Why I Dislike Games

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 554, 5 January 1929, Page 22

Why I Dislike Games

Osbert Hit well, poet and novelist, brother of Sacheverell and Edith Sitwell, poets, is nothing if not provocative. He explains here why he doesn't like games. According to “Who's Who” the recreations of STr . Osbert Sitwell are “Regretting the Bourbons, Repartee and Tu Quoque

■ T is ou patriotic grounds, chiefly, that I hear and making her way from a small island into the chief European Power and to a great Empire, there were no organised games. Almost the first mention of a game in history is the recorded fact that Drake nearly missed destroying the Armt.da through an untimely in-

dulgence in bowls but this was probably a momentary, if vicious, whim. To take a few great names at random, no particular devotion to golf or cricket, is associted with Raleigh, Marlborough, Henry V., Peterborough, the Black Prince, Pitt, Fox or Nelson, any more than with such negligible highbrows as Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Keats or Blake. The practice of games, of inculcating a blind team-spirit (“My country, Ih. right or wrong”), teaches a nation to be warlike without being certain to win, and, when engaged in battle, to

tight as though playing a game, with an all-powerful umpire looking on to declare against a “foul.” Golf nearly lost us the last war, and will lose us the next one, unless we have the good fortune to become embroiled with another golf-playing nation. England was built up with the brain rather than the foot; but it is the latter which the schoolboy from the age of eight to IS is taught to regard as all important.

Yet sometimes I wonder. . . . Abroad we are held to be the most subtle diplomats in the whole world. We have now taught other nations to play games. Is this a piece of deliberate. diabolic guile? Have tve, of a purpose, set their feet on the wrong track, taught them to waste

their time too? And as I hear of our continual defeats at the hands of France, Germany, America, Italy and Greece, a thrill of patriotic emotion runs through me, and I murmur. “There Is yet hope.” On the individual, games exercise as pernicious an effect as on a nation. They are brutally ugly to look at, with the possible exception of lawn tenuis (a harmless, silly, rather pretty game*. Cricket, for example, does not even possess the dramatic and exeitiug side, and certainly not the splendour of pageantry that may ex-