"You cannot be serious!"
John McEnroe and the rule of law
Tennis fans and those over 50 will know these words, uttered as they were on the Centre Court of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, which is the London district of Wimbledon. The Wombles of Wimbledon Common may be long gone, but the uncommon antics of John Patrick McEnroe, Junior, remain with us, in memory if not in the here and now. “The Brat grew up,” say some. Maybe that’s a pity.
One thing was for sure back on Centre Court in 1981, and that was that Mr McEnroe was serious. And the umpire he said the remark to was also serious (“you cannot be” is to be construed as “I cannot believe that you are”). The crowd and all the other officials were also serious. When Mr McEnroe made his way into the history books by exploding in a temper, you could have heard a pin drop, even on the All England’s grass. It ranks up there along with “Russian warship, go forth and procreate with thyself” and, I like to think so anyway, with the Glasgow bus conductress who said “Come on, get off.” She is nameless but still quoted to this day in the city where she made her remark.
In the aftermath of McEnroe’s remark, the outburst spread like wildfire around the world, and not just of tennis, and became the subject of much hilarity, outrage, disdain and mirth, some of which was jocular, some uninformed, by those who hadn’t even seen the match, and some informed, by those who had but had never heard of “due process”. But, then, who ever needed facts in order to have an opinion?
An American I met through my work said he was ashamed of McEnroe, ashamed to be an American. McEnroe, seemingly, had let the side down, the one with 380 million players, by challenging the unappealable authority of him who was to judge. Mr McEnroe didn’t raise his objection out of whimsy; he believed he had a valid claim, and, when it was refused, out came his verbal objection. It is in serious situations in which a serious objection is raised and put before a single serious judge, who is also jury and executioner, that one starts to wonder just how serious the whole process really is. Sport is sport and the flow of the game requires players to acquiesce without question in the decisions of the judges; that places huge responsibility on the judges, even if it is “only” sport that they are judging; however, the rest of life is sometimes sport as well. Professor Wilson of the Edinburgh University School of Law taught it thus: “The law of damages is like bingo. But, people like bingo.”
Ultimate frisbee is a sport in which there is no umpire. Players must themselves arbitrate contraventions of the rules, and I imagine that, when they do so, they do so seriously. And yet, I can also imagine there will be the odd exclamation of “You cannot be serious.”
The French language uses the word “serious” in two ways. There is sérieux, not smiling, sombre, professional and work-a-day. And there is au sérieux, which is meaning with sincerity that which you say, and taking great care in how you say it. You can be sérieux and lie through your back teeth. And you can be au sérieux with a stand-up’s one-liner.