It's Just a Game. Right?

Donald Trump threw a cage fight on the White House lawn. The Roman emperors would have approved. A brief and bloody history of sport as power.

Photo by Dim 7 on Unsplash

As the world burns, we look to sport for a distraction.

With the FIFA World Cup in full swing, the greatest show on earth might be just the tonic we need.

But, like the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, the 2026 tournament is set against a backdrop in the host country of internal political and social strife fuelled by racial division.

With fans, officials, and even an umpire refused entry to the United States, the World Cup’s reputation as an event that unites the world didn’t kick off too well.

It didn’t help that it came off the back of a sporting spectacle that reinforced all the concerns the world has about the direction the good old US of A has taken of late.

And yet, no less than Nelson Mandela had this to say: “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire, the power to unite people in a way that little else does.”

All this got me thinking, as is my way.

At this moment in time, might sport be our saviour? And looking back through history, how did we get to a point where playing games became such a deadly serious thing?

It’s just a game, after all... right?

Wrong.

Cage fight to the death

This is a story told in two parts.

First, the mess.

The cage fight.

On the lawn of a White Trash House that’s half in ruins and now only missing three cars up on blocks to complete the picture, a punch-on under lights became a fitting metaphor for all that has gone off the rails in the dis-United States of America.

It did seem fitting that the most despised octogenarian on the planet chose to celebrate his birthday with a cage fight. The UFC Freedom 250 event on 14 June was attended by 4,300 invited guests, with reportedly 115,000 more watching on screens set up on the Ellipse.

I’ll never understand why Donald Trump insists on being seen fawning over eye-poppingly well-built athletes. Built as he is like an overstuffed ziplock bag of fermenting tofu jammed into an ill-fitting suit and spray-painted tequila-sunrise tangerine, the comparison is stark.

Why put himself through it when it can only make him look even worse than he already does?

Because he clearly believes, as many do, that proximity to strength brings reflected glory. They look good, so he looks good.

That’s why Trump stuffed the audience for his real-life birthday bash with members of the military who only satisfied strict physical standards.

For that, read “no fatties.” Ironic, much?

It’s all about projecting power.

Donald Trump was attempting to legitimise his punch-on by using America’s armed forces as props.

Sport as propaganda

The UFC event was sport dressed up a propaganda.

And it was ugly.

The men who swaggered onto the stage beneath the so-called ‘Claw’ to pound each other to a pulp at the whim of the American emperor-with-no-clothes are part of a long, and very bloody, tradition.

George Orwell described sport like this as “war minus the shooting.”

If you asked the Ancient Romans, they would have agreed. Well, other than the “shooting” part, what with the whole guns-hadn’t-been-invented-yet thing.

Rome’s Colosseum opened in 80AD with a hundred continuous days of games. It was a colossal public relations exercise by an unpopular new emperor, Titus, funded by war booty seized from Jerusalem, including the treasures from the Temple of Solomon.

The “games” were as gut-wrenchingly awful as you can imagine. Most likely, much worse.

Amongst the thousands of events, condemned criminals were put to death in ghastly reenactments of mythological stories. A woman accused of adultery brought the myth of Pasiphaë to life. Just as the Cretan queen had seduced a bull, the poor condemned woman was raped to death in the stadium... by a bull.

Academics have estimated that as many as half a billion people were killed for entertainment (if that’s what you can call it) during the 400 years gladiatorial games were a thing in Ancient Rome. Half a million of those died in the Colosseum alone. And, yes, you read those figures correctly.

As for the exotic animals, dragged into the centre of Rome from the furthest reaches of the Empire to prove to the populace the reach of their emperor, as many as a million were slaughtered for “sport” in the Colosseum over the same period.

Entire species were pushed to the brink of extinction. The hippopotamus disappeared from the Nile, and the lions that once roamed Mesopotamian plains were gone forever.

Sport in the ancient world wasn’t a game

It was deadly serious.

In part, that was because competitive physical exercises were seen as the best way to prepare warriors for battle.

The Romans favoured javelin throwing, boxing, wrestling, and sword play. Archery was also a big thing, as it was across most of the world’s continents.

In Mughal India, artworks show aristocrats using bows and arrows for archery contests.

They also depict the origins of the game we now call polo.

The Mughals inherited the sport from Persian armies, who entertained themselves from the 6^th century BCE onwards by decapitating their enemies and whacking them around a field with mallets. It was messy, sure. But apparently navigating a horse while wielding a mallet was a fast-track way to learn how to disembowel opponents on horseback. Winning.

