The Importance of Sport in Society
How a gym course in prison taught inmates valuable life lessons that schools should have taught them when they were free young men.
The selling off of school fields, playing grounds, and a scaling down generally of sport at schools, has arguably been catastrophic for Britain. Vital life lessons that should be experienced by young people in a sporting environment are now glossed over, or discussed in a classroom at best. Unfortunately, I had the misfortune to spend some time in prison and saw first-hand how useful sport can be for many of our misguided young men. Nothing I encountered in prison helped inmates transform themselves into better members of society - except the gym course.
Gyms in Prison
The gym course I experienced in prison involved twelve inmates and was meant to last eight weeks. Being a professional golfer on the European Tour, and a former pupil at public school, I had been used to a disciplined environment with an ethos of fair play. So when one of my team mates was floored by a cracking right hook at the start of our experimental game of basketball, I realised that the opposition had not spent too many hours learning about good sportsmanship. They obviously had had different hobbies. Three of the six on the opposite side were in for burglary, three for violent offences. On the first day I did wonder if I would last the course.
Life Lessons from Sport
After the mass fight that followed the basket ball game, the gym instructors threw the biggest inmate into the shower and read the riot act. They explained exactly what was expected of us during the course. Each inmate had to referee a match so they they would experience first-hand the anger and frustration as the two teams rushed up in complaint when the whistle blew. Incredibly – and I mean incredibly - it was as though the inmates started to realise they had to abide by the rules. Incredibly, they started to work hard together as a team. Amazingly, they started to win with a degree of grace and lose with a semblance of dignity. Okay - it took awhile but it was there at the end! After spending over a year in prison I was humbled at how sport helped to teach the inmates a new code of behaviour.
Golf and Society
It really doesn’t matter what sport is played by youngsters. Preferably it would involve running around and burning up some excess calories – but in truth playing any sport helps. At Newbury Golf Center in England where I currently teach now I’m back in the PGA and trying to help young people, golf plays an important and vital role. Every week when the youngsters turn up to the club I realise they are learnning things that will stay with them for life. Various rules and codes of behaviour soon become part of a golfer’s life, and the list is endless.
- playing the ball as it lies
- accepting bad luck
- learning not to cheat
- showing respect to others
- learning how to keep going when it would be easy to give up
- time keeping
- patience
- hard work pays off
Sport for Young People
It is incredibly easy for people to dismiss the importance of sport in society. It is also very easy to blame an apathetic approach to sport on a lack of budget.. But promotion of sport, even golf, does not require a huge cash commitment, rather a mental change of direction. As the prison population continues to grow at an alarming rate, it would be sensible for schools to start teaching sport more regularly. It's pretty costly to house inmates and having spent too much time inside - it does breed some pretty scary individuals. Let's give our teenagers something better to do than hang around the streets with no direction.