What Sport Tells Us About Life

Contents

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Andrew Berry, Robert Travers, Mark Williams, Greg Rosenbauer, Nathan Leamon, David Davis, Graeme Gales, Leon Brittan, John Inverarity and Woody Brock for helping me with this book.

Vikram Seth, John Blundell, David Smith, Becky Quintavalle, Jonathan Smith and Beccy Francis read and commented on early drafts of the manuscript.

David Godwin’s wisdom and enthusiasm were inspiring throughout this project. Tony Lacey – a polymath about sport and culture – not only often knew a better example but also had the patience to wait until I could see it for myself.

Introduction

What kind of fan are you?

Have you paid a small fortune to be one of 76,000 watching Manchester United at Old Trafford? Or are you a loyal supporter of a tiny team, a bigger cog in an infinitely smaller wheel? Perhaps you are nervously hiding behind a tree, hoping not to convey anxiety to your already panicky son as he gets marooned on 99 in a school cricket match.

What are you doing here? Take your eyes off the pitch for a moment and look around. Glance at the rows of people, whether they are sitting on the recreation park bench or in an international stadium – some may have planned this moment as the centrepiece of their month, others may merely be distracting themselves to avoid weekend boredom. How can one activity – sport – unite such disparate strands of humanity? What on earth have they come to find?

We imagine it is straightforward: everyone sees the same match, even through different eyes. But, in truth, we all have a unique ‘take’ on sport that means we experience it in an individual way. Perspective is everything.

There is much talk in the sports world about ‘experts’ and ‘mere fans’, as though there is an inner caste of privileged insiders who really know what is going on, while the others – the laity – merely gather in the antechapel humming the better hymns. It isn’t true. Sports fans of limited knowledge but acute perceptiveness sometimes have far deeper insights about the game than people who are unhealthily obsessed.

The difference between an ‘expert’ and a ‘mere fan’ revolves around knowledge – who knows the most. But many of the characteristics which really separate sports fans have nothing to do with degrees of learning. Instead, they derive from differences in temperament. It is temperament that determines how you watch sport, what you see as you do so, which parts of your personality the stuff reaches, how deep it goes and why you come back for more.

One of sport’s wonders is the breadth of its support. I use breadth carefully, not meaning simply that lots of people like it – the popularity of sport is well known. Instead I mean the coming together of diametrically differing types of people, all glued to the same pitch or television screen. Some fans love the expectation more than the match itself. Others revel in the spectacle and the sense of theatre. To many supporters, sport is about belonging – to a team, a club or a community of fans. A different type is more detached, imagining himself as the manager or captain, looking down on the mêlée and searching for the right strategy. More common, I expect, is the fan who watches a match like a reader gripped by the narrative of a novel, simply wondering what will happen next.

But there is another huge category of fan: people who just love a bloody good argument. Sport gets them there. It makes them think, engage and argue. Sport stimulates and challenges. It provokes them. We know that playing sport is pugilistic; perhaps following sport can be as well.

Sports fans argue about anything and everything. Is too much money bad for sport? Given they’ve got all these damned statistics, why do they keep picking the wrong team? If the standard of sport is supposed to be improving, why do today’s players seem less good than yesterday’s giants? What part does luck play in top-class sport? How could anyone lose his cool in his swansong? What still motivates someone who has already won everything? Does what happened last season influence the next? How can we get out of this mess?

Unravel the ideas behind the arguments in those few sentences and you will find questions about evolution, destiny, psychology, the free market, history and many other disciplines.

That might sound daunting, but it should be liberating. Sport can be enjoyed at lots of different levels –just like music, literature or art. You don’t have to take an intellectual or analytical approach to love it. If you turn the pages of the novel simply to find out what happens next you are still getting your money’s worth. But potentially there is also a deeper level of enjoyment.

So it is with sport. I am not arguing that you should care more about sport in the conventional sense of sitting for even longer with your head in your hands while your team crashes to defeat. In many ways we already take it more than earnestly enough. But given that people already take sport so very seriously, and at such an intense level of enquiry, then we might as well draw out some of sport’s intellectual lessons and practical uses while we’re arguing about it. Sport, I think, is a huge and mostly unused analytical resource. This book tries to explore that resource.

