Life and Sport
Professional Fouls
Author: Bryan Davies
The flags are first to the field, their acres of silk woven with every colour ever known to the world, both ancient and modern. The traditional styling of the French tricolors and the vibrancy of Ghana's Black Star generate the same anticipatory cheer when they are set against the unsullied green pitch. A small phalanx of officials follows. Their entry from the tunnel triggers an expectant roar that rises ever higher as the players follow them in symmetrical columns. It is a neat set piece, each player led by the hand of a beaming and beautiful child. As the teams walk together into cascading wall of sound, there may be a joke or a wink tossed to an opponent. They may usually be teammates in the Premiership or the Seri A, but they are the enemy today.
The Music of Football
The stadium is pulsating now to the most profound and the most exhilarating rhythm on this earth. It is patriotic fervor distilled into an irresistible and overwhelming tribal beat, set to the music of football. The wigs and the war paint of the faithful will intrigue and delight the anthropologists of the next millennium.
The national anthems are sung with a throaty enthusiasm that is as beautiful as a cathedral choir. The players will never feel a greater excitement and all-powerful urgency than that generated as they climb onto the world's greatest sporting stage. The kick off at hand, the singing and the chanting crowd is 80,000 voices seeking to time their greatest crescendo with the first touch of the ball.
The two 45 minute halves and the 30 minutes of added time, if necessary, ebb and flow, the roars and the groans neatly alternated between the supporters of each side. Every human emotion is extracted from the spectators as the play unfolds before them. There are whistles of disdain and unanswered cries for divine intervention. There is injustice and redemption as the morality play unfolds on the 100 meters of emerald ground.
Where the fate of one side and its nation has been cruelly judged by a jury of five penalty takers, there is often a remarkable denouement that falls on the match as gentle as rain. The crowd is spent, its roars reduced to pure gratitude for their champions who for two hours were their surrogates in the battle for life or death.
FIFA World Cup
The sweat soaked players are battered by the heat and the emotion of the encounter; there is a certain relief, even in defeat. The teams mill about at the final whistle, as the victor and the vanquished exchange hugs and jerseys. There are tears of joy and of sorrow and in football it is difficult to distinguish them. Each team, win or lose, salutes its people where ever they are in the stadium. Chivalry is real at the World Cup.
Here the beautiful game is all speed and fluid, eye-popping dexterity. In North America, we elevated the soccer mom to the place of a social icon, and our suburban green space is often given over to neat rows of soccer fields, but the baby boom generation has never embraced the game – too boring, and no hitting, say the Canucks weaned on hockey. I love all sports, and every athletic discipline has the power and the vibrancy to elevate our spirits and ourselves. Soccer players and their games have an immediacy that is compelling. American football and hockey players are huge and the teams are often anonymous collections of interchangeable parts. The NBA and its endorsement of a strutting rap video mentality among its stars have toxified much of what is great about my favorite sport. And baseball... if soccer is boring, where does the game with the multiple pitching changes, interminable warm-ups and three and a half hour, 9 inning games stand?
Watching the precocious Christian Renaldo or the elegant Ronaldinho weave with the ball through opposing defenses as if they were parking lot pylons is to watch magic being worked. When the now aging Zidane exquisitely deposits a looping ball on the boot of a teammate from 40 meters away, one witnesses an athletic skill that transcends sport. Since June 9, 2006 when the Cup matches began, I have floated in a High Definition television sea, transfixed by these sublime talents, set against the colour and the urgency of the constant and relentless passion in every World Cup venue. It must be like this every day in Heaven.
Sport Mirrors Life
It is the professional foul that jars me back from the soccer rhapsodies to the everyday reality of sport and life. The professional foul is the disfiguring scar that blights the face of an otherwise beautiful creature, an imperfection that cannot be hidden or disguised by lipstick or powder.
Soccer has its rougher elements. Any contest played at full speed by 22 players will create, even encourage physical contact. Some players will dive, tumble and writhe on the field after any collision, real or imagined. The speed of their inevitable recovery is tied to the award of a free kick, or the order of the referee to get up. This is only gamesmanship, a slightly ridiculous but tolerable outcropping of our human nature.
Soccer's black arts are far more invidious. Amidst all of the uplifting emotional energy of a stadium packed to capacity, with its trappings of anthems, handshakes, and gorgeous children, a cheap shot attack on an opponent that saves a goal without resulting in a serious sanction is not immoral or unsporting, it is expected. These fouls are elevated and purified into something clinical and antiseptic in the soccer world. This is the professional foul.
Players are applauded by coaches and commentators for cheating, so long as it occurs in the guise of the professional foul. When England's Wayne Rooney attempted to separate a Portuguese opponent from his testicles with a kick, Rooney was reviled for his bad temper. Had he acted to prevent a goal, Rooney would be respected for his "professionalism."
Professional Fouls in the Legal World
The professional foul is an oxymoron, as absurd an expression as a mandatory option, or business ethics. The professional foul is a feature of soccer that is reflected in every business and every occupation that proclaims an adherence to higher standards of conduct or strict codes of behavior.
The legal profession trumpets its ethics and its corresponding powers of self regulation in a neat reflection of many of the features of a World Cup football match. Cases are argued between "learned friends." Points are made in court through a "respectful submission" to judges who are both learned and honourable. Legal principles are discussed with reverence. All of these concepts are unassailable.
I was a trial lawyer for almost 20 years. Many cases were long and ceaseless strings of professional fouls. The truth was so often a stranger to the proceedings, because the law reveres procedure over substance, or what can be proven over absolute truth. Evidence is massaged, held back, or discounted because whatever lip service is paid to the principles of law, the players are there to win, period. The progress of the most sensational murder case in Ontario history was significantly altered when the lawyer for the killer deliberately withheld from the investigators conclusive videotape evidence of the crimes committed. The best traditions of the Bar will countenance this professional foul.
When a learned friend appears to be breaking into the clear, he or she will be fouled, professionally and emphatically. Bow to the judge, shake hands with your opponent, render your account and tell yourself, this is the honourable profession.
Professional Fouls in the Business World
In business, lies are told and conniving is done, to merely score or to defend one's goal. For five years, the Enron accounting scandal was the World Cup of insider swindles. The public had a non-stop media treatment of how one of the world's most successful companies in the 1990s was pillaged from within. It was only when one of the Enron players swapped his jersey for a prison uniform that the most persistent professional fouls committed by Enron eventually led its former leaders to their doom. How many tens of millions of dollars were squirreled away, safe from capture? The Enron case is the ultimate corporate professional foul.
Did Enron truly shock the conscience of America? Did the participation of the Canadian federal government in the multi-million dollar enrichment of Quebec based advertising companies create a crisis of Canadian conscience? As we race ever faster into a world with the sketchiest of moral boundaries, we are conflicted. There are rules and standards of conduct that resonate with everyone on a human level, like a World Cup match.
We want there to be fair play in every aspect of our lives. We preach ethics and yet, we expect business, professional and government leaders to commit all types of professional fouls. In competition, where ever it is, we expect the players to seek a tactical advantage and we do not call it cheating unless the foul bore no relation to the prize – it would seem as though the rules are guidelines, not limits.
In a winner take all world, the test is not how the game was won, but by how much. Shareholders never complain about a stock split or an extra dividend.
Life is sport.
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Published: July 07, 2006
