Paul Thomas: The good old days of spear tackles and ball tampering

Earl Warren, whom President Dwight Eisenhower made chief justice of the Supreme Court in the mistaken belief that he'd be reliably conservative, always turned to the sports pages first because "they record people's accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man's failures."

At first glance this seems facile since sport has more losers than winners.

But we know where he's coming from: he's evoking a self-contained world where everyone plays by the rules, abides by the umpire's decision, respects their opponents, concludes proceedings with a firm handshake, and is a custodian of traditions and values.

Even 40 years ago that was a highly idealised view. Now that sport is a multibillion-dollar, round-the-clock, wall-to-wall branch of the entertainment industry, it seems hopelessly sentimental.

Today's sports pages might reveal some of the biggest stars pay lip service to the principle of a fair contest and engage in sustained, systematic cheating to secure the spoils of victory: marketable fame.

There might be pre-match exchanges or post-match acrimony. There might be libellous disparagement of officials.

Those who long for a return to sport's Garden of Eden have been rallying around the dreadnought figure of Australian cricket umpire Darrell Hair. He was seen by his supporters and, clearly, himself as a man of unbending principle in a sport populated by cheats, human weather vanes and political fixers.

Hair's code is that a man's got to do what a man's got to do. Like Gary Cooper in High Noon, he stood up for what was right even when the community he served and protected would have preferred otherwise.

It takes a powerful dose of blinkered self-regard to precipitate a crisis on a point of principle and in defence of your moral authority and then lay yourself open to the charge of grasping opportunism but Hair has obviously got what it takes.

It's a tawdry affair but let's keep it in perspective.

At the Adelaide Oval in 1998, only Mark Waugh stood between South Africa and victory. He was correctly given not out after treading on his stumps because he'd already completed his shot.

The South African captain held the game up for five minutes while he berated the umpires. It was an ugly scene with an ugly postscript: after Waugh had steered his side to a draw, the South African captain speared a stump into the umpires' dressing room door.

The man in question, Hansie Cronje, was later banned for life for match-fixing; Steve Randell, the umpire who'd borne the brunt of Cronje's rage, was later jailed for serial child molestation.

Sunil Gavaskar and Clive Lloyd are eminent figures in the game. Gavaskar is chairman of the International Cricket Council's cricket committee which makes all international umpiring appointments while Lloyd's a long-serving match referee who may yet be called upon to act as honest broker in the ball-tampering crisis.

Captaining the West Indies at Lancaster Park in 1980, Lloyd presided over an extravaganza of disgraceful behaviour, including a refusal to take the field after a tea interval, prompted by unhappiness with the umpiring.

Captaining India in Melbourne the following year, Gavaskar became enraged over an umpiring decision and staged a walk-off. Talk about poachers turned gamekeepers.

Darrell Hair is probably doomed, mainly because he has turned a matter of principle into an unseemly, lawyer-driven haggle, but his demise won't tell us anything about the state of the game that we didn't already know. It won't be all that long before 2006 is regarded as the good old days.

Speaking of which, rugby turned back the clock after the Wallabies roughed up Richie McCaw at Eden Park. Back in the days when such controversies were commonplace, the aftermath was always the same: to the team on the receiving end (and their media and supporters), it was thuggery; to the team who'd dished it out, it was just vigorous play and, anyway, the other mob had asked for it.

When a Welsh player had his jaw broken by Colin Meads in 1969, the visitors screamed blue murder; the response was he shouldn't have been jersey-pulling.

When the 1966 British Lions complained the lacerations on their backs from being trampled in rucks were so severe bruising went all the way through to their chests, they were told they shouldn't lie on the ball.

When New Zealanders complained about the spear tackle, Wallaby Ben Tune said any hurt caused was McCaw's own fault because "instead of crunching his stomach and twisting his body which is what you're taught to do when lifted off the ground, he stayed pencilled (sic) straight so that his head instead of shoulder blades made contact with the ground".

Don't you love that "made contact"?

"Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play," wrote George Orwell.

"It's bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard for all the rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it's war without the shooting."

That was written four years before Earl Warren was appointed to the United States Supreme Court.