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Last update: Friday June 3, 2005 9:44
30th March 2005
Sir - Sport England's classification of darts as sport (News, Mar 25) raises a smile of incredulity among many, and frustrates the bewildered chess player. The British Darts Organisation deserves enormous credit for its relentless pursuit of this recognition. The allocation of central funds will help the sport thrive.
Chess is chronically underfunded and yet its right to acknowledgement as a sport is indisputable. Extreme physical demands are made of the players - a single game may last more than six hours. A university study in America (Temple University) reported that tournament chess causes physical changes similar to a comparable session of boxing or football.
Physical condition is of paramount importance and has affected match results. Consider Kasparov's endurance against Karpov. And former world champion Bobby Fischer declared: "I've got to stay in shape or it's all over."
Roy Lawrence, Marketing Director, British Chess Federation, Battle, E Sussex
31 March 2005
`When the American Bobby Fischer took on the Russian Boris Spassky in Reykjavik
in 1972, their chess match was seen as a metaphor for the Cold War.
During their nail-biting battle, won by Fischer, the men were not just operating
at the extreme limits of their mental abilities, it was also their physical
endurance that was being tested.
According to the benchmark study carried out by Temple University in the United
States, the players' heart-lung rates and blood pressure were comparable to
those of competing boxers and footballers. Fischer himself declared: "I've
got to stay in shape or it's all over."
But more than three decades later, chess is not accepted as a sport in Britain,
the United States and many other parts of the world outside the former Soviet
Union. Its secondary status as a mere pastime is particularly rankling in the
wake of Sport England's decision last week to recognise darts as a sport - a
pursuit which, despite a recent ban on big-match drinking, is synonymous in
the popular imagination with cigarettes and beer guts.
However, the British Chess Federation (BCF), which represents Britain's 60,000
regular tournament players, is now set to play its killer move. It is petitioning
to return chess to its rightful status as a sport. Before darts, the previous
two sports to achieve the accolade in Britain were polocrosse - a fusion of
polo and lacrosse - and harness racing in which competitors ride chariots pulled
by horses.
And according to Roy Lawrence, marketing director of the BCF, his argument was
readily accepted by the ancient Greeks who included much less demanding "intellectual
sports" such as poetry reading in the original Olympics. But despite achieving
exhibition status at Sydney in 2000, chess remains firmly out in the sporting
cold.
"It is chronically under-funded - a situation which could be rapidly transformed
if it were to achieve sports status. The allocation of central funds will make
the sport thrive," said Mr Lawrence who has played chess for 40 years and
admits to being "completely shattered" after a typical six-hour game.
While applauding the success of darts, which argued its case on an "indoor
archery" ticket, gaining the support of the Sports minister, Richard Caborn,
along the way, chess has been continually rebuffed in its search for central
funding. The rejection is based on an obscure 1937 Act of Parliament, which
demands that sport must be "physical", he said.
Top-class players, who can earn up to £500,000 a tournament, follow strict
exercise regimes. The outgoing world champion, Gary Kasparov, credited his superior
fitness for his successful cerebral struggles with his arch-opponent Anatoly
Karpov in the 1980s.
Mr Lawrence said: "The campaign is going on all over the world. We are
not able to access sponsorship because we are not taken seriously. Chess can
be played by anyone - people with physical disabilities, the young who get into
it through computer software, and the very old." Unlike almost every other
sport, men and women compete at the same tournaments in chess.
Such inclusiveness is one of the main considerations when deciding the merits
of a pursuit for sport status. According to Sport England, which judges cases,
governing bodies must submit applications which show that "physical agility"
is needed to play them. They must also prove there is no discrimination by sex,
race or disability.
A spokesman for Sport England said yesterday it would consider an application
from the BCF, although, like darts, it would more likely be eligible for tax
breaks rather than cash.
April 01, 2005
I EXPECTED the talk to be way above my head, spiralling into the swirling abstractions
of the glass-bead game, touching on higher mathematics, fugal resonances, polyphonic
patterns, and then moving into the enthralling and baffling technicalities of
the piano opening, the gambit and the gambit declined.
But no. It was all about blood and killing. It was all about emotion. The conversation
was not cerebral at all, it was entirely visceral. The glorious algebra of it
all was something that may, perhaps, be discussed another day. Right now, the
talk was all of killing and of being killed.
He’s gone for the jugular. He’s bleeding to death before our eyes.
He’s landed the knockout blow. He’s on the ropes. He’s a dead
man walking. That’s the move, that was lethal, that’s killed him.
He can’t go on, he’s taken too much punishment. It was all blood
and guts, as if we were in the middle of the shoot-out in Taxi Driver.
And all the time, the two contestants sat there in their neat, clean, and noticeably
unbloody suits. Looking at each other. Looking away. Looking back.
