Renson, R.: FAIR PLAY: ITS ORIGINS AND MEANINGS IN SPORT ... Kinesiology 41(2009) 1:5-18
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FAIR PLAY: ITS ORIGINS AND MEANINGS
IN SPORT AND SOCIETY
Roland Renson
Faculty of Kinesiology and Rehabilitation Sciences, K.U. Leuven, Belgium
Review
UDC 796.011.5:81’0
Abstract:
Modern sport originated in Great Britain as a cultural product of modernity, emphasizing equality and
competition. Fair play was the moral creed of the new sporting ethos, created by 19th
century upper and
upper-middle class Englishmen. Modern sports were forged in elite public schools such as Eton and Rugby,
where self-government was a pedagogical innovation and where Spencer’s ‘survival of the fittest’ was part
of the ideology. The thesis presented here is that fair play was advocated for the simple sake of survival in
these rough games, which were gradually standardized and coded. Thomas Hughes’ novel Tom Brown’s
schooldays disseminated the new sports creed and Tom Brown and his headmaster Thomas Arnold of Rugby
School became role models, who inspired a whole generation, including Pierre de Coubertin. Fair play was the
watchword of the gentleman amateur and the notion came under pressure when rugby and Association football
were spread to the working classes. Professional players were considered by the defenders of amateurism as
spoilsports, who no longer played the game for the game’s sake. The question is asked whether fair play has
become an anachronistic survival of the old amateur ideal and whether the postmodern professional sport
scene - as a legitimate branch of show business - should be guided by a code of professional ethics?
Key words: fair play, modern sport, betting, public schools, sport ethos, amateurism, professionalism
Introduction
Fair play is a worldwide understood concept,
which found its origins in sport. Fair play is not only
an essential element of sport, it has also become a
more general philosophy of respect for others and
respect for rules, whether on the sporting field or in
business or other competitive endeavours. Publications
such as Sigmund Loland’s Fair play in sport:
a moral norm system (2002) and the creation of a
wide range of national and international fair play
committees, trophies and prizes, underlines the relevance
and importance of fair play for sport and
society. This review article examines the origins
of the fair play notion and links it to the origins of
modern sport in Great Britain.
The traditional forms of games and recreational
activities of ‘Merry old England’ (pre-industrial
Britain) were often linked to the church calendar and
had a highly ritualized character. The rules varied
widely from one place to another. These traditional
physical contests were often chaotic and violent in
nature, with opposing players from contiguous
villages and towns or from different town sections.
A surviving example of such a rough type of game
is, for instance, the yearly Shrovetide football
match in the town of Ashbourne in Derbyshire.
Hugh Hornby has very recently given an excellent
overview of the fifteen still existing forms of the
so called ‘festival football’ in his book Uppies
and downies: the extraordinary football games of
Britain (2008).
Modern sport, on the contrary, is characterized
by a more rational and orderly approach. It was generally
accepted that modern sport was shaped on
the playing grounds of the British public schools in
the course of the 18th
and 19th
centuries. Recently
though, some sport historians are challenging the
‘exclusive’ public school origin of both Association
football and rugby (Inglis, 2008). Modern sport can
be defined as:
“... physical activities of a recreational and competitive
character, in which one tries to conquer
either one’s own physical limitations (the Olympic
motto: citius, altius, fortius), or an external
obstacle (opponent(s), natural obstacle such as a
mountain, etc.) according to a pre-agreed code
of behaviour (fair play, rules, etc.)” (Renson,
1980, p. 16).
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Fair play originated in Great Britain as part
of this new sporting ethos. From there it was exported
to the European continent and elsewhere in
the world.
The first generation of European sporting zealots,
such as Pierre de Coubertin in France, were
fascinated by this new British sporting way of life,
which they perceived as a new form of practical
morality. In his 1897 work with the striking title A
quoi tient la supériorité des anglo-saxons? Edmond
Demolins wrote:
“Even when not working, the Englishman has
a need for effort: either by practicing canoeing,
cricket, football; he will accomplish a difficult
and dangerous climb, for the sole reason to have
conquered a difficulty (p. 373)”.
Another anglophile, the German author Rudolf
Kircher, wrote, in 1927, a book entitled Fair Play:
Sport Spiel und Geist in England, in which he stated
that one cannot understand modern sport and its fair
play spirit without understanding the global context
of English society:
“Sport is play, but the concept of ‘play’ stretches
far beyond the domain of sport. ... The play
spirit [Spieltrieb], also among the Englishmen,
expresses itself not only in muscular games, it
permeates deeply the cultural life of the whole
population ... English sport is directly and indissolubly
linked with the whole life of the nation.
… If one destroys the play spirit of the English,
then one destroys the spirit of the nation (pp.
11-17)”.
This theme was recaptured by Hans Indorf in
his 1938 work Fair Play und der englische Sportgeist.
Again, fair play was seen as an idiosyncrasy
of English society.
What’s in a word?
The word fair stems from Old English faeger,
akin to Old High German fagar, meaning beautiful.
The word play stems from Old English plega,
akin to Old English plegian, which means to play.
This is equivalent to Old High German pflegan and
Middle Dutch pleyen. The Dutch verb plegen, to
commit, and the German pflegen still exist, but the
Dutch term for play is spel, with its verb spelen,
related to the German term Spiel and verb spielen
(Gillmeister, 1993).
The word game is Middle English, from Old
English gamen, which is akin to Old High German
gaman, meaning amusement. The old term has survived
in backgammon, a game in which pieces are
sometimes forced to move backwards. The word
game can also refer to animals that are hunted for
sport or food. It would be interesting to look at Key
words: the way(s) in which these two meanings of
game are interconnected. When we consider Game
Laws in Great Britain, we see that they are concerned
with the legal rights and controls that exist
with respect to a variety of animals. There is
no overall definition of game; rather, it has been
defined in a number of Acts of Parliament. For example,
the 1831 Game Act included hares, pheasants,
partridges and grouse. Deer were added for
the purpose of the 1860 Game Licences Act, while
hares and rabbits were defined as ground game.
On the other hand, there are no absolute property
rights in living wild animals (foxes, badgers, lynxes,
etc.) (Collins, Martin, & Vamplew, 2005, p. 132).
If we look at the classical sports encyclopaedias
from the Belle Epoque period, The encyclopaedia
of sport & games for example, edited by the Earl
of Suffolk and Berkshire in 1911 and presented in
four volumes, we find that around 70 to 80 percent
of the entries concern all sorts of animals that can
be hunted, not only in Europe but throughout the
world. Even in a ‘blood sport’ like hunting, principles
of fair play were respected, and a distinction
was made between fair game (open to legitimate
pursuit, attack, etc.) and forbidden game.