The sport found its way to the Byzantine Empire, and ended up in India, where the British Raj adopted it and claimed it as their own. Without the heads.

Good Sir Knights

Today’s cavalry units wouldn’t know one end of a horse from another. And although we’re at a place where armchair warriors pressing buttons and writing code will be the future of warfare, demonstrations of physical prowess are still seen as the mark of military superiority.

It’s why autocratic rulers like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un like nothing more than a precision athletic display, preferably in honour of a birthday or national holiday.

I’ve no doubt that was what Donald Trump was imagining when he pictured his rumble on front lawn of the People’s House. The men stepping into the cage were, to all intents and purpose, his “champions.”

Back in the Middle Ages, knights fought for noblemen. They also competed for their lords’ favour in jousting and archery tournaments. They were granted lands and gifts in exchange for their service. The fighters in the American president’s cage were gifted Trump crypto coins.

I mean, same same.

But back to the Middle Ages, when sport stopped being a training ground for warriors because the face of warfare transformed into something else altogether.

Gunpowder changes everything

The nature of physical combat, and with it sport, changed forever once firearms became commonplace in the 15^th century. Because when you can pull a gun on someone, unarmed combat is less of a thing.

Then along came Renaissance humanism which—in a nutshell—modelled human beings as God’s most favoured creation.

Inspired by Ancient Greek, rather than Roman, philosophy, early modern thinkers began to view sport as an art form and means of personal improvement, rather than a way of bashing the shit out each other.

Even the language around combat sports changed. Just as one example, in Japan, what was known as kenjutsu (techniques of the sword) became kendo (the way of the sword).

It was the beginning of the transition from sport as warfare, to sport as we know it today.

The 19^th century Industrial Revolution brought technical sporting equipment that improved performance.

With improved equipment, athletes began to learn what their bodies were capable of and formulated training programs to maximise their performance.

New games like basketball (invented 1891), volleyball (1895), and handball (1917), were invented to capitalise on the new technology.

And the word “measure,” until then used to denote balance and proportion, began to be used almost exclusively to refer to numerical measurements.

Excellence could be measured.

Sporting prowess could be quantified.

Sound mind, sound body

It’s no coincidence that this period also saw the rebirth of the Greek Olympiad in 1896.

Sport had attained a cultural significance in Ancient Greece unequalled until the rise of modern sports.

Although the saying, mens sana in corpore sano, “a sound mind in a sound body” comes from the Roman satirist, Juvenal, the Greeks were the ones devoted to secular sports and sacred games.

No city-state was considered a true community unless it was kitted out with a gymnasium, where male athletes trained and competed... naked, of course.

And it was Greece that gave us the Olympics in 776 BCE.

Although martial sports like chariot racing and the javelin throw were part of the story, it was much bigger than that.

It wasn’t just about smashing your opponent. In Ancient Greece, it was about being the best human being you could be.

The great equaliser

This takes us to the second part of this story.

Because it’s been a long time since wars were won by arrows and javelins, or piffing your vanquished enemy’s head over a line. Sport has changed immeasurably.

But one thing remains the same. And it’s the thing the Ancient Greeks knew better than most.

True sporting talent can’t be faked. There’s no bullying, buying, or blackmailing your way into a spot on the podium.

You may own the team, but you’ll never take to the field with them.

Just ask the self-appointed king of the manosphere, Andrew Tate, who was handed his balls on a plate in a much pilloried MMA fight.

Or the Roman Emperor Caligula (yes, him again) who was totally obsessed with chariot racing despite being a famously terrible driver.

Despite having the authority to fix races or simply kill his rivals, Caligula’s erratic driving style meant he regularly caused the Roman equivalent of a Formula One five-car pile-up on the turn, to the utter fury of the audience.

He was, in short, hopeless.

He was the equivalent of Donald Trump when he declares himself the winner of a vanity tournament held at his one of his own golf clubs.

It’s the same reason the Egyptian pharaoh, Amenhotep II, was never defeated in archery tournaments. He never had any competition.

Bluff and big-noting count for nothing once the bell rings or the siren sounds.

Sport as hope

That level playing field means that at its purest, sport is about hope.

Deep-pocketed sponsors or well-connected family members count for nothing. And that gives birth to some of the world’s best rags-to-riches stories.

Just ask Pelé, who started out in the slums of Brazil kicking around a grapefruit or socks stuffed with newspaper bound up with string because he couldn’t afford a soccer ball, and went on to become one of the greatest players of all time.

There’s no such thing as a nepo-baby in the sporting world. Unless you’re born with that perfect alchemical blend of who knows what, you’ll never make it.

