The King of the World: Muhammad Ali, David Remnick, Picador, 1999
Author: administrator
The King of the World: Muhammad Ali, David Remnick, Picador, 1999
It’s been somewhat remise of Sporting Polemics not to have touched on the mighty Muhammad Ali, and his recent 70th birthday gave me the necessary prod. And I struck lucky. For all the mountains of literature on the great man, I stumbled across what is often considered the best of the best; David Remnick’s, ‘King of the World’. It’s not only cleverly constructed but it sets American boxing in the fuller social context of slavery and the subsequent rise of the civil rights movement of which Ali, despite his affiliations to the separatist Nation Of Islam, became an iconic figure then and still to this day. The way Remnick weaves the story of Afro-American oppression at the hands of white racist America lifts the Ali story well beyond a sporting tale and into the realm of social history. Remnick’s perceptiveness with regards to the many strands of the civil rights movement including the tensions and eventual split of Malcolm X from the Nation of Islam makes this an historical text to go along side the Malcolm X autobiography. Remnick’s knowledge of the pre-Ali American boxing scene and its treacherous links to organised crime, along with the newspaper industry and the sporting hacks that leeched off the boxing world, do full justice to the Ali story, enriching our understanding of what made Cassius Marcellus Clay a contender for the greatest sportsman of the 20th century.
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel, Forth Estate, London, 2010 Author: administrator
Christmas 2010 and Wolf Hall turns up as a stocking-filler. But the moment the word ‘Tudor’ loomed up from the back cover, the hefty tome was promptly consigned to the bottom shelf. The BBC had well and truly destroyed any residual curiosity I may have had in that infamous Welsh clan. But this Christmas, with time on my hands and nothing looking to match or better Arundhati Roy’s ‘God of Small Things’, I opted for Wolf Hall, Mantel’s 2009 Booker prize winner. What a Christmas it turned out to be. From the opening sentence through to the very last some six hundred and fifty pages later I was mesmerised. Caught as they say, hook, line and sinker. The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy, 1997, Flamingo Author: administrator
Fourteen years after the publication of Roy’s first and only novel, I found the time and space to give it a read. And, with job completed, I must say without the slightest hesitation, that all the accumulated superlatives that this book has attracted are fully merited. Very few novelists are cable of intertwining the particular, the historical and the universal with such ease and with such profound effect. How dare Ms Roy not devote her life to churning out more of the same. How dare she fritter her life away battling this injustice and that. But she dares, and now Arundhati Roy is as recognised as a champion of the downtrodden and oppressed as she is for her contribution to literature. The Arms Trade, New Internationalist, Dec 2011 Author: administrator
Christmas time and the usual stampede of mindless consumerism, the majority of stuff we neither need nor want. Spurred on by an advertising industry that starts to badger and bully the senses as early as October, the relentless onslaught builds up into a crazed frenzy by mid and late December. The Government plays it part, all but suggesting that it is our patriotic duty to spend, spend, spend in order to pump prime our sick and wasting economy. The joke is, in order to rescue the dying patient we will likely plunge ourselves even further into personal debt. Help, get me out of here! The Best of Times, the Worst of Times. (In memory of Christopher Hitchens) Author: administrator
That damn dialectic just keeps grinding on. Relentless would be a fitting adjective. From the humble atom with its feuding sub-atomic particles right through to the whole crazy mixed-up universe itself, forever expanding and contracting as it will, till the end of time and beyond. There’s just no way of escaping the ubiquitousness of the thing. Contradictory forces bound together in mutual rivalry, interpenetrating each others domain, pushing and shoving in a never-ending battle for supremacy; harmony and equilibrium only momentary, fleeting states. It seems it is only change that is permanent. ‘Nothing is eternal but eternally changing’ Gigantic, unseen centrifugal and centripetal forces tearing at the universe day and night from every conceivable direction; positive and negative impulses locked in eternal struggle; the ‘old’ forever being usurped by the ‘new’ until low and behold, the ‘new’ soon becomes the new ‘old’. Quantity eventually, always and everywhere, giving rise to qualitative change. Every thesis inevitably producing its own antithesis with the ensuing struggle certain to produce a synthesis – a new thesis in its own right. ‘The negation of the negation’, as Frederick Engels would have it. A universe consisting of nothing but contradictions everywhere you care to look. What a carry on! Surface to Air Missiles to protect Olympics ( Olympic Notes No11) Author: administrator
So it has come to this. The much proclaimed ‘Greatest Show on Earth’, a sporting jamboree to celebrate extreme human endeavour and to lift the spirits of a planet ground down by recession and poverty will now, we learn, be protected by surface to air missiles. This has to be the final Olympic joke. Already the much heralded promises of an Olympic legacy are in the gutter. Grassroots and community sports have been savagely slashed in order to pay for grandiose stadia, the largest of which will be handed over to a couple of seedy pornographers under the cynical auspices of giving West Ham Football Club a new home. Corporate sponsors, the likes of McDonalds and Coca Cola, will stuff their bank balances even further by monopolising the advertising rights of the Olympics while the general populous grows ever more obese with extra large portions of McShite and the rest of their poisoned merchandise. And then there is Dow Chemicals, sponsor of the main stadium wrap-around. Dow is a chemicals giant bestrides the planet with a devil-may-care attitude second to none. Just ask the residents of Bhopal for their references if you want to get a feel for the real corporate nature of London 2012. Table Tennis Dreams. Author: administrator
Ever since I can remember, through three successive administrative regimes, the English Table Tennis Association, the governing body for table tennis, has been dreaming and scheming about producing a world ping pong champion. As an interim and more realistic measure, they settle for dreams about how many players they can get into the world’s top one hundred. The result of all this dreaming and scheming has been very little. There are currently no English table tennis players, men or women, in the top one hundred and there has not been since the retirement of Matthew Syed who reached a respectable but hardly world shattering number 24 in the world rankings.