The development of modern sport
Sport historians like Manfred Lämmer, Ingomar
Weiler, David Young and several others have
dispelled the myth that the ancient Greeks were the
inventors of fair play. The French archeologist and
historian Paul Veyne (cited in Weiler, 1991, p. 55)
stated that the concept of playing within a predefined
set of rules referred to as game seems to be an
Anglo-Saxon invention, whereas the ancient Games
were trying to imitate the brutal reality of war instead
of trying to respect a set of artificial rules.
Sport sociologists have also helped with trying
to destroy the fair play myth of the ‘ancient
masters’:
“Ancient Greek sports were based on a warrior
ethos and involved traditions of honour rather
than fairness” (Dunning, 1971, p. 83).
“The boxers of Olympia were not classified according
to weight any more than the wrestlers
were” (Elias, 1971, p. 102).
One can already find traces of a moral concern
about play and games among the humanists of the
Renaissance period, such as Desiderius Erasmus
and Juan Luis Vives who were once colleagues at
the famous Collegium Trilingue in Leuven. The
Spanish scholar Vives was deeply shocked by the
violence of his time, and disapproved, for example,
of games being used for military training. In his
‘Six laws of play’, which he laid down in his 1538
publication Linguae Latinae exercitatio, he stated
(in the fifth law) that:
“No game should serve to raise anger to dispute
between fellow players, but the players must
be, throughout the game, companions, cheerful,
joyful and mirthful, nor must there be any
trace of deceit, or sordidness or avarice” (cited
in Renson, 1976, p. 9).
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Peter McIntosh, in his pioneering work Fair
play: ethics in sport and education (1979, pp. 20-21),
noted that Richard Mulcaster, headmaster of Merchant
Taylors’ School in London from 1560 to 1586,
was another who thought football could be made to
serve educational and moral purposes.
In his Homo ludens (1938, p. 12) the famous
Dutch scholar Johan Huizinga wrote critically about
the play element in contemporary sport and about
its origin:
“Though human beings have indulged in such
activities [physical contests] since the dawn of
time, these only take on the character of organized
games to a very slight degree ... there are,
however, other forms of contests which develop
of their own accord into ‘sports’... That this
process started in 19th
century England is understandable...
The structure of English social
life had much to do with it. Local self-government
encouraged the spirit of association and
solidarity, ... the absence of obligatory military
training, ... the peculiar form of education ...,
and finally the geography of the country ... Thus
England became the cradle and focus of modern
sporting life.”
From betting to fairness: modern
sport as a metaphor for equality
The sociologist Norbert Elias (1971, p. 101),
father of the civilization theory, has shown that a
greater emphasis on the enjoyment of game-contests
and the tension-excitement they create, in particular,
were to some extent connected with the enjoyment
of betting. He also stated that betting played
a considerable part in both the transformation of
‘cruder’ forms of ‘game-contests’ into sports and
the development of the ethos of fairness in England.
Peter McIntosh (1979, p. 2) has rightly claimed that
fairness is an idea and, perhaps, also an ideal, implicitly
or explicitly present in human relations. The
expressions fair comment, fair price, fair deal, fair
trade, by fair means indicate that fairness is not just
confined to sport and fair play. Moreover, “fairness
is related to justice and justice is fundamental … to
the survival of the human species”.
In a very original essay Sport as a symbolic dialogue,
C.E. Ashworth put forward the thesis that
if life can be considered a game, in which identities
are established, tested, and possibly even abandoned,
then games can be thought of as idealized
forms of social life. Games - through their rules establish
identity with a consensual certainty that in
social life itself, is not always possible. Therefore,
Ashworth (1971, p. 45) considered sport as a symbolic
dialogue: “Modern man insists on ‘equality’
in sport, i.e. on strict formal rules that make ‘extra-ability’
factors equal for everyone. This is because
he defines himself as equal”.
Equality is also the second of seven fundamental
characteristics of modern sport, identified
by Allen Guttmann in his classic work From ritual
to record: the nature of modern sport (1978).
Guttmann’s seven characteristics are secularism,
equality, specialization, rationalization, bureaucracy,
quantification, and records. The principle of
equality implies that everyone should, theoretically,
have the opportunity to compete, and that the
conditions for competition should be the same for
all contestants. Equality of chances (creating equal
opportunities at the start of the competition) is not
only a democratic principle, it is also a necessary
factor in building up tension about the outcome of a
game and in making betting a worthwhile - though
unpredictable - enterprise. This so-called equality
of chances even applied - in absurdo - to fox
hunting. Elias (1986, p. 168) believed that without
such a ‘fair’ arrangement, the pleasure and excitement
provided by the tension of the battle, which
was and still is the main function of the sport of
fox hunting, would be too short. Nevertheless, the
sport gave rise to controversies between those who
laid greater stress on the hunting itself (process-oriented)
and those who laid greater stress on killing
the fox (result-oriented) - between the advocates
of ‘good sport’ and the advocates of ‘gaining victory’:
“Without a figuration that was able to maintain
for a time a moderately unstable equilibrium
of chances for opponents, one could not expect to
have ‘good sport’…”.
Picture 1. The principle of equality of chances in sport was
even applied – in absurdo - in the sport of fox hunting. The
picture shows a fox hunt from a print after Samuel Howett,
engraved by Vivares ans Merke and published on january
20th
, 1808, by Edward Orme, London.
It seems, though, that the principle of creating
equal sides, as well as some incipient form of
specialization and some control of violence had already
been introduced in the game of football before
the 18th
century of ‘Egalité, Fraternité et Liberté’.
In Francis Willoughby’s book of games: a seventeenth
century treatise on sports, games and pas-
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times, which was re-edited in 2003, one can read
(p. 168):
“The players being equally divided according
to their strength and nimbleness … They usually
leave some of their best players to guard
the goal while the rest follow the ball.
… They often break one anothers shins when
two meet and strike both together against the
ball, & therefore there is a law that they must
not strike higher than the ball.”
Also, the principle of handicapping in sports
such as horse racing and golf, and even in tennis,
was introduced to ensure an equilibrium of chances
between competitors of different weight categories
or of different skill levels. The origin of the term
stems not from hand in cape or hand on cap, as is
often said, but from hand in cap. Originally, hand
in cap was the name of a trading game, involving
two traders and an umpire or matchmaker. A typical
14th
century example could include the trade of
a cloak for a hood. The matchmaker decides on the
difference in value (boot or odds) between the two
items to be traded. Both traders put their hands into
a cap, and would draw them out at the same time.