Sport has a rich conceptual framework, if only we would open our eyes to it. If you want to prove how much luck intervenes in history, sport is the perfect place to start the enquiry. If you want to know how to change an institution, sport has great examples. Sport pits nature against nurture and lets us all watch and take sides. If you wonder about the limits of objectivity, sport raises the question of the relationship between facts and opinion. Sport invites nostalgia about a mythic golden age, then mocks it by holding up a stopwatch that shows ever-improving world-record times.

We see what we want to see when we watch sport. The angry fan finds tribal belonging; the pessimist sees steady decline and fall; the optimist hails progress in each innovation; the sympathetic soul feels every blow and disappointment; the rationalist wonders how the haze of illogical thinking endures.

From the players and the fans to the institutions and the record books, sport is full of statistics, prejudices, perspectives and historical changes – the unavoidable stuff of life. Most of these chapters start with a simple question about one sporting issue, and then expand and connect it to the outside world. Sport is a condensed version of life – only it matters less and comes up with better statistics. Consequently, in this book, I place sport in the widest possible context in order to learn more about the game of real life.

More importantly, I hope this book may spark many new arguments, provoke disagreement from many quarters, and perhaps even resolve the odd existing row.

1. Why there will never be another Bradman

Sport appeals equally to two apparently contradictory world-views. First, the notion of a golden age of true heroes from which we have gradually declined. Second, the evolutionary view of human progress that sees sport as perpetually improving. Which is right? Or is there some way that both theories can be true?

To begin with, we should at least try to be objective and look at sports that are easily and precisely measured, like athletics. Where scientific tools are available to us, do they show sport to be getting better?

Until Roger Bannister managed it in 1954, many thought that running a mile in under four minutes was impossible. As one contemporary writer explained, the figure ‘seemed so perfectly round – four laps, four quarter miles, four-point-o-o minutes – that it seemed God had established it as man’s limit’. One of the most revered athletics coaches, Brutus Hamilton, agreed. He published ‘The Ultimate of Human Effort’, which stated that the quickest mile ever possible was 4:01.6. Anything faster than that was beyond human capacity. Some even thought that running that fast was dangerous, perhaps lethal. ‘How did he know he would not die?’ a Frenchman asked about Bannister afterwards.

The point isn’t that Bannister famously broke the four-minute ‘barrier’ on the Iffley Road track in Oxford on 6 May 1954. These days, four minutes isn’t even a landmark, let alone a barrier. The current record, 3:43.13 – held by Hicham El Guerrouj – is more than 7 per cent faster than Bannister’s speed. The four-minute mile was not a God-given barrier at all, just another step in human evolution. Marathon running makes the point even more starkly. In 1896 it took the Olympic gold medallist just under three hours. Now the best marathon runners hover around the two-hour mark.

There are all sorts of reasons for the sharp increase in human athletic evolution. First, modern training is far more scientific and advanced. Secondly, the professionalization of sport means that athletes can devote their entire lives to improvement. (Bannister, on the other hand, squeezed his training into hour-long lunchtime breaks from his medical studies. He couldn’t even take the day off after breaking the four-minute mile – and turned up as normal to St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington.) Thirdly, nutritionists fine-tune athletes’ diets to make sure they will be in perfect physical condition come race day.

Tactics and techniques have also advanced, sometimes, quite literally, in huge jumps. In the case of the Fosbury flop, one jump changed everything. Before 1968, high-jumpers took off from their inside foot and swung their outside foot up and over the bar. But at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, an American, Dick Fosbury, raced up to the bar at great speed and took off from his right (outside) foot. Then he twisted his body, going over the bar head first, but with his back facing down. The world’s coaches shook their heads in disbelief. Fosbury jumped 2.24 metres and won gold. By 1980, thirteen of the sixteen Olympic finalists were using the Fosbury flop. The world record – by Fosbury flop, of course – now stands at 2.45 metres.

A similar innovation was made in the shot-put by Parry O’Brien, who –just two days after Bannister broke the four-minute mile – became the first man to put the shot more than sixty feet, a barrier thought to be almost as unbreakable. Where putters had previously rocked back and forth, then hopped across the shot-put circle to their throw, O’Brien turned his back to the landing area, then spun 180 degrees, gliding across the circle before releasing. It worked. He set his first world record in 1953, and went on to break it sixteen times.

