My colleague Owen Slot did a rum thing this week: he used the first-person pronoun. He does that about once every 18 months. Unlike a writer such as I, he aims for some kind of objectivity. So when he gives unaccustomed exercise to the “I” key on his laptop, it is instructive to take notice.
He was writing a fine piece about his deeply equivocal relationship with the Tour de France. Love the action, hate the drugs. Heroes of incomparable adventure and courage bring us glorious stories that must be rewritten when the heroes are revealed as foul and perfidious cheats. And then he goes back for more. It’s flawed — it’s more than flawed — but he can’t resist.
It’s like the joke that concludes the Woody Allen film Annie Hall: “This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says: ‘Doc, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.’ And the doctor says: ‘Why don’t you turn him in?’ And the guy says: ‘I would, but I need the eggs.’ That’s what Slotty is saying about the Tour. He knows it’s crazy, but he needs the eggs.
Should we bother with a sporting event that is so deeply and so obviously flawed? Should we cover it in The Times? Or should we walk away from it? Could we force stage racing in general and the Tour in particular to reform by turning our backs on it? Is it our moral duty to do just that?
Hard questions. But take a flip through the sports pages across an average week. The greater chunk of it is about the action, but a good deal of the rest is report and comment on the myriad flaws in every single one of the many sports we cover.
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Take football. Fifa, the governing body, is rent by allegations of corruption. Nothing is proven, but nothing that comes from Fifa is believed any more. Its members refused to vote for England’s perfectly decent bid to hold the 2018 World Cup because a British television programme questioned Fifa’s integrity. And they gave the World Cup of 2022 to Qatar, which is absurd.
The owners of certain clubs are out of control; the managers twist truth and manipulate officials shamelessly; the players cheat as a matter of course.
If every foul was punished there would be nothing but free kicks and whistles. And the money, the sex scandals and the drink scandals — top footballers really do believe they can get away with anything. Yet we still watch football and continue to be enthralled by football. It seems we need the eggs.
Cricket is in the course of drastic change, driven by the prosperity of the sub-continent, the insatiable demand for one-day international cricket and the growing demand for inter-city Twenty20. More and more it becomes a game about sixes and adverts.
Flat “chief executive’s wickets” across the world make it a game in which bowlers tee it up for stars; there are problems with homeless Pakistan; there are problems with betting and the spot-fixing of matches; there are problems with money and administration. The game is flawed, racked with trouble, and yet England’s Test match against Australia in Adelaide was one of the great sporting experiences of my life.
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Rugby union in this country is run by an organisation in a state of meltdown, players intermittently try and gouge each other’s eyes out, and in “Bloodgate” they had one of the sporting scandals of the previous decade. Tomorrow night two men are boxing for four different world championships at the same time. Athletics fights the endless war against drugs. In tennis, as I (see what I mean?) write these words at Wimbledon, people complain that the game has become too samey, that the old Wimbledon of super-fast grass courts has gone and with it the buccaneering serve-volleying players.
Formula One gave us “Spygate” and “Crashgate” and is rent by feuds and schisms. Every year, the intrigue overshadows the action. Horse racing must deal constantly with issues of race-fixing and welfare. There is no sport in the calendar that is not flawed; no sport that is not deeply marred by greed, corruption, confusion, folly, maladministration and absurdity.
And yet we watch. We never try to teach sport a lesson by not watching it and not reading about it. That is partly because there is not a sport in the calendar that does not also have beauty, drama, excitement, skill, people of brilliance, people of courage, people with talents to marvel at, people with resolution to wonder at.
The splendour of sport’s action has us enthralled and we seldom look away. You can watch as much sport as a professional sportswriter does — a person such as I — and still find yourself unsated by sport’s wonders. Here at Wimbledon I have been gasping aloud at some of Andy Murray’s shot-making, just as a couple of weeks earlier I was marvelling at the run-making of Alastair Cook.
The music of sport’s action invites us to dance, its rhythms are irresistible, whether you are talking, as Slotty was, about Alberto Contador and Andy Schleck “playing cat and mouse all the way up the Tourmalet”, or Jimmy Anderson reducing Australia to three wickets for two runs; and if there are flaws in the tunes, the rhythm never fails to keep our feet moving. But if action is the essential truth of sport, it is not the only truth.
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There is also the equally irresistible force of narrative. What happens next? The question that keeps us reading the short story of a match, the novel of a season, the roman-fleuve of a career, the endless volumes created by a club and a nation and a sport. Sport is our Scheherazade, telling us story after story after story, all interlocking and each casting a strange light on every other, every tale making all the others richer and more vivid.
Question: given that sport’s many bad things are inextricable elements of every story, do they help make sport’s stories irresistible? Do we need the bad things to make the story good? The question cannot be ducked, and nor I think, can the answer. Which is yes.
We do not wish for bad things. Jack the Ripper made a good story but we do not go about hoping for more serial killers to brighten up our lives. Yet terrible things are part of the narrative of humanity, and we follow them, not with glee necessarily, but certainly with fascination.
The bad things in sport are part of the narrative of the great things in sport. If it were not for the tale of Ben Johnson, the tale of Usain Bolt would not be the same. That does not mean we long for more Johnsons, but it was Johnson that made Bolt, in Beijing and Berlin, one of the most glorious sporting tales of recent years.
There are bad things in all sports. And yet we still watch sport, we still follow sport, we still love sport. We do so in spite of the bad things; we do so because of the bad things.