An open hand was an agreement to trade and a
closed hand was a refusal to trade. In around 1750,
the term handicap began to apply to horse races
(The Oxford English Dictionary, 1989; Crowley &
Crowley 1999).
Guttmann says, “... this experiment in equality now
seems bizarre, but handicaps on the basis of weight
are still taken for granted in horse races”.
“To be a good animal”: modern sport
as a metaphor for competition
In 1860, the British philosopher Herbert Spencer
(1820-1903) published a small monograph, Education:
intellectual, moral and physical, in which
the following quote can be found: “People are beginning
to see that the first requisite to success in
life is ‘to be a good animal’; and to be a nation of
good animals is the first condition to national pros-
perity”.
Whereas Ashworth (1971) saw modern sport as
a metaphor for equality, Richard Holt (1989, p. 97)
has shown that sport also served as a metaphor for
competition, in the period that Britannia ruled the
waves. The ideology of competition and of ‘survival
of the fittest’ ran strongly through the middle
years of the 19th
century, when British goods conquered
the world market. Sport enshrined the ethic
of competition, or, more precisely, the ethic of fair
competition, by which Britons prospered:
“Downgrading the mere winning of games in
favor of taking part lay in the impetus this gave
to widespread participation and to the idea of
life as a constant struggle. By teaching boys
how to lose as well as how to win with dignity,
the wider competitive principle was strengthened”
(Holt, 1989, p. 97).
The framework of rules, including those ensuring
fairness, equal chances of winning for all contestants,
became stricter. The rules became more
precise, and surveillance of these rules more efficient;
hence, penalties for breaking the rules became
more difficult to evade (Elias, 1986, p. 151). J.
E. C. Weldon, headmaster of Harrow School from
1881-1895, put it very explicitly: “It is my earnest
desire that athletic games should be kept pure of all
that may lower the spirit of the game. For the lesson
of fair play in sport is the lesson of honesty in
business ...” (cited in Mangan, 1998, p. 37).
Sport historian James Anthony Mangan (1981,
1998) has clearly linked the relationship between
the games ethic and British imperialism, and has
provided many relevant examples. One such example
is a citation from John Astley Cooper’s 1916
article in the journal United Empire, entitled ‘The
British imperial spirit of sport and war’. The war,
in Cooper’s view, was a ‘muscular Christian’ crusade.
The empire was the ‘holy land’ - not to be
regained but to be preserved. Cooper was elated
that when the sporting traditions of a whole people
were trembling in the balance, “the inbred instinct
of fair play came to the fore! A true sportsman detests
a bully and German Kultur is the antipodes of
the British imperial spirit of sport” (cited in Mangan,
1998, p. 55).
Allen Guttmann (2004, p. 98), who has insightfully
analysed the nature of modern sport,
has stressed that modernity was evident in the
drive to create equal conditions in competitions a
drive that was taken to the extreme in France.
At some French track-and-field events, contestants
were handicapped on the basis of age: older runners
were moved back from the starting line, one meter
for every six months over the age of sixteen. As
Picture 2. Rugby College, where Rugby football originated,
became a mythical place. Pierre de Coubertin ‘sanctified’
Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby College, as the
‘ father of modern sport’. Drawing by W. Thomas, 1870.
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The public schools and modern sport
Eric Dunning (1971, p. 134), while studying the
social factors that have contributed to the development
of modern football, has pointed out that
from the second half of the 18th
century traditional
forms of football gradually began to decline. Increasing
industrialization and urbanization were
the major causes. At the same time, newer models
of the game, which were more appropriate for an
urbanizing, industrializing society, were beginning
to emerge in the public schools.
It is widely accepted that modern sports were
forged in these elite public schools, where self-government
was a pedagogical innovation and where
the attitudes of fair play and gentlemanly conduct
assuaged the tolerated violence on the playing
fields. ‘To play the game for the game’s sake’
was a reflection of the elite and gratuitous sporting
ethos of true ‘amateurship’. To play the game fair
for the sake of survival is a statement I would like to
make, in order to explain the instrumental or functional
nature of the fair play ethos. Physical injuries
were still common features in public school football
games throughout the 19th
century, especially
broken shins due to the tolerated ‘hacking’ of the
opponent with the iron-capped ‘navvies’- leather
boots that were originally worn by the canal diggers
[navigators] and later by the railway workers. But
gradually the ‘mock-fight’ component in the game
began to increase at the expense of the ‘real-fight’
component. Football started to become a form of
group contest, which provided, as much as possible,
the pleasures of a real fight, but without its risks and
dangers (Dunning, 1971, p. 144). Dunning’s tutor,
Norbert Elias (1986, p. 151), has described sports
as “… game-contests involving muscular exertion
attained at a level of orderliness and of self-discipline
on the participants not attained before”. At
the same time, however, these sports came to embody
a set of rules that ensured a balance between
the possible attainment of high combat-tension and
reasonable protection against physical injury. In the
19th
century, it was the boys themselves who were
responsible for running their football, as most of
the masters were hostile or indifferent to the game.
In the spirit of self-government, conflicts had to be
solved amongst the players themselves: “… it was
left to players through their captains to resolve such
differences - the referee in soccer was a late arrival
on the field and was not given a whistle until 1891”
(McIntosh, 1979, p. 118).
Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby College
from 1828 to 1842, was often depicted - and even
worshipped by Pierre de Coubertin - as the main
agent of the school reform in England, and as the
person who managed to deal with the endemic crises
of violence between the schoolboys. However,
it was not Thomas Arnold who entertained notions
of the moral influence of sport, but one of his assistant
masters, G.E.L. Cotton, who became headmaster
of Marlborough college in 1852 (McIntosh,
1979, p. 27). In Thomas Hughes’ popular novel Tom
Brown’s schooldays (1857), Tom and some of his
school fellows are discussing cricket with a young
master, who is believed to be based on Reverend
Cotton, assistant master at Rugby from 1837. In
the novel, the master explains to them the game’s
‘ideology’:
“The discipline and reliance on one another
which it teaches is so valuable, I think,” went
on the master. “It ought to be such an unselfish
game. It merges the individual into the eleven;
he doesn’t play that he may win but that his side
may” (p. 355).
