Joe DiMaggio

Joseph Paul “Joe” DiMaggio perhaps was the most famous baseball player ever. He played 13 years for the New York Yankees, and in 1969 he won the sport’s greatest living player award. He had two brothers and their careers were as baseball major league centre fielders. By the way, there was a problem at the Yankee stadium for right handed hitters. In its deep left and centre fields it was almost impossible to get a home run. Anyway, DiMaggio got married to a famous film star called Marilyn Monroe but sadly she filed for a divorce on grounds of mental cruelty, 247 days after the marriage, and the reason was related to the famous dress blowing scene in ‘The Seven Year Itch’ movie. DiMaggio’s biographer was Richard Ben Cramer.

Club presentation

        

Amalfi, Italy, 2013

The Club

Changes in sport & leisure

Changes in sport & leisure activities

A personal reflection

Fridays in Abu Dhabi 20 years ago were very different to today. There were no shopping malls and most shops, if they opened at all, did so late afternoon or early evening. Sundays in England in the 1950s, when I was a boy, were similarly quiet. Public transport operated much reduced services. Few children played outside. All shops were closed, apart from newsagents in the morning. The only sporting event I can recall on a Sunday was the annual Prix de L’Arc de Triomphe horse race in Paris. Nowadays, Fridays in A.D. & Sundays in the UK are big shopping and sporting days.

History & social conditions play a big part in how much sport & leisure feature in everyday life. I was born in 1949 & postwar austerity & rationing were features of my early childhood. Sports like football, cricket & horse-racing attracted enormous crowds in the postwar years. People longed to return to peacetime activities after the horrors and hardships of the Second World War and sports stadiums were not all-seater, as most are today, so thousands packed into football stadiums in particular. But for most people sport was a spectator rather than a participatory activity in the immediate postwar period. Whereas nowadays millions of people worldwide follow sports on TV, back then in Britain sports coverage on TV was very limited: the FA Cup Final, the annual All-England Tennis Championship at Wimbledon, the Varsity Boat Race, the 5-nation Rugby Union championship, the Rugby League Cup Final, the Open Golf Championship, test cricket matches (in 5-day tests Sunday was a rest day) and major races like the Derby & the Grand National were highlights. In the 1950s if you wanted to watch a lot of sport you had to physically attend sporting events.

Go back 40 years to the birth of the UAE: the new nation lacked infrastructure & there was a dearth of sporting & leisure facilities. Look at the Club as it was in 1962 (see the blog post The Club Abu Dhabi) and as it is now. In 1962 there were virtually no facilities and the Club existed mainly as a meeting place, a watering hole. Now it has an extensive beach, 2 pools, 4 tennis courts, 2 squash courts, a badminton hall, an outdoor general-purpose court, a diving section, a large sailing section and a well-equipped fitness centre, including gym, saunas and steam rooms. There is also a well-stocked library as well as numerous classes for dancing, aerobics, music, basket-weaving, jewelry-making, drama, language learning and so on. It now has over 4,000 members from over 80 countries. The number of food & beverage outlets, indeed the whole range of facilities, has greatly expanded since I first joined in 1992.

150 years ago, the development of railways in Britain, Europe & the USA for the first time provided fast, cheap transport for working people, many of whom could do things like visit the seaside for the first time. Henry Ford’s method of mass production of motor cars, widely copied at home and abroad, greatly cacelerated this process in the early 20^th century. Many people began to take up leisure & sporting activities which were previously very limited. Indeed the concept of leisure was, for working people, born at this time. Better working conditions, brought about by mines & factories acts, and other social legislation, meant people were fitter & better able to enjoy greater leisure time.

Nowadays leisure & sports are big business worldwide with a growing number of people seeking careers in them. Just look at all the sports & social clubs here in A.D. and the number of staff and professional coaches who man them.

On a personal note, I never flew until my mid-20s and my first jet plane journey was at the age of 30. Now I have young students who have travelled extensively in Europe, Asia, the Far East & Australasia. Even 20 years ago, few of my then students would have travelled beyond the Gulf region.

Of course, increased leisure time does not necessarily mean a more active lifestyle. Previous generations in this region were active as pearl divers, farmers, ans so on, and even ordinary travel was more physical for everyone, whether by camel, horse or on foot. Nowadays most Emiratis have sedentary jobs, comfortable cars and engage in many non-physical activities such as watching TV, playing computer games etc. This has led to high rates of obesity, diabetes and other related problems. Increased leisure offers great opportunities for leading a fit & healthy life. Encouraging more people to do so is one of the challenges of modern life.


 780 words

Istanbul

The codification of sporting rules

Sporting hero who thought outside the box

One hundred and fifty years ago next month a bunch of blokes went down the pub and invented football. The 1860s marked the high Victorian summer of British sporting inventiveness. It seemed that whenever two or three men gathered together they created, or systematized, another great sport.