Deeper longer-term demographic trends have also helped records tumble. Most sportsmen are naturally bigger and stronger than their ancestors, even before stepping onto a training field. A twelve-year-old child in 1990 (who was in what the World Health Organization calls ‘average economic circumstances’) was about nine inches taller than his 1900 counterpart. Improved diet and health have made us grow bigger and grow up earlier. More obviously, worldwide population has exploded, so the talent pool of potential record-breakers has increased hugely. You are far more likely to find someone who can run a four-minute mile in a sample of several million perfectly healthy people than in a sample, say, of only 10,000.

So, if health care becomes increasingly available around the world; and diet continues to improve; and training techniques become more scientific – then surely sporting aptitude will continue to evolve indefinitely? In which case, won’t each generation of athletes be fully justified in looking back on the last bunch of weaklings and laughing at them?

No. There are some barriers that simply cannot be broken. ‘We will never run a mile at the same speed at which we now run 100 metres,’ as the Harvard evolutionary geneticist Andrew Berry has explained. ‘The laws of oxygen exchange will not permit it.’

Racehorses seem already to have reached that physical limit. Like human athletes, for years their speed records steadily improved. From 1850 to 1930, the winning times for the Derby dropped from 2:55 to 2:39. But then horses simply stopped getting faster. From 1986 to 1996, the average time stayed at 2:39. Racehorses, unlike humans (so far as I know), are specifically bred to run. The stud industry seeks to preserve the best genes and match them with perfect partners. So generations of professional genetic selection have ensured that today’s elite racehorse has every conceivable speed characteristic. But you can only go so far. You can only breed horses with ultralight thin bones to a particular point; the bones will crack under stress if they get any lighter.

The same principles will one day apply to humans. ‘Human improvement,’ Berry concluded, ‘must eventually bow to the basic constraints of biomechanics.’ There is indeed an outer-wall of human endeavour. It is just that no one knows where it is. But we do know it isn’t the four-minute mile. Evolution has a good way to run yet.

There is an obvious difficulty in applying this scientific method of measurement to other sports. Cricket, for example, is a predominantly skill game – it pits bat against ball, and neither against a constant clock. There is also the Bradman problem: cricket’s towering achiever played from 1928 to 1948, and in half a century of professional cricket – for all the new training, better diets and vast talent pool – no one has got anywhere near him. How’s that for human evolution?

In fact, the Bradman problem is not unique to cricket. Being outstanding seems to be getting harder. In baseball, the holy grail for batters is to average over .400. No one has actually done that since Ted Williams in 1941 – but if you look at the fifty years before then, eight players managed even better and hit .410. The same is true for cricket. According to the Wisden Book of Test Cricket, twelve English batsmen born before the First World War had an average of above 50; an achievement matched by only three players born after it.

This is the central paradox of sporting progress. If the standard of sport is generally improving, why do the greats of the past stand out more? Three reasons: better defence, more information and a higher base level of achievement.

The first thing a coach can do in any sport is to provide a defensive structure. Attack and flair, which rely more on instinct, are harder to systematize. But defence is more a question of alignment and tactics – which means that even quite a small degree of thinking and planning can make a big difference.

I notice this during practice routines on match days and on training days. About ninety minutes before play starts, many professional cricket teams split into two groups and play a game of touch-rugby as a physical warm-up. Obviously, if you end up with too many of the natural athletes on one team, that side is going to win. But given two roughly balanced teams, if one of them takes defence at all seriously – tracks back, lines up properly, counts opposing players – it can easily make scoring very difficult for the opposition. (My own role in this defensive machine, as my team-mates at Middlesex will attest, is not always as central as it might be.) Usually, no one can be bothered to do much more than enjoy a bit of competitiveness and self-expression, and one side wins by default. But a defensive stalemate is quite easily achieved when both sides take defence seriously.

