The great changing room of colour and class
Date
2010-08
Authors
Nasson, Bill
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
AOSIS OpenJournals
Abstract
Reflecting on the issue of winning and losing in a chapter on sport in his 2005 work entitled, The angry
island: Hunting the English, the acerbic Scottish writer, A.A. Gill, makes two acute observations, both
of which have some bearing on the book under review. The first of these is that, in sport, the lesson to
be learnt from the English is that it is comforting to be beaten, for the measure of how well you lose
is a moral audit of character. The second is that irrespective of which sport is being played, whether it
be tennis, football, rugby or even bridge, the English thing is fairness. Or, rather, it is unfairness with
which the English are preoccupied, in the sense that what most provokes resentment is a playing field
that is not level; hence, their creation of intricate sporting codes and rules to ensure fairness. As South
Africa’s 2010 FIFA World Cup tournament has again illustrated, if sport is a circus of symbol, simile and
metaphor, then its greatest – and endlessly repeated – truism is that the playing field is level.
Description
The original publication is available at http://www.sajs.co.za/
Keywords
Book review, The race to transform, Sport in post-apartheid South Africa, Ashwin Desai, Transformation, Sport, Post-apartheid, South Africa
Citation
Nasson, B. 2010. The great changing room of colour and class. South African Journal of Science, 106(7/8), doi: 10.4102/sajs.v106i7/8.342