Inventing a sport requires three essentials: power, self-confidence and leisure. Victorian Britain had all three in abundance. Sport was the hobby of Empire, and most of the world’s most popular games emerged from Britain: cricket, golf, boxing, tennis, rugby, snooker and more.

If one man embodied the Victorian spirit of sporting creativity, it was Ebenezer Cobb Morley, a solicitor from Hull, whose legacy has brought sporting pleasure to millions across the world, but whose name is all but unknown. As we prepare for football’s 150^th birthday, it is surely time to remember Morley and celebrate a spirit of sporting ingenuity that has all but vanished.

On October 26, 1863, Morley gathered a dozen former English public school men at the Freemasons Tavern in Lincoln’s Inn Fields to try and make sense of football. The result was the Football Association, the first formal rules of the game and the birth of what would eventually become soccer – the word probably comes from the abbreviation of ‘association’ into ‘soc’, and thus ‘soccer’.

Football dates back to the Middle Ages, but until Morley called his meeting, it was closer to chaotic brawling than organized sport. Different teams played by different rules, and sometimes by none at all, some wearing pointy hats that made them look like garden gnomes. Rival public schools clung to their own versions: one set of rules could be played in the first half, and another in the second. In some schools, younger boys served as goal posts.

 Violence was integral. Traditional Shrove Tuesday games might range over open countryside and involve hundreds of players. A Frenchman, observing one such game in Derby in the early 19^th century, remarked: ‘If the Englishmen call this playing, it would be impossible to say what they call fighting.’

The first 13 rules drawn up by Morley and his chums described a game far closer to rugby: handling was allowed, and there was no forward passing, no crossbar and no goalkeeper. Players were forbidden to wear boots with projecting nails or iron plates, or to attach gutta percha, a hard rubber substance ideal for stomping on opponents, to their heels.

The modern game might benefit, however, from some of Morley’s laws: under the original rules there were no penalties, no shoving or pushing, and pitches could be up to 100 yards wide and 200 yards long, which might make for a more fluid game.

The association’s rules were revised almost as soon as they were written down. A new offside rule allowed the ball to be kicked forward to another player, so long as there were at least three (later two) opponents between the kicker and the goal. Queen’s Park Club in Glasgow then came up with the truly game-changing tactic of ‘combination play’ – passing the ball rapidly from one player to another, a technique that utterly flummoxed English public schoolboys trained to charge wildly at the opposition. Partly as a result, Scotland lost only  two of the first sixteen matches against England.

Once the rules were established, they became all but immutable. The fluidity of sport in its early stages gave way to rigidity. Britain invented most sports when it ruled the waves but then, in a reflection of imperial hubris, flatly refused to waive the rules once they had been established.

Religion, politics, literature all evolve over time, but the major sports have hardly changed in the past century and even the most minor tweak is accompanied by vast gusts of controversy. As sport becomes more professional, its adherence to set rules becomes ever more fixed.

It is a measure of Britain’s imperial reach that boxing still sticks to the rules endorsed by the Marquess of Queensbury in 1867. (Queensbury didn’t actually devise the rules: that was done by Welshman John Graham Chambers, another of history’s unsung sporting architects.)

Almost the only substantial change in cricket has been the acceptance of overarm bowling, an innovation initially dismissed as a ‘singular, novel and unfair style’. Adolf Hitler played only once, with British PoWs during the First World War and tried to change the laws of the game by banning pads and making the ball even harder – a crime, in the eyes of some Englishmen, on a par with invading Poland.

Of the major sports, only rugby regularly attempts to improve itself by altering he rules. The others remain immovable. Tennis was invented for a Victorian garden and has hardly changed since, even though the power-hitting of the modern game means that a better sporting spectacle would be created with a slower ball, wider court and higher net.

The football goal remains the same size (8ft high and 8 yards wide) as it was in Victorian times, even though human beings are generally taller, and goalies vastly so.

Next month there will be a flurry of events marking the birth of modern football, but it is also an opportunity to celebrate the heyday of sporting entrepreneurship when people in pubs sat around discussing how to invent, regulate and improve a multiplicity of sports, and proving that sport is an intellectual as well as an athletic pastime. Britain led the way in devising modern sports; it should also take the lead in revising them.

Morley drew up the outlines of what would eventually become the beautiful game; today he lies at the edge of an unlovely and abandoned graveyard on Barnes Common, despite a contribution to world culture that is without equal.

Ebenezer Morley, Britain’s forgotten football star, is my candidate for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square: for what better symbol of Britain could there be than a statue of a man with Victorian whiskers, a pint of beer in one hand and a football in the other?

Adapted from: Sporting hero who thought outside the box, Ben Macintyre, The Times, 27.09.2013.