Sporting Philosophy: The Euro Cup (and Socrates)

 
‘My lifetime preoccupation with sport is so deep that only philosophy can hope to get to its roots’. Old boy in the Olympia enclosure, Wembley, circa 1972. ‘What’ll you have, sport’, said the barman.
 
On the balcony across from me a symposium of bald young Existentialists is in progress while watching the Euro Philo Cup. I hear their sallies in the antechamber of my brain, like young Samuel Johnson half observing Sally Ford dancing in the kitchen yard as he does his homework, until a collective cry brings me back two years to the last World Cup to hearing a despairing ‘NON’ when well thought of France was eliminated in the opening round by negativists from Latin America (nil all) having previously missed a penalty in losing to a Quietist ex-colony. I was riding my bike through the vine-yards, half hearing the commentary from the transistors of pruning paysans scattered all over the hills.  The ‘NON’ was long and painful but mercifully subsided into stoic acceptance (what’s the Good of despair? And there’s always the Six Nations after Christmas). But the gendarmes were busy that evening in the bars with Dionysian fans. 

France went out, I gather, because Pascal and Montaigne appeared to come to blow when Blaise said to Michel ‘you only think about yourself’ (actually Montaigne merely slipped while trying to avoid a confrontation and the ref was on the blindside). Both were given red cards and Captain Sartre had to call up Voltaire and himself for the penalty shoot-out. Vol cynically put it wide with his left foot and J-P of course missed by a mile. 

It has been a thought-provoking tournament. The elimination of Spinoza’s Holland and England’s Logical Positivists came as no surprise. But Hegel’s Germany really should have done better (Kant alienated the referee). Italy made the mistake of making Vico rather than Machiavelli the captain and the Azzurri neo-Communists he picked were in the pocket of the Vatican Mafia who put their bets on Beghard’s Bulgaria springing a surprise. And Spain should have taken Gracian’s advise and withdrawn their indigenous thinkers gracefully, since no native philosopher of note was fit, and left it to George Santayana, an American transfer, to be player-coach. ‘The body is an instrument, the mind its function’. Know that and you can avoid an own goal.

Some years Later 

The Euro final is between Portugal (the hosts) and Greece (where the Olympics take place at the end of the era). Mostly it’s all port wine and Greek to me. I don’t even know why ‘i-grec’ is ‘Y’ in French. But I’m a fan and put on my thinking cap to attend to the results of matches and indeed mismatches. The outcome I anticipate will be dual. The post-Classical Humanists triumphing and the promoters, PIGO (Post Industrial Global Oligarchy) making a fortune. Both will be true to themselves. Perhaps, that’s what the game of philosophy is all about. Everybody wins like a dodo race.

The balcony Existentialist had Portuguese colleagues along to watch the final, and sat with the television sound down.  The Humanist disappointed, being sent off for barracking the ref, leaving the no nonsense Nihilists to make sure Greece won (en­ - zero). An unknown thinker called Charistes used his head in the fifty-seventh minute after Diogene barreled his way through and lofted a wild shot. Their German Idealist coach, Otto Rehhegel (no relation to Georg Wilhelm Friedrick), must be over the moon. And so am I. The Cup is back where it really belongs. Filosofie, after all, is a Greek word, and ‘no idea’ is where the need for it started.   

The Portuguese Existentialists are beyond the consolation of Boethius. At regular intervals they emit a muted ‘Aie’, which could be a tribute to the Greek’s superiority, but I think it is more kneejerk than that. Under the influence of the ancient Egyptians of Nakhon, who averaged ten and half pints a day of beer during the Holocene drought, they are reduced to mere reflexes. Throwing up over the side comes next. If the result had been the other way round, Greek youth would have taken hemlock and the pompiers would be coming round to pump out their stomachs. But really, I don’t know what all the fuss is about. Philosophy is only a game.

Coda

My inspiration for sporting philosophy was not European, but South America’s Dr Socrates Brasieiro Sampaio de Souza Vieiro de Oliveira, the Brazilian football captain in the nineteen eighties. He was a Soren Kierkegaard disciple, and encouraged his team to ‘live an idea’. Burdened by the legacy of Pele’s World Cup winners, the players were over-anxious to impress. When things did not work out, the rabugenta, as they were called, consoled each other with passionate embraces on the ground, which made people talk. At team-meetings Socrates told them to think on their feet. ‘It will help you escape from ‘‘‘the mirage of an analogy’’ which is the Pele era’. Your future is in playing with ideas that come from experience. And if you don’t think you have any, you can borrow mine. Soccer is a team game.’   

Socrates wasn’t just a medical doctor and a late Existentialist. At left back, he held the team together while all around him were playing fast and loose. His instructions were that the last word be dropped from the ‘I could do that if’’, and ‘to stop watching others all the time to see how they react. Watch yourselves’. And so, he relaxed his team-mates by example – unhurried but calm, dedicated to the existential idea of ‘the beautiful game’. He smoked two packets of Lucky Strikes a day to put super-fit attacks ‘in countenance’, thus setting himself up as a sitting duck to decoy opponents away from his gifted rabugenta. The team went from strength to strength on the back of his smoker’s cough. After leading them to two moral victories (catching the imagination of the world while losing), he put them on the scent of an ideal, which two World Cups later in 1994, got democracy in Brazil off to a winning start.           

Who said ‘philosophy is air-raid shelter for old men’? Oliver StJohn Gogarty (updating Plato and his philosopher’s cave). Another Oliver (Goldsmith) got it right ‘philosophy is a good horse in the stable and an errant jade on a journey’.  But it can get you to a desirable destination as Socrates the Second has shown, and even a conclusion. Play on, thinkers. But when Madame Phila Sophia presents you with a Cup, beware. It may be poisoned with the baby-fed Andes God Chac-Mool’s philosophy: ‘I don’t subscribe to the popular belief that there is a simple explanation for everything’. Living an idea can be complicated.     

The original Socrates claimed, ‘Ignorance is our salvation. We must learn to know the things we cannot understand’. Socrates the Second qualified what he knew with a humanist rider: ‘First the severity of the ideal. Then the gentleness.’ You have to love the game.

Albert Camus, no slouch as a sportsman, caught tuberculosis and could no longer play football, the game he loved. His doctor recommended rowing to increase his lung capacity. He practiced with friends on the Seine and declared it the purest of sport, and developed his philosophy on its first principle, ‘measure et equilibre’. It’s not about brute force but  balance.