The organization–defence principle applies equally in other sports. An American friend once persuaded me to play football in a casual round-robin competition one Sunday in New York’s Central Park. (He made the mistake of thinking that as I was a cricketer I must have some footballing skill too.) I was hopeless, the team of Brazilians were brilliant, and our team spent most of the day watching from the sidelines. It was immediately obvious that although no amount of coaching or tactics would ever reverse the result – the Brazilians would always be the best, our team would always be one of the weaker sides – some more organization and coaching would reduce the margin of defeat. A really thorough defensive plan might help us to lose merely 2–0 or 1–o instead of 4–0. (Why anyone would bother to even think about losing ‘better’ on a sunny Sunday in the park is a very good question.)

But the broader point applies to spheres which do matter. Defensive errors in all sports are often the result of bad planning and organization. Improve the ‘systems’ for every team in any given league and the result is not more goals, but fewer goals: defences are harder to break down and teams bunch up in terms of scoring. The good teams, in other words, stand out less obviously.

Secondly, professional sports teams now have much better information about the opposition. Access to television footage, newspapers, books and the internet all means that you can analyse future opponents in huge detail. Steve Waugh used to say that reading autobiographies was a great way to discover revealing weaknesses in current opposing players. In general, more is known about everyone in modern professional sport than ever before – and, as a result, more strategies are devised to counteract exceptional players.

Again, the easiest application of all that information is defensive. The Bodyline theory was infamously devised to stop Bradman. Bodyline may have been extreme and unusually unsporting, but it was philosophically ahead of its time. These days, devising strategies to limit opposing star players is commonplace – bowling well wide of Tendulkar’s off-stump, for example. More to the point, having endless footage of opposing players on tape removes an element of subjectivity from strategic planning. It is simply a fact where next week’s opposing opener scores his runs – a Sky Sports wagon-wheel, the graphic which demonstrates each batsman’s scoring distribution, proves the point.

Thirdly, the less good players in professional sport are a lot better than they used to be. The scientist, polymath and baseball nut Stephen Jay Gould did a study of the history of baseball averages. He found that as the game improved, the lowest averages crept up. An average that once made you a struggling but employed baseball player, now leaves you out of a job. And yet the overall batting average has remained reasonably constant. In fact, there is exact symmetry – as the worst have got better, the best have stood out less. As we have already seen, no one hits .400 any more.

Gould explained all this as a perfect scientific example of ‘declining variation’ – the bunching of elite sportsmen as the professional league improves overall. In an article for Vanity Fair, Gould measured this decline in variation throughout the history of major league baseball. He simply took the five highest and five lowest averages in each season and compared them to the league average. He discovered that ‘the differences between both average and highest and between average and lowest have decreased steadily through the years.’

Gould’s proper science provides the maths to back up my unproven park-soccer intuition. He was surely right in his conclusion that ‘Systems equilibriate as they improve.’ He argued, therefore, that ‘the extinction of .400 hitting is, paradoxically, a mark of increasingly better play.’

Later, unhappy with the coarseness of his statistical sample, he nailed his case about the declining variety of batting averages even more firmly. Gould explained his method as follows:

Well, exactly – I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Answer– ‘Our hypothesis is clearly confirmed. Standard deviations have been dropping steadily and irreversibly.’ In layman’s terms: as play improves overall, the gap between best and worst narrows.

In a cricketing context, Gould’s argument provides a scientific explanation of why there will never be another Bradman, even – in fact, especially – if the standard of general play does constantly improve. The sophistication of the modern game works against freakish solo domination. In skill-centred sports rather than purely physical sports, some records really are unbreakable.

The case of Bradman, in fact, proves Gould’s point better than any baseball player could. Bradman was better at cricket than anyone has ever been at any other measurable sport. His feats are more remarkable, the second-best player is further adrift, the chasing pack trails by a greater margin. When Bradman died in February 2001, the New York Times mathematically converted his cricket average into other sporting measures – basketball points per game, baseball hits per inning. Bradman, they concluded, was better than Michael Jordan or Babe Ruth or Ty Cobb.

A group of cricket statisticians, following Gould’s methods, undertook an analysis of all Test batsmen between 1877 and 1997. By plotting the coefficient of variation of batting averages across eras, they showed that variability had decreased over time. For a current player to be relatively as ‘good’ as Bradman – factoring in the greater ‘bunching’ of today’s great players – you would need to average about 77. No one is yet out of the high 50s. Bradman remains the greatest of the giants of sport’s golden age.