It was a principle of Thomas Arnold’s Rugby
that the responsible adult developed out of the irresponsible
boy. However, in his novel, Thomas
Hughes implies that games had no immediacy for
Arnold as an educationist, and were not part of his
responsibility as a headmaster. Games were recreation
and, therefore, the exclusive preserve of the
boys. All aspects of sport, as seen in the novel, are
the affairs of individuals, teams, or school houses.
The masters take a benevolent interest, offering
advice, never organization (Sanders, 1989, p.
XII-XIII).
Picture 3. The principle of ‘handicapping’ was introduced
in horse racing – and other sports - to ensure equilibrium of
chances between competitors of different weight categories.
This picture of “The weighing room”, where jockeys are
‘matched’, appeared in the Illustrated London News of
1893.
The ghost of Tom Brown
Tom Brown became a Victorian hero and a role
model for young boys struggling through their adolescence.
Rugby became a mythical place, where
rugby football originated. It even became a pilgrimage
spot for Pierre de Coubertin, who sanctified
Thomas Arnold as the ‘father of modern sport’
(MacAloon, 1981).
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Others have been much less clement towards
Hughes’ novel. Richard Usborne (1977), for instance,
in his essay ‘The shadow of Tom Brown’,
proposed that Tom Brown’s schooldays has been
a frontrunner in imprinting on the English ruling
class two irrational beliefs. Firstly, that corporal
punishment should be, by the male, bravely received
(bullying, caning, boxing, school fights, ‘going
hard’ at games, biting and gouging in the scrum,
breaking your neck in the hunting field, wounds or
death in the battle for your country). And secondly,
that corporal punishment should be bravely inflicted
when sanctioned by authority, and sometimes when
not sanctioned (beating small boys when you are
a perfect, housemaster, headmaster or father, biting
and gouging in the scrum - if not seen by the
referee - capital punishment if you are a judge or
a hangman, casualties by the thousand, preferably
on the enemy but, when necessary, on your own
men if you are a warlord, in uniform or civilian).
George MacDonald Fraser (1977) has emphasized
that the public school code of honour can only truly
operate in that enclosed society and that schoolboys
act with a fair amount of common sense, and know
when enough is enough.
The same mythical aura hangs around Eton
School, the birthplace of Association football.
While walking on the playing fields, the Duke of
Wellington would have said: “It was here that the
battle of Waterloo was won” (McIntosh, 1979, p.
34). The truth was less idyllic: the Duke had been
to Eton, but he did not like the school. Moreover,
there were no compulsory games in ‘his’ Eton, and
he knew nothing of playing fields when he revisited
his old school. What he really said was “I really
believe I owe my spirit of enterprise to the tricks I
used to play in the garden”. Paul Johnson, (1977, pp.
14-15) has remarked that it is one thing to demolish
mythology; it is quite another to form a just estimate
of the influence the public schools have exerted, and
still do exert, on public life. Anthony Storr, (1977,
p. 98), a psychiatrist, raised the same point: “Does
the public school system promote growth toward
psychological health and maturity, or does it produce
‘old boys’ who never grow up?”.
I would like to draw attention to the fact that
Tom Brown’s schooldays has not only spawned hundreds
of other school novels full of cricket, football,
and other sports, as well as fights, in Britain,
but also in America, where the Jesuit Francis Finn
(1859-1928) produced his own catholic version of
fair play and boarding school life. Both the educational
virtues and the perilous vices related to
playing these games are expressed in Finn’s popular
novels, which have titles such as Tom Playfair,
Percy Wynn, Claude Lightfoot, Harry Dee, and
That football game. These books were also cherished
by European youngsters of my father’s generation
(whose copies I still have), and were seen as
a catholic version of muscular Christianity.
From the public schools to the
working classes: amateurs versus
professionals
Due to the high level of autonomy which the
boys enjoyed, their struggles for power within the
schools and the fact that, as prefects, they became
accustomed to the exercise of power at an early age,
many traditionalist educators were convinced that
the public schools were a useful training ground for
young members of their class. Because of its civilized
character, and because its acceptance by the
public schools had given it a label of respectability,
by about 1850 football had become a socially
permissible activity for young adult ‘gentlemen’
(Dunning, 1971, pp. 140, 146). In connection to
this, Norbert Elias (1986, p. 168) has noted that the
sports-ethos was not the kind of ethos of the working
middle classes, to which one applies terms like
moral or morality, but that it was the ethos of the
wealthy, sophisticated and comparatively restrained
leisure classes. Set against this background, the amateurs’
fight for survival can be seen as the struggle
of those who saw heriditry, rank and nobility
of blood as their privilege, against those who “honoured
no one except for his own merit and his own
deeds”. The first viewpoint was clearly expressed
by the warden of Radley College in 1849: “A gentleman
both knows and is thankful that God instead
of making all men equal has made them all
most unequal …” (cited in Wigglesworth, 1996, pp.
87, 103).
Richard Holt (1989, 1992, 2006) has pointed out
that such moral arguments were but pawns in the
sports class struggle between gentlemen amateurs
and working class professionals. The argument used
by the amateur elite was that if sport were commercialized
then winning would become more important
than taking part, and if this happened a game
would no longer be a friendly encounter but a serious
struggle for points in a league system. Teams
would become the slaves of their supporters, who
would be more interested in success than in fair
play. Holt (1989, p. 104) argues that this vision of
the high priests of Victorian amateurism was a fine
and proper one. What was not acceptable, however,
was how these values were put into practice: “The
amateur code was in practice frequently a means
of excluding working-class players from high-level
competition”.
Fair play was the watchword of the gentleman
amateur. The term ‘amateur’ has now come to mean
anyone who does not play for pay, but the original
meaning was more subtle. Fair play meant not only
respecting the written rules of the game, but abiding
by what was generally understood to be the
spirit of the game. Sport had not only to be played
in good spirit; it had to be played with style, in
accordance with the slogan ‘Strife without anger,
art without malice’, as generations of Harrovians
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sang (Holt, 1989, pp. 98-99). Gradually, a shift took
place from the original distinction between gentlemen
and players to the rigid distinction between
amateurs and professionals. The new importance
of ‘how you played the game’, as the saying went,
gave added significance to the vexed question of
payment. The term professional came into use in
the 1850s and amateur in the 1880s. Before the mid-
19th
century, the terms gentlemen and players were
used mainly in cricket, to denote those who were
of independent means and those who were not. So
originally the distinction was purely one of social
position, and there was no dishonour attached to
making money out of sport (Holt, 1989, p. 103).
of public life and was actively encouraged by the
politically predominant classes (McKibbin, 1990,
p. 22). ‘Muscular Christian’ and ‘Christian Socialist’
priests, many of whom were educated at public
schools, played a central role in the spread of rugby
and Association football to the working classes.
