Sporting life - and death - social significance of the murder of Colombian soccer player Andres Escobar who helped his team lose in the 1994 World Cup games - Column

Insight on the News, August 8, 1994 by Richard Grenier

Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby who some 150 years ago Televated boys' playground games to the level of sport in order to "build character," would have been horrified at the fate of Andres Escobar, the soccer player from Colombia who was shot dead after accidentary aiding a goal for the opposing team that lead to Colombia's elimination from the 1994 World Cup.

There have been dissenters from Arnold's high-minded love of sport. Writer James Joyce described his vision of hell as "an eternal rugger scrum: 'But those who survived these scrimmages were believed by generations of Britons to grow into stronger, more resolute men, ready to fight on, "press on:" During the great days of the British empire, the immense prestige of which did much to propagate the English sports cult throughout the world, the idea seemed to make sense. On the courage and iron determination of such men the British empire would stand or fall.

In those days, of course, sport was for gentlemen. The "lower orders," who worked from 12 to 14 hours a day in the fields or in the new mines and factories, had no time for frivolities. It was only when ordinary working people had the leisure for these boyish games that the world of sport began to change dramatically.

First, hordes of common people, including 14-year-olds (who'd previously started work at that age), suddenly had the leisure to play at these gentlemen's pastimes. Second - and this was vastly expanded first by the popular press, then by radio and television - an immense audience for these games grew by leaps and bounds, hardly any of whom had the faintest notion of why these sports had been fostered to begin with. For these new giant audiences, now known as "fans:" the grand world of sport had become very much a part of modern show business. The word fan itself, short fonatic, was borrowed from the entertainment world.

But the heart-throbbing distinction between sport and theater is not that the audience doesn't know who's going to win - but that no one knows. It's in the lap of the gods. Unless of course the game has been fixed," which suggests the inevitable, intimate connection spectator sports in their mature phase have developed with the gambling industry.

Now when Escobar was gunned down at 3:30 a.m. outside a nightclub in Medellin, Colombia, one suspects this was not a display of the kind of character Arnold set out to build at Rugby. "Thanks for the goal!" the gunman shouted bitterly, as he fired six bullets into the soccer player.

We have what might have turned out to be a hopeless tangle of motivations: a violent country with the world's highest murder rate, drug money, gambling losses and, naturally, the spirit of fair play engendered by big-time, mass-audience sports. Actually, the murderer, who since has confessed, was the drunken chauffeur of a Colombian who'd lost money on the game. But murderous soccer riots have, by now, broken out in country after country. Is this the moral lesson that sport is supposed to teach?

With the tragic, terrible death of Andres Escobar - his black-lacquered coffin displayed in an flower-wreathed arena with fans shouting "Andres lives!" and still others crying "Justice! Justice!" - the world seems to have forgotten the events preceding Escobar's unfortunate mishap.

Colombia is not the world's only soccer powerhouse. Another is Argentina. And after Colombia defeated the fast and normally hard-driving Argentinian team by a stunning 5-0 in a World Cup qualifying match, the delirium unleashed in the streets of Bogota took almost 100 lives.

Where do these bodies lie in state, their coffins wreathed in flowers? Who mourns for them?