Opening lines: The column - This (un)sporting life

Does a sound body mean a sound mind? Certainly not in Australia, says Howard Jacobson. And anyway, fleshy absurdity is the first step towards intelligence

Mens sana in corpore sano. A sound mind in a sound body. A phrase frequently taken to mean a sound mind as a consequence of a sound body. That, anyway, was our old gym teacher's justification for making us play football in ballooning knickers - his word - in temperatures of 15 below zero, measured on the Manchester scale where zero starts a lot lower down. Good for our minds, apparently, though there was no evidence it had ever been good for his.

The phrase originates in Juvenal's Satire X - "If you must badger the Gods for something, badger them for mens sana in corpore sano", which sounds to me like a bit of leftover Greek holism. The Olympic ideal and all that. Bursa plumpa in arena plena. A fat purse in a full stadium.

You'll forgive my cynicism, but I'm writing from Australia, where nothing is presently engaging the interest of the nation more than the misdeeds of those who play sport or loiter round its peripheries. If it isn't an Australian cricketer selling weather forecasts to an Indian bookmaker called John - and how many Indian bookmakers called John do you know? - it's an Australian cricketer making a nuisance of himself at a Sydney nightclub and ending up flat on his back in the early hours, nursing a black eye and unable to remember his first-class averages. Couldn't say no to a drink. Shane Warne couldn't say no to the bookmaker because a refusal is known to offend on the Indian subcontinent (and Australians are nothing if not sensitive to foreign ways), but he did happen to be down a few rupees at the gambling tables at the time of the offer. I don't mean to be prim, but throw nightclubbing and roulette-wheeling and bookmaking into the pot along with the gratis whoring and other associated luxuries doled out to members of the IOC - men's sauna in corpore sano - and don't we have to say that sport appears to be keeping lower than your usual company?

Fine by me. I have always thought that sport and late nights in bent places go together. But then I have never been of the opinion that a fit body will be of any advantage to your mind. You build your strength up precisely so that you can withstand the debilitation that accompanies the indulgence of moral weakness - moral weakness being the only thing that drove you to build your strength up in the first place. It makes perfect sense until we introduce the concept of the sportsman as role model - a direct result of mens sana in corpore sano thinking. Then it becomes a quandary for us, wondering what to do when the most self-obsessed human beings on the planet suddenly fall over drunk in the gutter, take steroids, rob, cheat, steal and otherwise do all you would expect them to do to maintain the pre-eminence of their wills, but in the process disappoint the faith our children have in them.

So what are we doing letting our children look up to sportspersons in the first place? They want role models? Give them George Eliot. I grew up with a picture of Henry James on my mantelpiece. It's not for me to say what kind of man that made me; but at least you won't see me in Reeboks, or wearing back-to- front baseball hats inscribed with encouragements to succeed.

I know - your kid won't go anywhere unless he's got words on his clothes. Then send him out with this written across his back: To be absent from the body is sometimes to be present with the Lord. Charles Lamb. But of course he won't have heard of Charles Lamb. Any relation to Alan Lamb who used to bat for England?

If you would like your children to grow up with a sound mind introduce them to sound minds. Mens sana in mens sana.

The thing about sound bodies is that they do not even guarantee themselves. I taught a weightlifter in my academic days. A lovely boy. Sweet nature. Shoulders like Samson. But I was always having to meet him at Cambridge railway station to help him carry his suitcase. He wasn't built to lift luggage. He pulled muscles in his neck once just sitting up in bed reading Middlemarch.

Now there's a girl tennis player whom other girls are hinting is half man. So what? Confusing role model. But if the object of playing tennis is to make good tennis happen, we ought not to care what manner of creature aided by what manner of substance makes it happen. Let there be tennis! We don't consider it a mark against Coleridge that he wrote Kubla Khan (no, no relation to Imran) as a consequence of a chronic inability to hold his laudanum. It's not as though he enjoyed an illegitimate advantage; he wasn't beating anybody unfairly at writing Kubla Khan. Here is the difference between a trained body and a trained mind. The body only understands competition with the aim of conquest. Its inclinations are first and foremost Fascistic. Whereas the mind delights in pure solitary creation, putting into being that which was never there before.

That there is a correlation between the body and the mind I do not doubt. The clearest minds invariably inhabit the most imperfect bodies. To say one must be grotesque in form before one can be sound in mind might be to overstate it slightly, but without consciousness of one's own fleshly absurdity there is no comedy, and where there is no comedy there is no intelligence.

Maybe Juvenal meant that all along. One of the buffoons of Satire X is Milos of Croton, a sort of classical Mike Tyson, who gets himself stuck in a tree while trying to pull it apart with his bare hands and ends up being devoured by wolves. What if a sound body to Juvenal was no more than a body not given over to luxuriousness? Which would seem to rule out anybody associated with sport.