While the middle and upper classes stressed individual
competition in the sphere of work, in the
sphere of leisure they emphasized team spirit, fair
play, and cooperation: “To play for money was to
make it work”. But - alas - the amateur clubs were
now also forced to adopt underhand methods of
payment in order to attract and retain high calibre
players “… ‘shamateurism’ became the norm”
(Dunning, 1971, p. 149).
The waning of the amateur sport
ethos: from Eton to Proshow
The word amateur comes from the Latin verb
amare, which means to love. Amateurs are thus
considered athletes who only play for the love of the
game. Amateurism, however, meant many things.
It was part of a ‘civilizing process’ of self restraint,
but it was also a way of promoting the spirit of
competition for its own sake. Hostility to betting
put the amateur sport clearly in the camp of the
protestant work ethic and the industrial bourgeoisie,
as opposed to the aristocracy. The aristocrats,
with their pre-industrial code of honour, continued
to gamble on horses, yet disapproved of payment
of professional players. In their eyes, paying players
a wage spoiled the fun and defeated the moral
purpose of the games, which was to improve the
body and the character (Holt, 1992). Where have
we heard this before? Mens sana in corpore sano, I
wonder, however, why physical education and sport
apologists always neglect to cite the whole quotation
of the Roman poet Juvenal (ca. 60-140) who actually
said: “Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore
sano” (Satire, 10, p. 356) or “Let us pray that
there might be a healthy mind in a healthy body”.
John Hulley of Liverpool Athletic Club used the
well known abbreviation in 1862 as the motto of
an essay competition during the first Olympic festival
in Liverpool; since then it has lived a life of
its own as a perfect illustration of ‘wishful thinking’.
The gradual decline of amateurism in sport is
well documented in D.J. Taylor’s book On the Corinthian
spirit (2006).
In the Fair Play Declaration of the International
Council of Sport and Physical Education (ICSPE),
published at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris
in 1976, one can still read that:
“Fair play … requires as a minimum that he [the
competitor] shows strict, unfailing observance
of the written rule … [obligatory]; … fair play
is embodied in modesty in victory, in graciousness
in defeat … [commendable]; …The referee
should not confine his involvement to the playPicture
4. Fair play was the watchword of the gentleman
amateur. Before the mid 19th century the terms ‘gentlemen’
and ‘players’ were used in cricket to denote who were of
independent means and those who were not. The print from
an engraving by S. Lipschitz after a drawing by W. Drummond
and C.J. Baséne, shows a cricket match between Sussex and
Kent at Brighton in 1849.
The famous Corinthian Football Club, which
was founded in 1882, originally determined to play
only friendly matches against other amateur clubs,
especially teams from the London area. They refused
to join the Football League or to compete in
the Football Association Cup, due to their original
rules forbidding them to compete for any cups or
prices. They also refused to take penalties, inspired
by the idea that such penalties were not within the
spirit of the game. When they finally competed in
a competition in 1900, they beat Aston Villa, then
League champions, by 2-1 (Cavalini, 2007).
The defenders of amateurism had other motives
as well. Convinced that sport should be an avocation
rather than a vocation, they even condemned
specialization (Guttmann, 2004, p. 98). True amateurs,
who still regarded training and competition
as a pastime, also thought that intensive training led
to an inequality of the terms of competition
“…when they had to take their places on the
starting line alongside the full time workers”
(McIntosh, 1979, p. 138).
The use of the vocabulary of ‘fairness’, derived
from amateur sport, was important in all aspects
Renson, R.: FAIR PLAY: ITS ORIGINS AND MEANINGS IN SPORT ... Kinesiology 41(2009) 1:5-18
12
ing field or arena. It will be to his credit if … he
seeks contacts before and after the events with
the competitors … [commendable]” (cited in
McIntosh, 1979, pp. 122-123).
I am afraid that if a referee would do this today,
he would surely be fired by his football association.
In contrast to this rather ‘idealistic’, or should
I say ‘paternalistic’, view of the amateur sports of
the good old days, is the fact that spectator sports
have become “… die wichtigste Nebensache der
Welt” (the most important triviality of the world).
Ten years before the official abolishment of the amateur
rule by the Olympic Movement, Allen Guttmann
(1978, pp. 31-32) wrote:
“The amateur rule was an instrument of class
warfare ..., the attempt to limit sports to gentlemen
of means still survives in the anachronistic
amateur role ... . Western nations must eventually
abolish the amateur-professional distinction
in its present form because it has long since become
anachronistic and because it is corroded
by hypocrisy and mocked by the practice of
communist nations where ‘amateurs’ devote at
least as much time to sports as do our ‘profes-
sionals’.”
Whereas Guttmann pleaded to give up the
anachronistic and hypocritical amateur status, Peter
McIntosh (1979, p. 138) warned - from a pedagogical
point of view - against the professionalisation
of the Olympic Games. He complained that they
were publicly preaching and promoting humanism,
amateur ideals, equality of terms in competition,
friendship in the contest and other human values
are, but that they were at the same time, in living up
to their motto ‘Citius, altius, fortius’, contributing
to the professionalization of sport. McIntosh (1979,
p. 139) was disappointed by the hollow rhetoric of
the Olympic Movement during the Cold War crisis,
when the terms amateurism and fair play had
rather farcical, as opposed to moral, connotations.
Probably with great regret and pain in his heart, he
predicted the inevitable bifurcation between physical
education, on the one hand, and the competitive
sport business, on the other:
“Despite the high-sounding pronouncements on
sport by the International Olympic Committee,
by UNESCO and by other prestigious bodies, it
may be that the morality of sport is being preserved
or transformed not in the stadium but in
the kick-about arena.”
Guttmann and McIntosh thus held quite different
views on the transformation of top level sport
into entertainment industry when they wrote their
treatises in the late 1970s. While Guttmann acted as
an objective observer, who watched the emergence
of a globalized and professionalized sport entertainment
industry (see also his book on Sports spectators
(1986), McIntosh was still fighting a rearguard
action against the waning of the amateur ethos and
the loss of the fair play spirit in sport. Should McIntosh,
therefore, be considered a naive nostalgic of
the past, and Guttmann a cool observer without
social ‘engagement’? I believe that they were each
looking at different kinds of sports and from different
perspectives. The American scholar Allen
Guttmann, himself being culturally immersed in
the Whole new ballgame (1988) of the sports scene
‘made in America’, showed a commonsensical approach
to sport show business. The British physical
educationist Peter McIntosh was concerned with
the difficult issue of moral education in relation to
sport. He did, perhaps, not differentiate enough between
physical education through sport at one end
and sport as mere entertainment business at the other,
because in his own country sport used to be the
‘corps business’ of [male] physical education.