And then, all at once, a whir of action. One contestant stretched out his hand
— and then snapped it back again. A few minutes later, the other contestant
stood up — and walked about a bit. And I tell you quite truthfully that
it really was enthralling. Because what they were doing was not above my head
at all.
They were trying to smash each other to bits. And I have seen that happen with
Mike Tyson, Malcolm Marshall and Michael Schumacher. The way they were trying
to smash each other, yes, that was indeed above my head. But I had no problem
whatsoever in relating to the struggle for supremacy between Garry Kasparov
and Anatoly Karpov in New York.
It was the World Chess Championship. I subsequently spent a lot of time covering
another World Chess Championship, between Kasparov and Nigel Short in London,
a bout of ritual bloodletting that was sponsored by The Times. I remember meeting
the rather likeable Short several times. Although he managed to keep a few of
the ironies about himself, the impression he increasingly gave was of a man
being clubbed silly.
And this was tough for a man who had proved his own hardness of mind time and
again in years of metaphorical combat. But he had met someone harder and, at
times, was made to look like a 12-year-old playing with a grown-up. Short was
in a wrestling-with-your-dad situation. He was a man of suffering, that much
was inescapable.
The British Chess Federation is trying to persuade Sport England that chess
is a sport. This is an interesting academic argument but for one thing: if you
are reckoned to be a sport, you can get funded and you can get tax breaks. That
makes it a serious business rather than a saloon-bar discussion. Definition
is crucial. Chess has a huge international following, but in this country, we
don’t think of it as a sport. My reports on the Kasparov-Short encounter
appeared on the news pages.
So what about darts? That is everybody’s test case. But Sport England
has, indeed, recognised darts as a sport. Clearly, great athleticism is not
the definition of sport. Sport England demands that applicants show “physical
agility”. An activity that you mostly do lying down can therefore qualify
as a sport. Rifle shooting, for example. Most sports, as we understand the term,
are about movement. Shooting is about absence of movement. If you can reach
a state in which, at the moment of truth, nothing moves but your finger, you
are shooting well. It is a high and rare skill, a test of physical and mental
ability and it is an Olympic sport.
It is also one of the few sports in which a large Scotch gives you a distinct
advantage, drink in well-judged quantities being a notorious nerve-settler.
Accordingly, shooters are drugs-tested for booze. Which brings us back to darts.
Darts is also a test of stillness and accuracy, and a well-judged intake of
booze is a genuine performance enhancer.
Watch Phil Taylor throwing. It is like a frieze on a Greek drinking vessel,
body still, shoulder rock-steady, a classical study of physical perfection.
The arm moves only from the elbow, a perfect technique. But what gives him the
edge is his mind. Taylor’s mental strength gives him both his physical
steadiness and his ability to hit doubles and close out legs and sets and matches.
In short, darts is a physical skill that is backed by mental strength. That
describes darts, it may very well work towards a definition of sport.
I have seen this combination of physical skill and mental strength in David
Beckham, Martin Johnson, Nasser Hussain. I have also seen it in Katarina Witt,
Dame Ellen MacArthur and Lucinda Green, skater, sailor and three-day eventer.
It is a combination that makes sport watchable, beauty and intensity in the
action, the revelation of character, of mental strength in the narrative of
the event.
There is resistance to the idea of darts being a sport, because it doesn’t
seem to be physically demanding. There is some cultural throwback involved here,
a notion that sport has to be good for you, that sport has to make a person
morally and physically better. This goes back to the Victorian idea of sport
as something that stops boys masturbating or, still worse, leaping into bed
with each other. “The rest was only sending you all to bed dead tired,”
the redoubtable headmaster says in Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co.
If a game doesn’t make you tired, then there is resistance to the idea
that it is a sport. Try telling that to Kasparov and Short.
Sporting people are still keen to see sport as something that is virtuous. Virtuous
because it is tiring, at the very least. We must recognise that this pursuit
of virtue is a confusion when we come to definitions. All the same, if we stick
with the notion of sport as a marriage of physical skill and mental strength
— and I must confess that I am happy with it — chess seems to be
a loser.
And yet chess can claim to teach certain kinds of virtues: how to think, how
to plan, how to recognise patterns, how to win, how to lose. But virtue is not
enough to make chess a sport. Football, darts, shooting and ice skating —
they are sports. But chess is not a sport, not in the terms that I suggest.
That doesn’t stop chess from being a good thing, whether we are talking
about virtue or pleasure. It doesn’t stop chess being about the pursuit
of excellence, it doesn’t stop chess masters from being people of strength
and skill. They are just not sportsmen. It is not my definition that is wrong.
It is the categorisation. Chess is a mindsport. It shouldn’t be compared
to darts and football, but with bridge, Scrabble, poker, spoof, paper-scissors-stone.
And as such, respected, and given the financial support and the tax breaks it
craves.
So we’d better close with that definition. Sport: a competitive activity
that rewards a combination of physical ability and mental strength. Or can anyone
do better?
