In Russia, where they don’t play games about anything, not even games, and where the umpire may actually get killed if he doesn’t watch his step, the life of a sportswriter is far from simple. Andrew R. MacAndrew here tells us how the Grantland Rices of the Workers’ Fatherland keep their eye on the ball.
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A communist newspaper, Lenin once said, is a weapon of the Communist party. That goes for the sports pages just as much as for the rest of the paper. And for that matter it goes for the athletes, too. This makes the work of a sports reporter in Russia somewhat more complicated than it is here. It may be easy enough to put the party line into an editorial on world politics, but where does it fit into an account of a soccer game? It had better fit, that’s all. . . .
It goes without saying that the Soviet sports writer must believe (Rule 1) in the superiority of Soviet athletes. This superiority is supposed to follow somehow from the axiom that the Soviet social system is superior to all other social systems. When the American team accumulated more points than the Soviet team in the last Olympic Games, at Helsinki, a new scoring system was immediately devised and, in the Russian press at least, the Soviet athletes emerged triumphant.
Rule 2. The Soviet writer must take care to expose the intrigues of capitalist sports officials whose only concern is to cheat the Soviet sportsmen out of their well-earned victories and, of course, to make a lot of money. The foreign athletes themselves are merely the tools or paid stooges of these capitalists and therefore are often lacking in sportsmanship.
Rule 3. The Soviet writer must be “vigilant,” which means he must always be ready with an explanation for every Soviet failure on the playing fields.
Finally—Rule 4—the Soviet sports writer must always keep in mind such slogans as that “international sports create good will among peoples.” If he finds difficulty in reconciling that sentimental idea with the other rules (see above) governing his job, he is only in the same boat as everybody else in the Communist world and no doubt overcomes the difficulty (or internal contradiction, as he would call it if he were talking about a capitalist country) with ease.
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The cover story of a leading Soviet magazine, Ogonek (“Little Flame”), reports on the 1954 World Gymnastics Championships in Rome. The article opens dramatically. Charles Toeni, the Swiss secretary-general of the FIG (Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique), steps from a plane at a Swiss airport. Reporters surround him and ask him anxiously what he thinks of the chances of the Soviet gymnasts at the forthcoming World Gymnastics Championships in Rome. The secretary-general declares that, while he believes the Soviet women are somewhat superior, the Soviet men may have, at best, a slight edge over the Swiss.
“So the chances of the Russians and the Swiss will be about equal?”
“Yes.”
And all this is on record! The entire exchange above was quoted in the magazine La Semaine Sportive.
Well, seven months went by. . . . And then we found ourselves in the Olympic Stadium in Rome. . . .
A Verdi hymn announced the opening of the 13th World Gymnastics Championships. . . . Twenty-four countries took part in the competition. . . . Many pairs of field glasses are turned toward our team which marches past near the end of the procession, which is arranged in alphabetical order. The supple Soviet girls are followed by eight magnificent, picked men. Some of these athletes are already known to the spectators: they are Victor Chukarin, the All-Round Olympic Champion, Shaginyan and Korolkov, who took Olympic prizes, and the young Moscow athlete Muratov.
The competition begins and the women win easily, as expected. It is now up to the men to make the Swiss official swallow his words.
Chukarin, the Ail-Round Olympic Champion, sprains his finger, but decides heroically to hide this fact from the public.
He would not give up the struggle just because of a finger. Now, watching the easy, powerful, and precise movements of the gymnast, no one, except the coach and the small group of his comrades, could guess the effort it cost him. . . .
Nevertheless, the Soviet team slowly forges ahead, followed by the West Germans and the Japanese. And here an element of foreign spying comes in:
At Helsinki, the Japanese were always watching the Soviet gymnasts while they were training. We could hear a continuous buzzing sound which was the noise of a movie camera, and now we see the result: at Helsinki, no Japanese could perform the “cross” on the rings, while now they all, one after another, can hold that position for four to five seconds, as though being timed. . . .
Nevertheless:
The Soviet athletes demonstrated a definite superiority in rings. They accumulated 58.4 points while the Japanese, who came second in this field, collected only 55.9.
The Japanese had systematically and exactly learned every movement of our gymnasts from the films they had taken in Helsinki. But then Tokimoto, Ono, and their fellow countrymen must realize that they are emulating our yesterday. That day is gone, and what they must face today are the 1954 master gymnasts of the Soviet school. . . .
The air is full of capitalist intrigue. When Shaginyan is awarded 9.7 points for his exercises on the vaulting horse,
the representative of the Swiss team suddenly appeals to the judges. Isn’t 9.7 an overestimation of the Soviet gymnast’s performance? Isn’t 9.5 enough? In which case, by the way, the Swiss, Stahlder, would win. But the judges don’t go for this “diplomatic intervention”. . . .
The Soviet team takes a definite lead and the main interest of the championships centers around the struggle for the title of All-Round World Champion, which is finally shared between Chukarin and Muratov. The article also notes that the Soviet team became so popular that Italian spectators were reproached for cheering representatives other than their own, to which a “humorous middle-aged worker” replied: “Well, blame the Soviet lads for it. It’s impossible not to admire them when they get down to work.”
