ‘level playing field’; there’s been some success with a project so we have some ‘runs on the board’; a challenge is faced by ‘stepping up to the mark’, and so forth. These two tendencies – sports overwhelming goodness, and its linguistic ubiquity – come together in Andrew Leigh’s promising but ultimately frustrating and disappointing short book, making a case for a more inclusive, expanding Australian economy.

To be fair to Leigh, he is not a sport studies scholar but a self-confessed ‘sports tragic’, and this is an invocation of sport to provide a metaphorical base for an exposition on a policy and practice approach to social fairness. That’s not say that his use of sport in this argument is naïve – he does have a PhD in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, has an academic background as an economist, and over the last ten years has held a number of ministerial and shadow ministerial posts for Australia’s Labor Party. It’s fair to assume he knows exactly what he is doing in building his case for fairness on sport’s metaphors: years in Parliament and experience as an academic tend to make a speaker aware of their rhetorical forms and power. Even so, his metaphors are not very complex, often relying on simile – the most straightforward of metaphorical forms. However, this reliance on simile means that Leigh’s failure, for the most part, to consider sport’s negatives is all the more problematic.

The argument is built around eight sites where sports practice, organisation, and athlete actions can inform thinking and outlooks about economic relations, goals, practices, and framing. Using these tropes and modes he makes a case for enhanced productivity, a legal framework that balances labour market participants’ interests, an approach to pay that is fair and keeps up with business growth and well-being, and opportunities for workforce participation and (re)training for economic change. He also addresses less quantitative issues – collegiality, good training and leadership, and gender and race equality and inclusion. His case, therefore, deals with economic as well as social and cultural capital, grounded in a vision of a humane, responsible capitalism. And, again, to be fair, there is a reading of sport that supports and sustains this liberal centrism, even from a self-professed social democrat such as Leigh.[4]

Sport – risky business. (Shutterstock/Margaret Kite)

At the heart of Leigh’s case, however, lies a profound paradox. On the one hand, he celebrates athletes’ struggles to build a more just world of sports while, on the other, he de-emphasises sports’ systemic inequities in invoking it as a model for ‘a fairer society and stronger economy’. Even more surprising is his tendency to treat athlete activism as the actions of individuals. So when addressing the question of equity in women’s sport, he discusses (on p 61) Billie Jean King’s refusal to play in the 1972 US Open unless prize monies were equalised, but there is no mention of the other 8 elite women tennis players who joined her forming the WTA.

Elsewhere, the split in rugby leading to the formation of rugby league is reduced only to a question of player payments (p 30), ignoring the wider dispute over the control and culture of the game, where amateurism stood in for class power and dominance. Although he does recognise the existence of players’ unions, and that some of them have successfully fought for better conditions and incomes, this appears almost as an afterthought and fails to note that the relative complicity of some player unions in sports’ hierarchies makes them more like yellow (company) unions than models for working class struggle that he tries to present them as.

It is in this problem of class dominance that the argument is weakest, but paradoxically also holds together strongest. Leigh’s model of sport coincides closely with the currently dominant ideals of performance sport, admittedly with a strong sense of participation, that broadly aligns with his orthodox economics, of the kind we might once have seen as ‘damp neo-liberal’. In this approach, the corporate world and market are mitigated by a humane social policy that emphasises equity, participation, and forms of inclusion that do not rock the corporate boat but allow it to assert forms of diversity. If that’s the economic model that we want to celebrate, encourage, and enhance, Leigh’s case is sharp and insightful. For those of us with a more heterodox economic outlook who aspire to build different economic and sporting worlds, his case falls far short.