When I was five and he was seventy-three, I met Sir Donald Bradman in Adelaide. It was the Smiths’ first big family holiday, and in South Australia we stayed with friends who lived two doors along from the great man. I was already crazy about cricket, and our friends kindly arranged for us all to have tea with the Don and for me to have a net session in the back garden.

So, I was to bat in front of the Don. It was the ultimate dream come true for a cricket-mad kid. I was old enough to be thrilled, but young enough (thankfully) not to be burdened by understanding quite how astonishingly lucky I was. I spent most days hitting cricket balls anyway – I would hang a ball in a sock and tie it from a tree like a pendulum so I could hit as many balls as I liked. The scheduled net session just promised a better audience.

The big day arrived – a warm, sunny afternoon in the Australian winter. I remember meeting a shrewd-looking old man who seemed to have a sharp, analytical expression. A few balls were thrown for me to hit into a net. He watched and didn’t say much. More balls were thrown. I hit some okay with my beloved size 3 Stuart Surridge cricket bat.

‘For God’s sake, stop throwing him half-volleys – make it a bit harder for the lad!’ he exclaimed. The Don had spoken and everyone laughed.

I didn’t realize then, of course, what writing this has helped me understand now. I had been privileged to meet not only a genius – there will always be geniuses – but a genius from an age when they stood taller above their contemporaries. The sporting world was smaller in Bradman’s time, so its giants loomed larger. No one stood higher than him.

There truly was a time when great men were greater – but human progress means those days will never come back. There really will never be another Bradman.

2. The age of the amateur has passed. Worse luck

Beware false dualities: classical and romantic, real and ideal, reason and instinct… Dualities which are defined at the same moment (stoic and epicurean, Whig and Tory) become united by the historical process, and end by having more, not less, in common… Ideas which have for long divided individuals will become meaningless in the light of the forces that will separate groups.

The river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainland

– Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave

One generation’s favourite idea is despised by the next as old-fashioned rubbish. That is what has happened to amateurism.

At its peak, the character-building philosophy of amateurism defined British attitudes to sport. A century ago ‘amateur’ was a compliment to someone who played sport simply for the love of it – it is derived, after all, from the Latin for ‘to love’. The word professional, on the other hand, scarcely existed as a noun.

How the wheel has turned. In fact, the words have almost completely swapped meanings. ‘Professional’ now has a definition so broad that almost anyone who has held down a job for a few months can call himself a ‘true professional’. And amateurism has become a byword for sloppiness, disorganization and ineptitude.

‘The amateur, formerly the symbol of fair play and a stout heart,’ as the literary critic D. J. Taylor put it, ‘became the watchword for terminal second-rateness and lower-rung incompetence.’ Have we thrown out the baby with the bathwater?

There is no doubt that the survival of amateur rhetoric so far into the twentieth century was a bizarre anachronism, even by British standards. When Fred Titmus made his debut for Middlesex in 1949, his progress to the wicket was accompanied by a loudspeaker announcement correcting an error on the score-card: ‘F. J. Titmus should, of course, read Titmus, F. J.’ A gentleman was allowed his initials before the surname; a professional’s came after. People felt these things mattered.

There are countless stories about grand but hopeless amateurs insisting that far more talented pros called them ‘Mr’ – even on the field of play. Right up until the 1970s, any MCC member – even one who could scarcely hold a bat let alone play first-class cricket – had the right to demand that the MCC young professionals bowled at him in the Lord’s nets.

Clearly the amateur ideal – in its snobbery, exclusivity and sometimes plain silliness – assisted in its own demise. But now professionalism has had a good crack of the whip, perhaps it is time we drew stock about where that idea has taken us. And as we wave amateurism goodbye, could there be anything in its wreckage that might be worth salvaging?

First of all, we might consider whether amateurism allowed for a broad church of personalities, and encouraged an instinctiveness and individuality that is well suited to producing success in sport. Secondly, perhaps amateurism left people alone more – and it might be that great players respond well to being left alone.