But it is our job to dream and scheme retort the ETTA, and with our current crop of young players we might soon realise our dreams. Just give us a little longer and a few more resources and all will deliver the goods. Well it might and it might not, but the question we might ask ourselves, not just of the ETTA, but of all sports governing bodies; does it actually matter? Are we having the wrong dreams and therefore hatching the wrong schemes? I would argue emphatically that we are. Senna (Film Review) Author: administrator
This film, compelling as it is, raises more questions than it answers. It charts the rise and eventual untimely death of Ayrton Senna with great passion and intensity and even one such as I, who has an inbuilt distaste for Formula One, couldn’t help but be drawn into the internal politics of it all. And at the very beginning it was Senna himself who is quoted as saying that Formula 1 is all about politics and money. And there is the rub. Having made this declaration, very little is specifically laid out about the politics and the money. Yes, it’s implied in just about every scene but by the end of the film we are no wiser about who is really pulling the strings and what the politics are really about – other than money of course.
Seven Billion Citizens (Editorial Author: administrator
I’ve been looking for ways to mark the official UN declaration of the arrival of the seventh billion citizen on our dear planet when along comes an unsolicited email presentation beautifully presented and stunningly bleak in content. It asks us to imagine that the world has been reduced to a mere one hundred people all living in a single village but significantly in the exact same socio-economic proportions that the real world is today. The statistics that emerge are sobering to say the least and most instructive in highlighting just what an inhumane disaster zone our planet really is. If it has one failing it is that it does not explicitly point to how we arrived at this appalling state of affairs but then anyone with half a brain will find the answer implicit in the statistics. It does finish on a slightly tacky note but the spirit of the thing is sound enough. Occupy Wall Street Author: administrator
Once again, Simon Jenkins has made a complete wally of himself. Not content to become an apologist for Imperial Britain, he now turns his bourgeois attention to belittling the anti-capitalist protesters springing up in over 900 cities across the globe. Jenkins may play a useful role in protecting endangered castles and aristocratic homes via his exalted position in the National Trust, but he really ought not to dabble in more contemporary matters. And by contemporary matters I refer to any of the political tussles between the two great competing socio-economic classes that have at once simmered and raged over the past five hundred years – that historic struggle between the capitalist bourgeoisie and the natural antithesis to that great class – the global proletariat. Leave it alone Mr Jenkins because clearly you just don’t get it.
This is what the learned Mr Jenkins has to say of the growing street vanguard against capitalist greed; School Wars, Melissa Benn, Verso, 2011, London Author: administrator
Here is a story long overdue for the telling. It is the story of the half hearted attempt to set up a ‘comprehensive’ education system in Britain and the subsequent, never-ending endeavours to undermine and destabilise that which was achieved. The work by Melissa Benn is a meticulous but at the same time a very readable one, and she should be highly commended for her efforts. While we have all had our eyes and efforts focused on defending the National Health Service, our partially constructed national education service has been allowed to fall into disrepair. So bad have things become that one wonders whether it is already too late to save the half built crumbling ruin. Selection is now the order of the day, and masquerading under the fig leaf of choice, comes a tidal wave of privatisation and profit taking. Add to that, a nasty increase in religious schools and religious separatism and you have all the ingredients of a right wing, corporatist takeover of English schooling - all the better to facilitate the economic corporate takeover of the British economy. Palestinian Statehood (Editorial) Author: administrator
Some ten years ago, maybe more, an Israeli father and son table-tennising duet arrived at London Progress Table Tennis Club and proceeded to make a bit of a splash. They were both full of that notorious Israeli cockiness, bordering on outright arrogance, and both a little mad. But they were generally well liked and anyway, who would really notice two more, mad, cocky, ping pong players at the London Progress lunatic asylum. They could both handle themselves competently on the table; the father, I believed, was a former Israeli international and the son looked to be heading in the same direction.
