Across the Pond

Author: Adam Clayton

Unemployed philosopher and football manager Jose Mourinho once claimed that people look at sport and bring to it the negative aspects of our society, projecting individual and societal feelings of shame and guilt upon those in the sports world. Mourinho, defensive guru on the football pitch, was also a master of offense off of it, shifting attention to rival managers and teams and distorting reality to suit his team's needs, a genius of modern-day football and psychology.

Politics is in many ways eerily similar, and indeed Hillary Clinton would have done well to hire the comical Lusitan during her latest campaign shuffle-up. But the true reality of sports and politics is that we not only hold these people to different societal standards, but that we occasionally hold them to very few standards at all. Take, for instance, the fascist salute of Paolo Di Canio for Lazio in 2005, which brought him a measly one-game ban and 10,000 Euro fine as well as the adoration of thousands of fascist skinhead fans that purchase a large portion of the club's season tickets. Likewise, countless arrests of sports stars are often tolerated as consequences of fame, and antics that would get a 15-year-old kid sent to a juvenile center are spun into profitable entertainment. Lies and blatant reneges of promises by politicians are daily occurrences, common sense and reality skewered in debates such as whether Bill Clinton was actually being 'hyper-accurate' in his definition of 'sexual relations.'

So it comes as no surprise that yet another sport has become engulfed in scandal. Formula One recently found itself in the unenviable position of defending the president of its governing body, Max Mosley. Son of the one-time leader of Britain's Union of Fascists, who modeled his party and himself on Benito Mussolini's inclusive political movement and appealing character cult, and whose mother was quite understandably bowled over by Hitler, Mosley was exposed by The Sun for hosting a five-hour S&M romp with five Nazi-themed hookers that left him with "sizeable whip wounds." The first official remark on the cavorting Mosley's historical escapades was from Formula One CEO Bernie Ecclestone, who said "Knowing Max, it might be all a bit of a joke." Besides the strange insinuation that Max was acting out of humorous intent and that those intentions were misread, Ecclestone fails to grasp the fact that Max is married with two kids, and that five hookers is even more illegal than one. According to Bernie's theory, Max's April Fool's Day prank involved Max saying "I'll take all five," dressing them up as his parents would have approved and joking with them each for consecutive hours until it stopped being funny.

Of course, looking to the guardians of our sport to ensure a decent sense of morality among our sporting elite when they condone such behavior makes it hard for anyone to believe that our cultural pastimes are victims of unfair attention from the media. Yet much like the 'Genocide Olympics' and other recent sporting debacles, it is likely to be up to the sponsors to cast the final vote in ridding sports of such moral digression. Corporate sponsors are just as vulnerable to negative reactions against the sport as they are impacted by its positive exposure to fans. The power of sports fans to evoke positive moral change is as succinct as our options as a consumer, and thus capitalism will ironically prove to seal the fate for this Formula One guardian Max Mosley and his fascist fantasies.