Mercy a waste when victory calls

SPORT offers many opportunities to display grace but few seize them.

The Duchess of Kent consoles Jana Novotna

LAST weekend the quality of mercy seemed a bit strain'd to me. It completely failed to droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. The resulting behaviour would have been grotesque from Saddam Hussein, but Alastair Cook, former choirboy and captain of the England cricket team, went right ahead and did it.

He didn't enforce the follow-on and go for the quick kill in the second Test at Lord's, because that would have given Australia a phantom of a spectre of a ghost of a chance. Instead, England batted on and on and on. He didn't declare on Saturday to give Australia the traditional Horrid Half-Hour. He didn't even declare the next morning. He didn't just want to win, he wanted to break hearts and minds and spirits as well.

This week, James Anderson was asked his views. He failed to stand up for mercy. "I don't feel sympathy for them," he said. "Our job is to win games of cricket, we want to win the series 5-0 . . . We don't really feel anything for them, to be honest."

The Australian team are human beings in turmoil. They are close to despair. Misery and confusion dominate everything they do. Everyone who has experienced failure and carried its emotional load -- that is to say all of us -- understands the way they feel. Professional athletes know such things better than most, because defeat and disappointment are part of every athlete's life.

You can double that again for anyone who has played cricket for England. Heavy and predictable defeat dominated the team's life during the 1990s. Some of the present crop experienced the 5-0 defeat in Australia in 2006-07, and they all know what it is to get up every morning feeling inadequate on a cosmic scale. The England team is content for Australia to feel that way. Eager.

No mercy. None whatsoever. Opponents must not be let off anything. If you can add to their suffering, it is your right -- your duty -- to inflict it. You have no choice in the matter. If you are employed as an enforcer you must enforce; if you are an executioner you must execute; if you are employed as a torturer you have no option but to bring out your instruments of pain.

Which is odd when you remember that sport was brought into Victorian education as a teacher of moral virtues. Sport made you obedient to authority, it made you sink self into common cause, it taught you to work hard, it taught you about self-sacrifice, it taught you a kind of chivalry, it taught you about camaraderie, it taught you modesty and decency, it taught you how to deal with triumph and adversity, and it made you clean in thought and deed, because it sent you to bed too tired to masturbate.

But no one ever suggested that the pursuit of sport should involve mercy. And these days, when we come across mercy in sport we mostly despise it. We call it choking and put it down to weakness of character. The classic example is the women's final at Wimbledon in 1993, when Jana Novotna led Steffi Graf 6-7 6-1 4-1 and then lost the next five games. You can argue the psychology as you wish. You can say that Novotna felt sorry for Graf, you can say she was too fearful to seize her moment. Either way, she was unwilling and/or unable to humiliate a beaten opponent and so surrendered the title. You could call this an act of heroic self-sacrifice.

Roger Federer is regarded as an artist-champion whose method embraces a transcendent beauty. That has never compromised his readiness to inflict pain and humiliation on his opponents. My occasional colleague on The Times, the excellent Lynne Truss, suggested that the female love of tennis comes from a fascination with the deliberate infliction of pain on another: a complete absence of the traditional female requirement to conciliate, to see the other person's point of view, to make everything all right again. The lack, in short, of mercy.

Athletes are admired for their ruthlessness. Ruth means mercy, but we no longer use the word positively. Instead, we use the word ruthless as a semi-admirable character trait. Alan Sugar is a ruthless tycoon, Chris Froome was ruthless in the Tour de France on Mont Ventoux. In a sporting context, that "semi" is also most completely redundant. We accept that a ruthless athlete is better than one with ruth.

There are examples of athletes showing mercy and getting praised for it, but they are rare as spoon-billed sandpipers. One example: the Ryder Cup of 1969 was a particularly fractious one, but it ended when Jack Nicklaus let Tony Jacklin off a putt on the 18th. Had Jacklin missed it -- and it was missable -- the US would have won. But he didn't even have to try. Nicklaus showed mercy. The decision was widely praised, and years later, the two of them co-designed a golf course in Florida that is called The Concession.

Another example. In 1980, Muhammad Ali was already showing early signs of Parkinsons when he went into a heavyweight world championship fight with Larry Holmes. Holmes began to hold back as he realised his opponent's helplessness and pleaded with the referee to stop the fight. Eight years later, the ageing Holmes found himself helpless against the young Mike Tyson; Tyson brutalised him. What else could he do?

Mercy is particularly appropriate in boxing because it kills people. Unlike every other sport in the calendar, boxing is not a metaphor: it is the real thing and it has damaged people for life. All the same, even in boxing mercy is hardly common. And in most sports, mercy is seen as the weakness of a loser, a character flaw.

Sport has always shown us moral qualities as well as sporting skills -- but it is wrong to assume that the person or the team with the highest moral qualities always wins, and that winners are superior to losers in moral character as well as in sporting ability. It's just that mercy is mostly inappropriate to professional sport.

Mercy matters in most human encounters. Those who lack mercy lack something of humanity, but sport is not the place to look for it. In understanding that, we accept sport's failure to encompass every aspect of human experience. All winners stand higher than the rest, but that's because they are standing on the hopes of their rivals. Jessica Ennis didn't weep for her disappointed rivals in the Olympic Stadium last year; Andrew Flintoff comforted Brett Lee at Edgbaston, but only after he had been defeated. Compassion is not mercy.

The Victorian founders of sport codified all those games to produce admirable people to run the Empire. These days top athletes are supposed to be role models, admirable people whose moral characters we would be pleased to have our children emulate.

The inference, then, is that for purposes of running empires and living a full life in the 21st century, mercy is surplus to requirements. If that is really the case, then God have mercy on us all. Winners are not by definition better people than the rest of us. They are just better at winning.

The Times