Cruel, witless and mean, 'banter' has become the overly lifestyled soundtrack to modern sport. It's time to take a banter-stand
It is of course important to tolerate the beliefs, opinions and flagrant idiocies of all men. At some point, though, a line must be drawn. The concept of banter ? also known as banta, bants, epic banter ? has hovered around sport for some time, but there is now a sense of a tipping point approaching. A brief scan of the sports pages this week produced at least 12 mentions of "banter" among the daily business of sport, including my favourite "Bresnan: banter inevitable on lifeless tracks", with its implication that like death, banter is now inescapable, a source of ancient and inconsolable sorrow. For so long a peripheral parasite, banter has now lodged itself in the guts of sport like a tapeworm, albeit a tapeworm that has managed to writhe up the gullet and entwine itself hungrily around the vocal chords. Frankly, sport has had enough. It is time to take a banter-stand.
First of all it is important to isolate exactly what banter is. Banter is not chit-chat. It is instead an aggressively specialised form of predominantly male speech, a tone of willed, cajoling hilarity. Banter may have once suggested just a passing mood but it has gathered itself in recent years and come back reinforced, tooled-up, formalised into a permanent state of being, a career, a lifestyle choice. Racked with wheedling mirth, suckling at the oxygen mask of cliche, the banterer now walks among us unashamed, burping out his gobbets of sports-guff.
It is a nuanced discipline. There is talk of people having "good banter", which is of course a basic contradiction as by definition all banter is appalling banter, inexcusable banter. Personally I have no banter at all, good or bad ? but I believe it would be easy enough to acquire a basic level simply by adding the word "Wheayeahmate!" to any sentence. "Wheayeahmate it's lunchtime!" "Wheayeahmate I am secretly lonely behind my obstructive male blurting!" and so on.
As with all successful movements banter has its grand public standard-bearers. Rio Ferdinand, whom I admire hugely as a footballer, has been hugely influential. Ferdinand has just the right level of restless verbal energy and as such he has become the banter gift that never stops giving ? a banter Santa decanting banter via his Twitter empire, his awkward and stagey friendships with rappers, his forays into designing expensive fashion-shoes that look like brown calfskin cowpats.
Richard Keys and Andy Gray were influential in spreading about a notion of a high-end, clubbable banter: the bull-necked banter-gods striding about their own pinstriped banter-universe. There was even, in the midst of their own laughable sexism-shame, a sense that "banter" represented to Keys and Gray something noble, a shimmeringly modern way of being, borne aloft on a graspingly confused notion of "irony", catchphrase-dependent, dulled by magazine-twaddle and TV-blurt.
At which point the forces of banter may demand a right of reply. What exactly is wrong with a bit of banter? Harmless, harmless banter. But the fact is banter is wrong ? and also harmful. Mainly it is a symptom of an overly lifestyled society, of the cant of modern leisure-consumerism. Sky Sports still aggressively sells its own notion of banter-dependent football rivalries, the face-painted goons howling into camera lenses, the dork who mows his lawn in a club crest. Elsewhere Match of the Day has been entirely consumed by banter, hoarding at its heart an intolerable anti?chemistry of the punditry sofa. Alan Shearer and Gary Lineker have been mummified by banter, appearing on screen with the look of men kidnapped by hostile forces and forced at gunpoint to sit rocking with silent laughter, glazed with joke-fear, constipated with badinage.
Mainly, though, banter is mean. It is constitutionally cruel, thriving in the gravity of status-imbalance. Within even the most densely thicketed banter-forest, there is always a gorilla-hierarchy. At least one current England cricketer has a Twitter friend who defines himself as "wingman to [England cricketer]" and who appears to spend his time gurning on the periphery as a kind of sidekick-entertainment for the sporting grandees, a banter-fool waggling his banter-stick.
Beyond this banter has an obfuscating effect. It blurs the vision. Currently the ambient sound of sport, the buzz around its gangways goes something like "Wheayeahmatebanterbantebanter!". Sport is not supposed to sound like this. The sporting voice has in the past been a noble thing. If Muhammad Ali were in his prime, would people say he had "good banter"? Did Bill Shankly have top, top banter, or was he in fact a conduit for a grand socialist poetry of the terraces? Sport used to be so austere, so unresponsively adult. It made room for you only grudgingly, tolerating your adolescent presence with heartening indifference. In the age of banter, sport must look very different to the young: caperingly hostile, back-slappingly overdressed, holding its stomach in and breathing beer-laughter into your face.
Perhaps, though, we needn't worry overly about banter's own longevity. As a sporting chorus, banter has something close to a built-in obsolescence. The native tone of the football fan is in reality something closer to boredom, frustration and quiet loathing. Banter is still an intrusion into these closely guarded places. It is a forced marriage, the sound of people who don't really like sport talking about sport. This is the secret sadness of banter. At bottom the banter-man simply craves acceptance. He is just a man ? albeit an annoying man. Banter with him gently. Banter him off on his way.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/oct/21/sport-banter-barney-ronay
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