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Let’s promote civility in sport

By Dvir Abramovich - posted Tuesday, 3 July 2007


The overriding message should be that the rules of respect and civility are the same in sports as they are at home or in the classroom. If an employee or a student called his boss or teacher a “slut”, what would happen? There is no reason why normal standards of discourse expected in every day life should not apply on the field.

Coaches, administrators and parents must reject toxic language and bad behaviour and must set the tone about the importance of respectful language.

Consider: cheap shots may provoke a fury of emotion and reaction and have no place in sports. They genuinely hurt the feelings of the player, as was the case when Zinedine Zidane delivered a headbutt to the chest of an Italian defender in the 2006 World Cup final after experiencing a meltdown caused by a filthy insult.

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I don’t care if making a crack about one’s wife or mother is an age-old tradition. It is surely not an honoured tradition.

Attempts to get inside an opponent’s head, to gain advantage by distortion, do inflict psychological injuries. Sledging is to be rejected as not being “part of the game”. In the USA sporting associations have defined taunting as actions or comments which are intended to “bait, anger, embarrass, ridicule or demean others”. I believe that sportspeople should adhere to strong ethical standards, respect the integrity and personality of their opponents, and set a good example for student-athletes.

Winning should not come at the expense of respect. Each player should take personal responsibility for keeping the game at a high level of sportsmanship.

If we implicitly accept sledging, we are directly endorsing the dumbing down of dialogue and the loosening of standards regarding how we conduct ourselves in public. Officials need to clamp down on injurious language, as complicated as it may seem.

Let’s summon a level of indignation and zero-tolerance for demeaning, bigoted language.

Professional sportspeople should be held to a higher standard, not a lower one. The instructive lessons to be learnt from the Headland-Selwood incident is that we should think about how much words can hurt. Players of any code are not to be treated as if they live on another planet.

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Our young worship sports people as role models. It’s time players start behaving accordingly.

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About the Author

Dr Dvir Abramovich is the Jan Randa senior lecturer in Hebrew-Jewish studies and director of the University of Melbourne centre for Jewish history and culture.

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Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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