I suspect that’s why people like Donald Trump go to water in the presence of elite sportspeople. He knows it’s the one thing money can’t buy.

I’ve seen the starry-eyes myself.

When my son was in his mid-teens, he was very handy at our local, Australian, version of football.

One year, he shared the club best and fairest award with a young man named Max Holmes. If you’re from Australia’s southern states, you’ll probably know who that is. If not, suffice to say today he’s one of the most celebrated and exciting young players in the league.

Another sport my son excelled at was basketball. And while AFL was his winter sport, the rest of the year he dribbled around the courts. For a couple of years, he was in the Firsts of a local rep basketball team with another young man by the name of Josh Giddey. I suspect plenty of you will know that name.

My son was a good basketballer back when he was playing with Josh. Good. But he wasn’t Josh.

But AFL footy? That was my son’s thing. As a junior, he was a bit of a star. I’d see that look in the eyes of grown men (yes, almost always men) as they asked me about my son’s plans for his sporting career.

These were people who had it all.

Intergenerational wealth. Career success. Fame.

They also had all the things required of a sporting champion and were high-achievers in their chosen fields. They had ambition. Self-discipline. Determination. Vision. Focus. Work ethic. Stamina.

The one thing they didn’t have was the peculiar combination of physical abilities that make for a great sportsperson.

So, they were starstruck. Over the prospects of a fifteen-year-old boy.

Because no matter how well they’d done in life, they knew that he could do the one thing they never could.

Sport is colour blind

For those who are born with the gift, sport can be the golden ticket.

It’s so much more than just two groups of people trying to whack a ball into a net, or two men pummelling the shit out of each other.

It can change lives.

Nelson Mandela said that sport is “more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers. It laughs in the face of all types of discrimination.”

Soccer—or football, depending on your flag—is called the World Game for a reason. Almost half the world’s population tune in to watch a bunch of people try to kick a black and white ball into a net.

Here in Australia, as we confront our own, homegrown, rise of deeply troubling rhetoric that attempts to erode the multicultural heart of our great nation, the members of our FIFA World Cup team, the Socceroos (yes, that’s really their name) are a beacon to all of us.

Drawn from all corners of the globe, many of them came to Australia with their families to search for a safe place to call home. Three of them arrived as refugees when they were children.

My own family can relate. My son’s grandfather was born to two Greek migrants in the 1930s. When he went to primary school in Australia, he spoke no English. But he was a gun soccer player, a sport called ‘wog ball’ in Australia back then.

My father-in-law learned that sporting prowess was a fast track to acceptance. And although he lived up to family expectations and became a surgeon, he encouraged his own children to pursue sporting success. His son—my husband—became a state hurdling champion.

When we had children, my husband dutifully trotted them off to sporting fields and athletics tracks across the city. Both our son and daughter have become exceptional sportspeople in their own right because their grandfather saw how sport could open doors that might otherwise remain closed.

But things get tricky when malignant forces decide to hitch their wagon to this feel-good story and bathe in the reflected glory.

Jumping on the bandwagon

And that’s why Donald Trump’s impotent display at the White House is so unsettling. He’s quite happy to requisition others’ hard-won acclaim to push his own agenda.

Don’t like it? Tough shit. That’s the message. As it is with so many more of his executive decisions.

It’s fitting that he just returned home after a whirlwind tour of Versailles. Louis XIV built the world’s glitziest palace in the 1600s for the equivalent today of US$3.5 billion and used it to stage extravagant spectacles to keep his court compliant and ensure his name would live on long after he was worm food.

But these things always have ramifications. The excesses of Louis’ court laid the seeds of the French Revolution, for a start.

And then we have Caligula again, who in 39 CE ordered the construction of a bridge straddling the three-mile wide Bay of Baiae made of merchant ships so he could disprove a prophecy that he had less chance of becoming emperor than he did of riding a horse across the strait. The fact he was already emperor by this time says enough about the depth of his imposter syndrome.

Being a worldclass cosplayer like certain other delusional leaders, Caligula whacked on Alexander the Great’s golden breastplate and rode across the pontoon bridge with his army following behind.

He ended the whole ridiculous enterprise with a speech... about himself, of course. This from the Ancient Roman historian, Cassius Dio:

“First he extolled himself as an maker of great enterprises, and then he praised the soldiers as men who had undergone great hardships and perils, mentioning in particular this achievement of theirs in crossing through the sea on foot. For this he gave them money, and after that they feasted for the rest of the day and all through the night, he on the bridge, as though on an island, and they on other boats anchored round about.”