I have pointed at the gradual and general ‘sportization’
of physical education on the European
continent, where, before the 1960s, Swedish gymnastics,
German Turnen, or more eclectic systems
still dominated the physical education curriculums
(Renson, 1999). Some have seen this development
not as an ‘aggiornamento’, but rather an educational
fiasco, or as Gilbert Andrieu (1992, p. 153) concluded:
“L’éducation physique est malade parce qu’elle
ressemble trop au sport.” (Physical education is ill
because it resembles sport too much.)
Since the first Olympic Congress of 1894,
where the amateur principle was the central issue,
together with the re-establishment of the Olympic
Games, sports and the Olympic Movement have
gone through a process of drastic changes. They
have migrated ‘From Eton to Proshow’. Sports
and games are no longer the sole prerogative of the
‘leisure class’. The ‘Sport-for-All’ movement has
strived to democratize physical activities for both
sexes, all ages, and all layers of society. Amateurism,
on the other hand, has been abandoned as the
guiding principle of the Olympic Movement since
the Seoul Games of 1988 and the sports scene has
become an integral part of professional show business
or ‘Proshow’, where other rules reign than …
on the playing fields of Eton.
Conclusions
Modern sport originated in Great Britain as a
cultural product of modernity, emphasizing equality
and competition. Fair play was the moral creed
of this new sporting ethos. Guttmann (1985) considered
fair play as a new chivalric ethos, created by
19th
century upper and upper-middle class Englishmen.
My thesis is that fair play was advocated for
the simple sake of survival in rough games played
inter pares (among equals). Pierre de Coubertin,
the French founding father of the modern Olympic
Movement, adopted this British cultural product
as the corner stone of his Pédagogie sportive
and spread this sporting gospel around the world.
Renson, R.: FAIR PLAY: ITS ORIGINS AND MEANINGS IN SPORT ... Kinesiology 41(2009) 1:5-18
13
Sport, however, is not educational in itself, but only
when put in an educational context (Renson, 2003).
The question, therefore, is whether or not, and if so
where, when and how, such an educational context
can be made ‘operational’ on our sporting fields?
I am optimistic that fair play ethics have a future
in an educational setting and under proper moral
leadership, and probably also in a recreational
context, where “…winning is not the only thing”.
Though I am much less optimistic about the chances
of fair play ethics in a semi- or full professional
sport setting, where winning or losing are seen in
terms of economics. Alexander Trollope already
criticized the growing seriousness in sport in 1868
(pp. 6-7) as “… a pursuit which, to be pleasurable,
should be a pleasure and not a business …” George
Orwell, who played for the Eton football team, expressed
his opinion about serious sports in more
drastic terms: “Serious sport has nothing to do with
fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness,
disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure
in witnessing violence, in other words it is war minus
the shooting” (Orwell, 1945).
Corporate governance, professional rights and
duties in terms of labour law should govern top-level
sport, thus guaranteeing its legal character
and professional ethics. For much too long, serious
sport has not been taken seriously enough.
The vox populi is asking for more spectacular
‘flair games’ and the professional sportsmen and
women are rightfully requesting their share of fair
play. Therefore, all those concerned with the preservation
of the moral values of fair play in sport
will have to face some serious challenges and answer
some tough questions. Such questions could
include:
- How can we still play the game for the game’s
sake, and not just for the game’s stake?
- How can physical educators cope with the new
sports creed (or sports greed)?
- When will professional sport ‘out’ itself as a
fully fledged branch of enterprise with a code
of professional ethics, career guidance, etc., and
as a self-supporting institution?
- Has fair play become an anachronistic survival
of the old amateur sport ideal? Or should amateurism
be reinvented, as recently proposed by
Lincoln Allison (2001)?
Fair play is one of the most vital contributions,
which sport has made to modern ethics. By looking
at the historical origins of the fair play concept,
I hope to have stimulated critical reflection on its
relevance for the movement culture of postmodern
society. Without fair play, sport as well as all
other competitive endeavors become a mere matter
of winning at all costs, indeed … war minus
the shooting.
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14
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Renson, R.: FAIR PLAY: ITS ORIGINS AND MEANINGS IN SPORT ... Kinesiology 41(2009) 1:5-18
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Submitted: October 23, 2008
Accepted: February 15, 2009
Correspondence to:
Prof. Roland Renson, Ph.D.
Faculty of Kinesiology and Rehabilitation Sciences
K.U. Leuven
Tervuursevest 101
B-3001 Leuven, Belgium
Mail: roland.renson@faber.kuleuven.be
Phone: 0032 (0)16 329052
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Renson, R.: FAIR PLAY: ITS ORIGINS AND MEANINGS IN SPORT ... Kinesiology 41(2009) 1:5-18
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Sažetak
Uvod
Fair play je širom svijeta poznat i razumljiv koncept,
koji svoje porijeklo vuče iz sporta. Fair play ili
“poštena igra” nije samo esencijalni element sporta,
već je postao i općenitija filozofija poštovanja drugih
i poštovanja pravila, kako na sportskom terenu,
tako i u poslu ili drugim natjecateljskim pothvatima.
Ovaj pregledni članak proučava porijeklo pojma fair
play i povezuje ga s podrijetlom modernog sporta
u Velikoj Britaniji.
Tradicionalni oblici igara i rekreacijskih aktivnosti
u predindustrijskoj Britaniji često su bili vezani uz
crkveni kalendar i bili su vrlo ritualnoga karaktera.
Pravila su se jako razlikovala od mjesta do mjesta.
Takva tradicionalna natjecanja često su bila kaotična
i nasilna, a suprotstavljeni natjecatelji bili su iz
susjednih sela i gradova ili iz različitih dijelova grada.
Nasuprot tome, moderni sport obilježava racionalniji
i uređeniji pristup. Općenito je prihvaćeno da
je moderni sport oblikovan na igralištima britanskih
privatnih škola tijekom 18. i 19. stoljeća.
Fair play je nastao u Velikoj Britaniji kao dio
tog novog sportskog etosa. Otuda je eksportiran*
na europski kontinent, odnosno diljem svijeta. Prva
generacija europskih sportskih fanatika, kao što je
bio Pierre de Coubertin u Francuskoj, bila je fascinirana
tim novim, sportskim načinom života, koji
su doživljavali kao novi oblik praktičnog (primijenjenog)
morala.
