FASCINATION OF SPORT

Shannon News, 8 December 1925, Page 3

FASCINATION OF SPORT

REASONS FOR ITS LURE. GAMBLING A PARASITE. There are people who wonder at the fascination of sport, writes Dr. F. Aveling,. Reader in Psychology. University of London, In the "Daily Mail." • What is it in the human make.up that will spur 100,000 people to a football match and set millions reading the sporting editions of the daily papers? Why, when the Cup-tie final is played, or the Grand National run, or the Boat Race rowed,, do we find people wagering- on teams and horses they have never seen, and costermongers and shop assistants parading the dark or light blue COlOUl'S? * It is not merely the gamblng thirst, for this can be assuaged by the turn of a card or the fall of dice. Gambling, after all, is only a parasite of sport. , Rather must we dig deeper at; the roots of human behaviour for the cause of the fascination. Surely, though no individual in. these vast concourses might be able to say how or why, the love of sport is a survival of the primitive combative instinct, the instinct of self-as-sertion, in our breasts. There is the tendency of self.assertion within all of us, making' for the tendency to take sides. And this tendency. If we are in the crowd, is enhanced by the very thrill of solidarity with the crowd. We are just units in a herd, swayed by the primitive emotions unloosed by the , contagion. Fui-ther, we have the symbolic Self-identification with the crowd. Why else do the light blue rosettes or dark blue ribbons appear on Boat Race day ? . Why are cart horses decoi-ated with university colours?. Surely not because the wearers of the, colours, or the drivers of .the dust carts have any real reason for manifesting partisanship either with Oxford or with Cambridge* It is simply a taking of sides —which side determined by a thousand factors that have nothing to do with the impulse. Men take sides for the satisfaction Of a symbolic victory and the gratification of self.assertion. It cannot be —as it has been suggested —that they wear the colours, because they wish they had had an opportunity to be identified in actual fact with those great, historic seats of learning. Most of them probably do not know what a university Is or stands for. ft cannot be that horses, as horses, interest them with a dim vision of proprietorship, or that they themselves wish personally to strive in the arena to win applause from the crowd.

. There are no conscious longings or x-egrets; no dreams of ownership, no craving for actual strife. There is just the great, dumb impulse of selfr assertion striving for expression. And from the primal hand-to-hand combat, with its taut and straining muscles, its battering pulses ;and ; quick gulps of breath, to the quite comparable bodily tensions, the ex. citement and incipient movements intake of breath of the spectators at ' a boxing match of football game there is but a difference of degree. Tear away the veneer, and you but find the savage. Blood has been shed for a mere colour before now.