The domino effect for the people of Rome? The use of so many merchant ships for the vanity project caused severe famine across Italy. The bridge building project plunged the empire into a financial crisis.

So, yeah. Make of that what you will.

Bread and circuses

Leaders like Donald Trump and Caligula (now, there’s a match made in heaven) get away with obscene displays like this thanks to the entertainment value of public spectacles that frequently have sport at their centre.

You’ve heard the one about keeping the people entertained with “bread and circuses.” But here’s the full quote from the Roman satirist, Juvenal:

But what of the Roman mob?.... They shed their sense of responsibility long ago, when they lost their votes, and the bribes; the mob that used to grant power, high office, the legions, everything, curtails its desires, and reveals its anxiety for two things only, bread and circuses.

Nations have been destroyed by the ambition of a few, by their desire for fame and a title, a name that might cling to the stones that guard their ashes.

Quick potted history for those of you who may have forgotten, the Roman Republic began in 509 BCE after the people overthrew their monarchy in favour of an elected government. It lasted 450 years or so, until a period of unrest that included the assassination of the self-appointed dictator, Julius Caesar, and ended with the rise of Rome’s first emperor... Caesar’s great-nephew, Octavian, crowned Augustus in 27 BCE.

With that, people power stopped being a thing. Juvenal wrote his satires more than a century later, as a commentary on the decline of the Roman Empire. One of the things that had his toga in a knot was the general populace’s disinterest in anything other than trivial pleasures.

Sport as spectacle

“Bread and circuses.” Keep your bellies full, and your mind occupied. That’s the theory, anyway.

Another Roman thinker, Plutarch, put it this way: “The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.”

Put simply as long as you’re on the deck of the Titanic focussing on anything other than the iceberg on the horizon, then everything’s hunky-dory for those at the helm.

Aldous Huxley, in his horribly prophetic novel, Brave New World, wrote this in 1946:

“It is possible to make people contented with their servitude. I think this can be done. I think it has been done in the past. I think it could be done even more effectively now because you can provide them with bread and circuses and you can provide them with endless amounts of distractions and propaganda.”

The point is that sport as spectacle is the perfect medium to capture the popular imagination when you’ve got a story to sell.

Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party knew it when they staged the 1936 Olympics.

And Donald Trump knows it as he hosts the FIFA World Cup and, in 2028, the Olympic Games.

Sport as big business

Because with sport, you have a captive audience.

It’s estimated that almost three-quarters of a million people play professional sport worldwide. One in every three people on the planet participate in some form of organised sport.

With that, comes money. A great deal of money. $2.65 trillion a year’s worth of money. h The FIFA World Cup alone is responsible for $10.9 billion in revenue.

And nobody does money in sport quite like the US.

A young French magistrate by the name of Alexis de Tocqueville first picked up on it in the early 1800s. In his landmark book, Democracy in America, he wrote that unlike Europeans, who pursued sport as a leisure activity, Americans treated games as a serious business. Their competition was fierce, they tracked statistics obsessively and linked it to their pursuit of material success.

So, now we find ourselves in a position where thirty teams of men competing to throw an orange ball in a hoop generate $12.25 billion a year for the NBA .

According to Forbes, the Chicago Bulls are responsible for $434 million of that total each year.

And every year for four years, beginning in 2025, $25 million of that will go to the lovely young fella my son once played basketball with.

No regrets

My son dropped AFL and basketball.

Instead, he chose athletics. Last year, he represented Australia at the World Championships in high jump, and this year, he’s the national champion.

He trains every day and flies around the world to compete. Most of those expenses are self-funded. So, he’s not in it for the money.

Yes, he has moments of regrets. But he owns his choice. Because he knows that whether you’re a basketball player on a multi-million-dollar contract, or a high jumper working a day job to pay the bills, you’re both in it for the same reason.

To see how far you can go, and what you can do with the gifts you were blessed with.

As for the rest of us, we get to go along for the ride. To be inspired by stories of human endeavour and victory in the face of sometimes overwhelming obstacles.

I’ll leave you with a thought from the French philosopher, Albert Camus.

He was a goalie. Because, of course he was. Can you think of a more fitting position for an existentialist?

“After many years in which the world has afforded me many experiences,” he wrote, “what I know most surely in the long run about morality and obligations, I owe to football.”

I love writing, and I love having readers. Thanks so much for subscribing, reading, commenting and sharing.

Most content on Human Matters is free, but paid support makes it possible.

Heartfelt thanks to those of you who help make that happen.