Razvoj modernog sporta
Povjesničari sporta, kao što su Manfred Lämmer,
Ingomar Weiler, David Young i još nekolicina,
uništili su mit o tome da su stari Grci izmislili fair
play. Francuski arheolog i povjesničar Paul Veyne
(citiran u Weiler 1991, str. 55) navodi da je koncept
igranja unutar unaprijed definiranog skupa pravila,
koji se naziva igrom, anglosaksonski izum, dok
su razne antičke igre pokušavale imitirati brutalnu
stvarnost rata, a nisu se temeljile na poštovanju
skupa umjetnih pravila.
Tragovi moralne zabrinutosti o igranju i igrama
mogu se naći već kod humanista renesansnog perioda,
kao što su Desiderius Erasmus i Juan Luis
Vives.
Od klađenja do pravednosti: moderni
sport kao metafora za jednakost
Sociolog Norbert Elias (1971, str. 101), otac teorije
civilizacijskog procesa, pokazao je da je naglasak
na užitku u igri-natjecanju i, osobito, u napetosti-uzbuđenju
koje natjecanja izazivaju, u određenoj
mjeri povezan s užitkom u klađenju. Klađenje je
igralo veliku ulogu i u transformaciji “sirovijih” oblika
“igara-natjecanja” u sportove i u razvoju etosa
pravednosti u Engleskoj.
Jednakost je druga od sedam temeljnih karakteristika
modernog sporta, prema Allenu Guttmannu.
Guttmannovih sedam karakteristika jesu: sekularizam,
jednakost, specijalizacija, racionalizacija, birokracija,
kvantifikacija i bilježenje. Načelo jednakosti
podrazumijeva da svatko, teoretski, treba imati mogućnost
natjecati se, a uvjeti za natjecanje trebaju
biti jednaki za sve sudionike. Jednakost izgleda za
uspjeh nije samo demokratsko načelo, to je također
nužan čimbenik za stvaranje napetosti oko rezultata
igre i za pružanje smisla klađenju.
“Biti dobra životinja”: moderan sport kao
metafora za natjecanje
Dok je Ashworth (1971) moderni sport vidio kao
metaforu za jednakost, Richard Holt (1989, str. 97)
je pokazao da je sport služio i kao metafora za nadmetanje
u periodu britanskog imperijalizma. Ideologija
kompeticije i ‘preživljavanja najsposobnijih’ bila
je snažno zastupljena sredinom 19. stoljeća, kada
je britanska roba osvajala svjetsko tržište.
Pravila, uključujući ona koja su osiguravala pravednost,
jednake izglede za pobjedu svih natjecatelja,
postala su stroža. Pravila su postala preciznija,
a njihovo nadgledanje učinkovitije.
Privatne škole i moderan sport
Široko je prihvaćeno da su moderni sportovi
stvoreni u elitnim školama, u kojima je (učenička)
samouprava bila pedagoška inovacija i gdje su principi
fair play-a i džentlmenskog ponašanja ublažili
nasilje koje se toleriralo na igralištima. ‘Igrati igru
radi igre same’ bilo je razmišljanje elite i sportskog
etosa pravog ‘amaterizma’. Igrati igru radi preživljenja
– tvrdnja je koju želim izložiti da bih objasnio
instrumentalnu i funkcionalnu prirodu etosa
fair play-a. Nogomet je postajao oblik skupnog natjecanja
koje je, u što većoj mogućoj mjeri, pružalo
zadovoljstvo prave borbe, ali bez pravih rizika i
opasnosti (Dunning, 1971, str. 144).
Thomasa Arnolda, upravitelja Rugby Collegea
od 1828. do 1842. godine, često su opisivali – Pierre
de Coubertin ga je čak i obožavao – kao glavnog
aktera školske reforme u Engleskoj te kao čovjeka
koji je uspio riješiti endemske krize nasilja među
dječacima u školi. Popularni roman Thomasa Hughesa
Tom Brown’s schooldays (1857; Školski dani
Toma Browna), proširio je novo sportsko uvjerenje,
a Tom Brown i njegov upravitelj Thomas Arnold iz
Rugby Collegea postali su uzori koji su inspirirali
cijelu generaciju.
Načelo Arnoldova Rugbya bilo je da se odgovorne
odrasle osobe razvijaju iz neodgovornih djeFAIR
PLAY: PORIJEKLO POJMA I NJEGOVO
ZNAČENJE U SPORTU I DRUŠTVU
*
Prava morfološka struktura riječi: eks+port+i+ra+n+ø .
Renson, R.: FAIR PLAY: ITS ORIGINS AND MEANINGS IN SPORT ... Kinesiology 41(2009) 1:5-18
17
čaka. No, same igre nisu bile dio Arnoldove odgovornosti
kao upravitelja. Igre su se ubrajale u
rekreaciju i bile su prepuštene dječacima. Oni su
bili odgovorni za organizaciju nogometa. U duhu
samouprave, sukobi su se rješavali među samim
igračima.
Duh Toma Browna
Tom Brown postao je viktorijanski heroj i uzor
mladim dječacima u životnoj dobi adolescencije.
Rugby College je postao mitsko mjesto nastanka
nogometa rugby - ragbija. Postao je čak i mjesto
hodočašća za Pierrea de Coubertina, koji je slavio
Thomasa Arnolda kao ‘oca modernog sporta’ (MacAloon,
1981).
Jednaku mitsku auru nosi i Eton School, rodno
mjesto nogometa (soccer ili association football).
Mnoga su i kritička sagledavanja tih mitova, koja
postavljaju pitanja poput onoga psihijatra Anthonya
Storra, (1977, str. 98): “Promiče li sustav privatnih
škola rast prema psihološkom zdravlju i zrelosti ili
on proizvodi ‘stare dječake’ koji nikad ne odrasta-
ju?”.
U svakom slučaju, roman Tom Brown’s schooldays
nije potaknuo nastanak stotina drugih školskih
romana punih kriketa, nogometa i drugih sportova,
ali i tučnjava, samo u Britaniji, nego i u Americi,
gdje je jezuit Francis Finn (1859-1928) stvorio vlastitu
katoličku verziju fair playa i internatskog školskog
života.
