Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Sports injuries

A report prepared by the National Better Health Program a decade ago 
found that there had been an estimated one million reported amateur and 
professional sports injuries in 1990. Treatment for those injuries had cost 
a trifling $200 million.

According to The Sydney Morning Herald's magazine Good 
Weekend, Associate Professor Caroline Finch of Monash University's 
School of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine estimates that sports 
injuries now cost the country a whacking $1.65 billion a year.

What the Good Weekend article does not reveal is what proportion of 
that amount relates to injuries to professional sportspeople. Professor 
Finch however does point the finger at "physical ball sports like 
Australian football and the two Rugby codes" as the main source of 
injuries.

Under our free enterprise private profit way of organising sport, top 
sportspeople must depend on continued sporting participation in order to 
make money, whether from fees, endorsements or sponsorship deals.

So when they get injured they pay surgeons to fix them up and as quickly as 
possible to get them back into action. The catalogue of serious injuries to 
leading figures in various sports that accompanied the article was indeed 
alarming.

Liz Taverner plays netball for Melbourne Phoenix. A reasonably non-
combattive sport, you would think, but all sport at the top level is played 
under intense competitiveness.

Careers depend on doing well, and the strenuous pursuit of victory at all 
costs has led to Liz Taverner having injuries from her head to her ankles. 
Both her knees have had to be reconstructed.

But her injuries pale into insignificance besides those of recently retired 
AFL footballer Stephen Silvagni. At only 34, the amount of reconstructive 
surgery he has undergone is appalling.

Both his shoulders and both his ankles have had to be reconstructed. His 
right wrist needed surgery for snapped ligaments, his right hip for damaged 
cartilage. A torn right hamstring had to be surgically re-attached.

He had to have another operation on his left shoulder for tendon damage and 
one for a ruptured testicle.

This is in addition to such minor inconveniences as "various strains" to 
his left hamstring, torn groin muscles and bruised ribs.

Silvagni has also had concussion more than once "after being knocked 
unconscious several times". Which might account for his extraordinary 
comment about his injury record: "I've been pretty lucky, really."

It seems to me that a sports regime that expects people to strain their 
bodies until serious injury results is not really what sport is supposed to 
be about. It should not be acceptable that people injure themselves in a 
desperate search for financial security, whether in a factory or on a 
sports field.

Socialist countries tried to resolve this problem by guaranteeing sports 
people a job after they finished competitive sport. This took care of basic 
financial needs but did not always help with the psychological problems — 
the sudden loss of fame, glamour and adulation.

In the early 1980s the Soviet romantic comedy In Love Of His Own Free Will 
featured the lanky actor Oleg Yankovsky as a former ice-hockey star now 
given a job as a machine-tool operator. His material needs were taken care 
of but his self pity over his relatively mundane position compared to his 
previous acclaim had turned him into a drunk.

It was an excellent film, funny, wry, observant, defiantly unglamorised 
(the Moscow living conditions on display were very down-to-earth). The 
scene in which Yankovsky (because he made a bet with his new girlfriend 
that he would) tries earnestly to develop a new attitude towards his 
machine tool was delightful.

Sadly, romantic comedies about a pair of ordinary workers are probably as 
rare in Russia now as they are in Hollywood.

* * *

No-holds-barred capitalist propaganda

You will no doubt be distressed to learn that Americans are not falling 
over themselves in their eagerness to join the US armed forces. After 
September 11, it seems, interest in the military did go up, but common 
sense must have prevailed because recruitment remained static.

But fear not! The Pentagon was already on to the problem. With the aid of 
some no doubt highly paid advertising gurus, they came up with a marketing 
concept, the Army of One.

The Pentagon's marketeers, looking for ways to sell the military life to 
young people, have zeroed in on individualism and professionalism as themes 
the military can push that will resonate with young people, at least in the 
USA.

US capitalist culture has always emphasised the individualist, superman 
hero who single-handedly saves the wagon train/plane-load of 
hostages/platoon of raw recruits or whatever.

And a very warped concept of professionalism pervades all those Westerns 
about "professional gunslingers", the plethora of more recent films and TV 
shows about government assassins, and the more violent of the many cop 
shows.

In their crudest form, however, these values are on display in video games, 
aimed fair and square at children. Indeed, to better get their message 
across, the Pentagon developed their own video games.

Developed by the Modelling, Virtual Environments and Simulation Institute 
of the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, the Pentagon's 
games are distributed free.

They purport to teach kids how to make war ("to free hostages", of course), 
how to develop organisational skills through military training and how to 
get promoted. Sick or what?