Winning ugly. That was the title of Brad Gilbert’s book on tennis and, let’s be honest, it had quite a ring. It expressed an idea, you could even call it a philosophy, that winning is everything and sod how it looks; it was the notion that nailing the last point is what matters and that ambitions such as playing elegantly, fluently, even beautifully are at best frivolous and at worst counterproductive.
Arsène Wenger has had the phrase thrust at him accusingly at more than one press conference. The Arsenal manager has long given us teams primed not merely to execute a tactical plan but also to express an aesthetic imperative. His players have been schooled in the ideals of pass and move, of creating threads of motion that most neutrals would concede have turned the Emirates Stadium into a crucible of the artistic.
The refrain, of course, is that after more than four years without a significant trophy, Wenger’s noble intentions have been enacted at the expense of success; that by maintaining his literal commitment to the beautiful game he has, by implication, deprived fans of the conquest of silverware. “You need to learn how to win ugly,” Wenger has been told. “You need to understand that beauty is one thing but it should never be sought at the expense of what really matters — winning.”
The admonishment has teeth because of its inherent plausibility.
In an age of cosmetically enhanced actresses and glitzy but inferior architecture, beauty has become synonymous with superficiality. That, I suggest, is why the title of Gilbert’s book had such a powerful resonance with sports fans and in the context of the wider zeitgeist. Winning ugly has become the thing, an expression not merely of pragmatism but of gutsiness and depth.
Advertisement
But the tide, I sense, is turning once again. We are moving towards a renewed recognition that beauty is not an irrelevance, and certainly not a needless extravagance, but something rather more fundamental. Wenger, for one, has resolutely sustained his belief in the importance of beauty, often in the teeth of shrill criticism.
“I believe that anything in life, if it is really well done, becomes art,” he said in an interview earlier this season. “If you read a great writer, he touches deep inside and helps you to discover something about life. Life is important on a daily basis because you transform it — you try to transform it — into something that is close to art. And football is like that.” But what about the purported conflict between aesthetics and success? Are there times when Arsenal have created art on the pitch but at the expense of results?
“At the end of the day, I ask you: who is the most successful team in the world? Brazil. What do they play? Good football,” Wenger replied. “Who won everything last year? Barcelona. What do they play? Lovely football. I am not against being pragmatic because to be pragmatic is to make a good pass, not a bad pass. It is as simple as that. When I see Barcelona, to me it is art.” Wenger’s sentiments are deep indeed — central not just to his management philosophy but also to his raison d’être. And they are sentiments that have reverberated particularly powerfully in recent days as we have witnessed a series of sporting performances whose beauty has been exceeded only by their devastating effectiveness.
Let us start with Arsenal and their defeat of Bolton Wanderers on Sunday afternoon, when Cesc Fàbregas orchestrated a symphony of movement that defeated and demoralised his opponents, and left neutrals drooling. Should Arsenal beat Bolton again this evening by a margin of two or more goals they will go top of the Premier League, not a position from which it is easy to sustain the idea that they are in hock to a defunct philosophy.
One day earlier, Barcelona beat Seville in a match that once again confirmed Pep Guardiola as Wenger’s philosophical soul mate. Barcelona played football from the heavens, particularly in the second half, the trinity of Xavi Hern?ndez, Andr?s Iniesta and Lionel Messi articulating with rare eloquence Wenger’s assertion that beauty is, at some fundamental level, synonymous with pragmatism. After knocking four goals past Seville they are five points clear at the top of La Liga.
Advertisement
Three days after that, a Swiss dressed in azure and white took to the Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne to begin his quest for the Australian Open title. Roger Federer is the most successful tennis player of all time He has also made it to the semi-finals of 22 successive grand-slam tournaments stretching over five years. That is a record of consistency without precedent. And yet there is no tennis player who has played with more beauty than the 28-year-old.
Even today, after almost a decade of familiarity, I get dewy-eyed watching Federer. He evokes a phrase that is so overused that it has lost much of its resonance: poetry in motion. As Federer glides around the court, flicking forehands and caressing backhands, I guess I am not the only one who is put in mind of Tennyson. “All experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move.” There is, indeed, cadence in Federer’s craft.
Perhaps there is only one sportsman who has evoked the poetic more powerfully than Federer. Muhammad Ali was not, of course, a poet in any literary sense — Norman Mailer once said that his various attempted ditties were united only in being “resolutely anti-poetic”. But when Ali discarded his pen and took up his gloves, he created art. Forget for a moment the bouts with Joe Frazier and George Foreman when a post-prime Ali was forced to win ugly, and instead focus on the Ali of the 1960s whose speed, fluency and fistic geometry could have emerged from the imagination of Michelangelo.
Look deeply enough, then, and you will perceive that beauty is not antithetical to sporting greatness but, more often than not, central to it. Two sides of the same coin. It is not just Arsenal, Barcelona, Brazil, Federer and Ali, but also Tiger Woods, Sugar Ray Robinson, Ajax under Rinus Michels, Ronnie O’Sullivan, Bobby Fischer. Winners all. Artists all.
But why should this be? Why, to paraphrase Wenger, is beauty so deeply implicated in success in arenas as diverse as football, tennis, boxing, golf and the like? This is a question that is both subtle and deep but perhaps we get a glimpse of an answer from nature.
Advertisement
Biologists have long known that our perception of beauty is grounded in mathematics and geometry: the symmetry of a human face, for example, signals the absence of genetic defects. We also see this truth in the ancient idea that beauty is related to the Golden Mean of Phidias with such varied works as the Parthenon, the Mona Lisa and Debussy’s Reflets dans l’eau all approximating to this abstract mathematical ideal.
If these speculations hint at something close to the truth — that beauty consists in the expression of an underlying geometrical truth — perhaps there will be some future time when Prozone will reveal that Arsenal’s passing describes the progression of the Fibonacci sequence. In the meantime, however, let us settle back and enjoy the beauty.