Iz privatnih škola u radničku klasu:
amateri nasuprot profesionalcima
Zbog svog civiliziranoga karaktera i zbog toga
što mu je prihvaćanje privatnih škola dalo etiketu
respektabilnosti, nogomet je oko 1850. godine postao
društveno prihvatljiva aktivnost za mladu odraslu
“gospodu” (Dunning, 1971, str. 140, 146). Vezano
uz to, Norbert Elias (1986, str. 168) primjećuje
da sportski etos nije bio etos radničke srednje klase,
nego etos bogate, sofisticirane i komparativno
suzdržane dokone klase. Iz te perspektive, borba
amatera za preživljavanje može se promatrati kao
borba onih koji su nasljedstvo, položaj i plemićku
krv smatrali svojom privilegijom.
Argument koji je koristila amaterska elita bio je
da bi komercijalizacijom sporta pobjeđivanje postalo
važnije od sudjelovanja te da, ako bi se to dogodilo,
igra više ne bi bila prijateljski susret nego
ozbiljna borba za bodove u sustavu liga. Momčadi
bi postale robovima vlastitih navijača koji bi bili
više zainteresirani za uspjeh nego za fair play. Richard
Holt (1989, str. 104) tvrdi da je ta vizija visokih
vođa viktorijanskog amaterizma bila ispravna.
Ono što, pak, nikako nije bilo prihvatljivo, jest kako
su se te vrijednosti praktično iskorištavale: “Kodeks
amatera se u praksi često iskorištavao kao sredstvo
isključivanja igrača radničke klase iz natjecanja
viših razina”.
Fair play je bila krilatica gospode-amatera. Pojam
profesionalan počeo se koristiti 50-ih godina
19. stoljeća, a amaterski 80-ih godina 19. stoljeća.
Prije sredine 19. stoljeća, pojmovi gospoda (gentlemen)
i igrači ( players) koristili su se pretežno u kriketu,
a originalna razlika u pojmovima bila je samo
u smislu društvenog položaja, dok se zarađivanje
sportom nije smatralo nečasnim (Holt, 1989, str.
103).
Nestajanje amaterskog sportskog etosa:
od Etona do Pro-showa
Deset godina prije no što je Međunarodni
olimpijski odbor službeno ukinuo amatersko pravilo,
Allen Guttmann (1978, str. 31-32) zastupao je
odustajanje od anakronističkog i hipokritskog amaterskog
statusa. S druge je strane Peter McIntosh
(1979, str. 138), s pedagoškog stajališta, bio najvećim
protivnikom profesionalizacije Olimpijskih igara.
Pobunio se da Igre javno zagovaraju i promiču
humanizam, amaterske ideale, jednakost u smislu
kompeticije, prijateljstvo i druge ljudske vrijednosti,
ali da istovremeno doprinose profesionalizaciji
sporta, promicanjem mota ‘Citius, altius, fortius’.
Predvidio je neizbježnu bifurkaciju između tjelesnog
odgoja, s jedne strane, i kompetitivnog sportskog
biznisa, s druge strane.
Guttmann i McIntosh su, dakle, kasnih 70-ih godina
20. stoljeća različito gledali na transformaciju
vrhunskog sporta u industriju. Američki znanstvenik
Allen Guttmann kao objektivni je promatrač pratio
nastanak globalizirane i profesionalizirane sportske
industrije zabave. Britanac Peter McIntosh, iz polja
tjelesnog odgoja, bio je zabrinut ozbiljnim pitanjem
moralne edukacije povezane sa sportom i gubitkom
amaterskog duha i duha fair playa iz sporta.
Od vremena prvog Olimpijskog kongresa 1894.
godine, gdje je načelo amaterstva, zajedno s ponovnim
uspostavljanjem Olimpijskih igara, predstavljalo
središnju temu, sport i olimpijski pokret
prošli su kroz proces drastičnih promjena. Sport i
igre nisu više isključivo pravo “dokone klase”. Pokret
“sport za sve” težio je demokratizaciji tjelesnih aktivnosti
za oba spola, sve dobi i sve slojeve društva.
Amaterizam je, s druge strane, napušten kao vodeće
načelo olimpijskog pokreta od vremena Olimpijskih
igara u Seoulu 1988. godine, a sportska je
scena postala integralni dio profesionalnog show
businessa ili Pro-showa, gdje vladaju drugačila pravila
….od onih s igrališta Etona.
Zaključci
Moderan sport nastao je u Velikoj Bruitaniji kao
kulturni produkt moderne, stavljajući naglasak na
jednakost i kompeticiju. Fair play je bio moralno
uvjerenje tog novog sportskog etosa. Teza koju
postavljam jest da je fair play bio zagovaran jednostavno
u svrhu preživljavanja u grubim igrama
koje su se odvijale “inter pares” (između jednakih).
Pierre de Coubertin, francuski osnivač modernog
olimpijskog pokreta, usvojio je taj britanski kulturni
proizvod kao podlogu za svoju Pédagogie sportive
i proširio taj sportski credo diljem svijeta. No, sport
nije edukativan, odgojan sam po sebi, već samo
kad je smješten u edukacijski, odgojni i obrazovni,
kontekst (Renson, 2003). Stoga je pitanje može li
se ili ne – a, u slučaju da može, onda kada i kako,
takav edukacijski kontekst učiniti ‘operacionalnim’
na sportskim terenima?
Renson, R.: FAIR PLAY: ITS ORIGINS AND MEANINGS IN SPORT ... Kinesiology 41(2009) 1:5-18
18
Optimistično gledam na to da etika fair playa
ima budućnost u edukacijskom okruženju i pod pravim
moralnim vodstvom, a vjerojatno također i u rekreacijskom
kontekstu. Puno sam manje optimističan
u pogledu izgleda etike fair playa u (polu)profesionalnom
sportskom okruženju, u kojemu se na
pobjede i poraze gleda s ekonomskog stajališta.
Korporacijsko upravljanje, profesionalna prava
i dužnosti u smislu zakona o radu trebali bi upravljati
vrhunskim sportom, garantirajući tako njegov
pravni karakter i profesionalnu etiku. Već se previše
vremena ozbiljan sport ne shvaća dovoljno
ozbiljno.
Očuvanje moralnih vrijednosti fair playa u sportu
sve će više biti suočeno s ozbiljnim izazovima i
teškim pitanjima koja će tražiti odgovor.
Fair play je jedan od najvažnijih doprinosa koje
je sport pružio modernoj etici. Bez fair playa sport,
a i ostale kompetitivne aktivnosti, postaju pitanje
pobjeđivanja pod svaku cijenu - uistinu “rat bez pucanja”,
kao što je George Orwell pesimistički predvidio
1945. godine.