Virtue has finally triumphed.
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The journalistic virtue of “vigilance”—sometimes also called “criticism and self-criticism”—is well illustrated by a recent article in the Young Communist League paper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, “On Refereeing Soccer” (August 17,1954).
Once again a dramatic lead:
A Moscow forward breaks through the enemy defenses. He reaches the penalty area. One more second and the ball will be in Tiblis’s net. But no. . . . The Moscow forward is lying on the ground where he has been brutally dispatched by a Tiblis defender. The referee whistles. The game is stopped. But the referee does not award a free kick to the Moscow team. Instead he throws the ball in the air for a replay. . . . The public is indignant. And to think that such a thing happened during a Division A championship match between Dynamo of Tiblis and Torpedo of Moscow!
The article gives a few more “scandalous examples” of this sort and then, as is usual in the self-improving Soviet society, tries to dig down to the root of the trouble:
Although our referees receive satisfactory theoretical and physical training, we are too often forced to witness unforgivable decisions. This is because moral qualities and will power are insufficiently developed in the referees. . . .
Why are moral qualities and will power insufficiently developed? Because “the Soccer Section of the Committee on Physical Culture and Sports, under the USSR Council of Ministers, does not pay sufficient attention to the political education of the referees [and does not listen to] the warnings and complaints about the amoral behavior of some referees, their pretentiousness, their aristocratic airs, their conceit, their intolerance toward criticism, and their excessive predilection for alcohol.”
In short, “poor refereeing is arresting the development of Soviet soccer.”
Even under Communism, it seems, the sports fan may still wish to kill the umpire. The only difference is that if the umpire doesn’t mend his ways, he may get hit with more than a pop bottle.
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The Soviet press of course made the most of the American basketball fixes, asserting that such scandalous behavior is inherent in the capitalist system. Here, however, is a feuilleton from Pravda which shows that such things can happen in the world of the future too.
Ashkhabad’s outside left received the ball from his center forward and, skillfully dodging the opposing fullback, streaked toward the home team’s goal. In the stands, the fans closed their eyes to shut out the sight. But, at the very last moment, the goalie dived for the ball and averted the disaster.
The entire stadium rose to applaud the Alma Ata goalie’s daring save. That is, all but one man, who, gloomily cursing the goalie, hurried toward him along the sidelines.
“You must let the ball in,” he panted out.
“Let it in? Where?”
“Your goal, of course.”
“Are you joking?”
“Bekbayev never jokes. Bekbayev orders!” said the man angrily, and he turned away from him.
At that, the goalie saw red.
He rushed out of his goal and tried to kick the ball into his own net. The Alma Ata players formed a wall protecting their goal from the man designed to guard it.
Suddenly the loudspeaker blared: “The Alma Ata captain is wanted immediately by Comrade Bekbayev.”
“What’s the matter?” the captain asked.
“Why don’t you let Ashkhabad score? Don’t forget that they must score two goals. Then Ashkhabad will have a higher goal average than Tashkent. This would make Uzbekistan [the republic represented by the Tashkent soccer team] fall behind two points and enable Kazakhstan [represented by Alma Ata and Ashkhabad] to get into the first place in the Central Asia League. . . .
But the rank-and-file booters of Kazakhstan proved themselves to be men of honor. They denounced the dishonest deal Bekbayev urged upon them, a deal alien to the spirit of Soviet sports, and pursued their bid for first place honestly as befits Soviet athletes.
But the Kazakhstan Republic Committee for Physical Culture and Sports did not have such high principles. They applied a coat of whitewash to Bekbayev. Furthermore, Comrade Kanapin, secretary of the Kazakhstan Young Communist League Central Committee, actually suggested that Bekbayev’s talent for scheming should be used for the general benefit of the sports movement.
In his own interests, this talent has been put to full use since the very first day Bekbayev was appointed director of the Kazakhstan Physical Culture Institute. The appointment seems to have been a hurried one and Bekbayev, who had previously only gone through ninth grade, proceeded to fill in the inevitable gap in his education by becoming a student at the institute of which he was director. A year later, Director Bekbayev conferred upon Student Bekbayev a diploma of graduation from the institute. Not content with this, he decided to satisfy his ambition and become a Master of Sports. His complete lack of athletic performance did not prevent Bekbayev from recommending himself for this title. . . .
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As for the problem of Rule 4—about reconciling the irreconcilable, or rather not being bothered by it—this can perhaps be illustrated by the frequent repetition in Pravda and Izvestia editorials of the 1949 Directive of the Communist party, to wit: “Achieve world supremacy and set records in the most important fields of sport.” These articles exhorting Soviet athletes to win at all costs “for the prestige of our Soviet Union” always go on to state that an athlete who represents the Soviet Union abroad “promotes friendship among peoples by displaying the true spirit of sportsmanship and fair play.”
But so far no Soviet sports writer has been able to explain convincingly how it is possible to win “at all costs” while promoting friendship and remaining a gentleman and a sportsman. Or is this dialectics?
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