Mourinho gains only disgrace by deceit - Does Croft know cricket if he only cricket knows
02 April 2005
Rarely since the notoriously rabid supporters of the New York Rangers ice
hockey team had an extremely unnerving experience while riding the subway a
few years ago has the pent-up fury of sport's distant cousins been so forcibly
expressed.
The memory of that bizarre episode was provoked this week by the ferocious reaction
of the British chess federation to the news that it may be barred from dipping
into Sport England's somewhat arbitrary but quite often exceedingly generous
gravy boat. If it proves so, it will be for the old reason: while the heirs
of Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky may burn off vast amounts of nervous energy,
they do it with insufficient "physical agility".
Not quite as much, for example, as the darts players hauling pints up to their
jowls with relentless precision. Or snooker players nipping off for a drag,
or worse. The latter possibility recalls a long lunch with Hurricane Higgins.
Copious amounts of Chablis were followed by several large snifters of brandy.
When he left at dusk he was asked where he was going. Plainly slighted wounded,
he nonchalantly lit up a cigarette and said: "Practice of course."
What happened in New York is thus something of a warning for the bureaucrats
doling out the largesse. The audience at the Metropolitan screamed, scuffled,
and threw programmes, and some heavier objects, at the stage when it was announced
that Luciano Pavarotti had been adversely affected by the Manhattan fumes and
would not be doing his stuff.
Such alarm was created that the following day a spokesman for the New York Rangers,
noting a sharp drop in attendance for a punch-up with the Pittsburgh Penguins,
theorised bleakly: "It maybe that our fans are staying home for fear of
tangling with the opera crowd."
Coming on a slightly different tack, A J Liebling, author of The Sweet Science,
marshalled a brave defence of his beloved sport of boxing while wading into
the great cultural divide.
He said that anti-boxing forces tried to rationalise their position by proclaiming
solicitude for the fighter's health, and then counter attacking with a thumping
rhetorical question. He asked what the reaction would be if a boxer ever went
as "batty" as the celebrated dancer Nijinsky? Liebling provided his
own bracing answer. "All the wowsers in the world would be screaming 'punch-drunk.'
Well, who hit Nijinsky? And why isn't there a campaign against ballet? It gives
girls thick legs."
Liebling, like the chess body now, was wading into the eternal question of what
truly constitutes sport, at what point do you draw the line between the body
and the mind?
Of course it has long been blurred. When you go to the gymnastics hall, as some
of us did relentlessly to see the sublime Svetlana Khorkina at the Olympics
of Sydney and Athens, do you go as an aficionado of the beam and the bars or
an impassioned stage-door Johnny?
If a batch of beautifully synchronised swimmers stick clothes pegs on their
noses and come out of the water without a millisecond between them are they
Olympians - or refugees from an old Esther Williams movie? Is ice dancing, so
beautifully expressed by Torvill and Dean, sport or entertainment or, too frequently,
a fix?
Once the late James "The Shunt" Hunt brooded restlessly about the
dangers of Formula One. He confided: "Sometimes I wish I had been a golfer.
What a lovely, risk-free life."
But was Hunt talking about a swap from one nominal "sport" to another?
For me, no. Formula One demands nerve and stamina and unworldly reflexes. Winning
a major demands wonderful natural co-ordination and feel for the subtleties
of timing and imagination.
In one sultry week former world heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis had two contests.
In one he ravaged the myth of Mike Tyson. In the other he was slaughtered by
the 14-year-old chess champion of Mississippi. He seemed to be much more drained
by the defeat.
Lewis's trainer, Emmanuel Steward, who looks after fighters in that part of
Detroit where they tend not to pin up posters of grandmasters, hated the hours
the champion spent over a chessboard. "Fighting and chess, hell, you couldn't
find two more opposite things," said Steward. "In the ring it's explosion
and instinct. In chess you have to think through everything you do. I worry
that Lennox will take off some of his edge."
Thinking things through, however, never seemed to hold back Muhammad Ali, Sugar
Ray Robinson, Joe Louis, or, come to think about it, Lewis.
According to one study, the epic duel between Fischer and Spassky produced in
both contestants the heart-lung and blood pressure rates of competing boxers
and footballers. This is an impressive detail in a debate that can never be
satisfactorily resolved anywhere except in the mind of a pedant.
For what it's worth, the opinion here is that the ultimate examinations of sportsmen
come in the mountains of the Tour de France and the square ring. How do you
split these rival demands? Perhaps only in the reality that on the Tour no one
is trying to separate your head from your shoulders.
But if the debate can never be truly settled, a brilliant compromise has already
been been adopted by the Germans and enthusiastically advocated by the British
grandmaster Jonathan Speelman. It is to have a separate category of "mind-sport".
Here at least is one true gathering of the competitive instinct. Certainly it
is hard to think of a great sportsman who didn't have a mind as strong as tungsten.