Just as suddenly as they arrived they were off back to the homeland, probably because it was time for the son to carry out his compulsorily Israeli military service. During their years at the club I had many heated exchanges with the father over Israeli foreign policy and over the general nature of Zionism. Heated as those exchanges were, we always seemed to end on friendly terms, perhaps both recognising the seeming intractability of the questions under discussion. Neither father nor son could be described as religious fanatics – both quite secular in their outlook, and both, in theory, could see the pressing need for a peaceful resolution of the ‘Palestinian question’. The stumbling block between us was always their denial of the ethnic cleansing that took place in the original establishment of the Jewish state. They simple would not accept the undisputable facts that millions of Palestinians were forcibly removed from their villages and towns to make way for what is now the Jewish state of Israel.
I think it was a year after they had returned to Israel that I received a phone-call from the father wishing me seasons greeting and all the best for the New Year. He also offered an invitation for the club to send over a team for a match against the Israeli national side. Always up for a new adventure and seeing certain groundbreaking possibilities I immediately accepted but on the proviso that their team would be a mixed Israeli-Palestinian team. This was accepted in principle and he would get back to me with some more details. Then came the long silence. Clearly either he had had second thoughts or some person or peoples in high places had leaned on him. Some ten years later I’m still waiting for the follow-up call. Dude, Where’s My Country? , Michael Moore, Penguin Books, London, 2003 Author: administrator
Michael Moore, bet noir of right wing, Christian fundamentalist, quasi fascist, nutcase America, has a new book coming out. It’s called, ‘Here Comes Trouble: Stories From My Life’ and make no mistake, Michael Moore has had more than his fair share of troubles over the years. You don’t take on the National Rifle Association, the US Health Insurance Industry, the entire Bush Administration and the associated US military-industrial complex, Fox News and their religious fundamentalist lunatics constituency, to name but a few, without making a few enemies. It is a fair bet to suggest that Michael Moore has received more death threats than Fidel Castro. He must be doing something right. Years of round-the-clock security from ex US Seals suggest that these threats are more than just fanatical hot air. The right-wing in America want Michael Moore dead and they probably won’t rest until they achieve their goal. That’s the nature of US politics today. For all these reasons, Michael Moore has zoomed right to the top of my short list for World President. This man is on the front line and leading the counter-attack against corporate, war-mongering, gun-totting America, oblivious to the bullets flying all around him.
Jamie Oliver for World President Author: administrator
If we had an elected post of President of the World, Jamie Oliver wouldn’t be the worst candidate. In fact he would be quite high on my short list, if for no other reason than his tireless campaigning for decent food. This campaigning is now taking him directly to the UN, where there is to be a major medical debate on non-communicable diseases, with the world-wide obesity epidemic high on the agenda. Oliver has called for a “global movement to make obesity a human rights issue”, and he is attempting to generate a global debate on the subject. In a hard hitting, no nonsense language that he has become famous for, Jamie tells us,
Simon Jenkins; Bourgeois Historian Author: administrator
Simon Jenkins has entered the debate about exactly what should be taught in the teaching of history and his contribution is a contradictory one. On the one hand he argues, correctly in my view, against the hotchpotch approach to history teaching, whereby no discernable connection is made between each taught unit, so in the end students have no understanding as to how it all fits together and what actually is the driving motor of history. A dollop of Roman history followed by some maraudering Vikings and some nasty Normans and lo and behold its time for the Tudors, who apparently had lots of wives. If that eclectic mish-mash hasn’t got our students sufficiently switched off, a predictable dose of twentieth century wars with jack-booted Nazis stomping around will soon be coming their way, but of course, any possible connections between all this historical blood and thunder is never made. Jenkins professes to be, ‘an unashamed chronologist’, arguing that ‘history cannot be told spasmodically’. On this I 100% agree. Jenkins adds, ‘I cannot see how any narrative can avoid starting at the beginning and running to the end, however hard it seems to tell it that way.’ Three cheers for historical chronologists! Michel Platini: “Football going pear-shaped” Author: administrator
It’s hard to know what to think of Michel Platini, the outspoken, plain talking, president of European football’s governing body. At one moment he comes across as a possible champion of the ordinary man and woman against the greed and machinations of the corporate world. Yet in the next moment he is upholding the credentials of Sepp Blatter as the best man to clean up the tainted world governing body. Will the real Michel Platini please stand up.
There is little doubt that Platini is a football man through and through. As three times European player of the year his footballing credentials are impeccable, and his tireless pronouncements and campaigning to bring some degree of sanity to the bloated corporate beast that European football has become are indeed refreshing. Yet one cannot resist the suspicion that he has made a pact with the devil; support Blatter for one more term and then step up to take the FIFA presidential crown. He who sups with the devil is sure to be irretrievably tainted in the end, and that, for Platini and for football generally, would be a great shame. |
