God bless America, the winningest nation

This is the Ryder Cup, a golf tournament formerly between Great Britain and America that was once America’s for the asking. Then the competition was beefed up by the addition of the rest of Europe. European golf improved in both quality and ruthlessness, America started to lose and the competition grew incandescent. These days, the Ryder Cup is astonishingly, even rather disturbingly, intense.

And if much of the sportsmanship has gone — and much of the simple good manners as well — then the biennial match has become thrillingly watchable. It used to be an event for golf buffs. Now it is an event for everyone who enjoys the testing of human beings in sporting combat.

The Ryder Cup has changed. But then so has all sport. And it is the influence of America that has changed it. We look on baseball and gridiron as the quintessential American sports, but in truth these days, all sports are American sports. Even — perhaps especially — cricket. Sledging, relatively new in cricket, has always been a staple of baseballing life.

If sport has lost much of its good manners (British and European virtue) then we have also lost the hypocrisy (British and European vice). Sport is not a way of developing your fundamental decency. It is no longer a preparation for running the Empire.

Sport is a profession and it is about winning and losing. It works financially because people watch it. We watch it because we want to see the struggle. We watch because it is intense and dramatic and beautiful, and because we don’t know what happens next. We watch it because sometimes our guys win.

The more people care about whether they win or lose, the more watchable it gets. The audience feeds on player intensity. “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing” — lines attributed to Vince Lombardi, American football coach and national myth, though in fact the words are a slight misquotation of Bill Veeck, the baseball player and former owner of St Louis Browns.

Never mind. Like all popular misquotations, it came about because it was something people wanted to hear. They wanted those words, and they wanted them in Lombardi’s mouth, because they sum something up. For Americans, the words demonstrate their downright unhypocritical winningest spirit; to Europeans, they show the primitive barbarism of America. Or rather, they used to.

Britain was shocked by Billie Jean Moffitt (later King) when she first played at Wimbledon in her Dame Edna specs. Her strident intensity was too much for our delicate souls. She — a woman! — was out there rebuking linesmen and doing it in a horribly loud, vulgar, American way: “That was NAD out!” But Wimbledon got the hang of her and what she meant and, in the end, took her to its capacious heart. The same process happened with John McEnroe, who took sporting bad manners to their logical extreme.

Ivan says in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov that if you don’t believe in God, then everything is permitted. McEnroe worked on the same principle, substituting sportsmanship for God.

Just as you find Coca-Cola at every food counter in the world, so you find American sporting mores everywhere you look in sport, whether the participants get paid for it or not. Winning matters to everyone who kicks a ball, runs, swims or in any fashion tries to do something better than somebody else. Mad McEnroe-like intensity is not so much acceptable as normal. Pushing the rules to the limit is de rigueur. To quote Veeck, properly this time: “I try not to break the rules, merely to test their elasticity.”

With intensity, Americans brought in professionalism. Not professionalism as in getting paid, professionalism as in doing things with total thoroughness. In this country, rugby union has only just worked out what that means. The game is utterly different as a result.

The ancient traditions of English sport required you to look as if you weren’t really trying. All Englishmen would like to be the aristocrat in Chariots of Fire who had the champagne glasses placed on his hurdles, or Denis Compton turning up to bat in his evening clothes from the night before. But Americans brought in vulgar, flat-out, give-everything intensity to preparation as well as to the action. They brought science in. They approached sport with a total lack of embarrassment: the idea was to win, and you must do everything in your powers to win.

This brought drugs into sport. Drugs weren’t entirely an American idea, not by any stretch of the imagination. Sport was caught in a pincer movement between the Eastern bloc sport-is-power mentality and the American body-building gyms and the lust for self-improvement by any means.

American sport is ingrown and self-regarding. America is fascinated by its own domestic life. The lack of internationalism in American sport is a statement about the way Americans see the world. America would be quite a different place if football, as in soccer, was the national sport. Or cricket, for that matter.

In football, they would hear their treasured national anthem booed all over the world, just as our own is. In cricket, their finest would get beaten by Muslims on a regular basis as they faced Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis in Pakistan. Such matters affect the way a nation sees the world and its own place in it.

America is not good at international competition. They lack the practice. That is why the Olympic Games on American soil can be so awful: they become a festival of America v The World. It happened at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City this year — September 11 has not changed that at all. Exacerbated it, if anything. Americans rise to loud and fervent patriotism, but then so does the world. The more Americans like to win, the more the world enjoys seeing them beaten.

America also brought vast commercialism into sport and the rest of the world followed with slavering jaws. If much of this is ugly, we should reflect that high stakes give us intensity, and intensity is what we seek.

By the end of the 1970s, the Olympic Games had become the greatest way of losing money a city could come up with. The Games were close to unsustainable. But after the Los Angeles Olympics of 1984, the Games became big business and cities fought and flocked — and bribed — for the lucrative honour of holding them.

Strident, in-your-face commercialism is a fact of life in modern sport and it seems that this is a price we have to pay for more and better sport. Of course, the more strident it gets, the more we will reach for our zappers and switch to something less intrusive. Sport is great, but there are times when sport seems to be trying to throttle itself. The farther sport moves from what people enjoy, the less it will work as a spectacle — and as a business.

Sport has changed beyond measure. The way we watch sport and understand it has also changed. And the principal reason for change is America: the way Americans play their sports and the extent to which they value their sports.

Is this massive American influence a good thing or a bad thing? This is a child’s question from a history book with Good Kings and Bad Kings. Many people, many of them English, believe that sport has lost something important in the rejection of manners. The outcry at the last Ryder Cup makes that quite clear: the moment when the Americans chucked all sporting conventions of decent behaviour out of the window in an incontinent, gloating and premature celebration.

Sport these days is not something a person does in his spare time. These days, sport requires everything: time, energy, heart, mind, soul. We watch them win, we watch them crack before us. Sport gets ever more cruel and the crueller it gets, the more we watch.

The Americanisation of sport has forced people to give more of themselves to their sport than ever before. As a result, sport is the most vivid public experience regularly available to humankind. Good thing or bad thing? Either way, we keep on watching.