For the love of sport

We watch sports because we enjoy them. And we are grateful to those who give us the pleasure.

“Do you love sport?” It was a strange question to ask someone who has spent the last four decades following sport, writing about it, analysing it, discovering new things in it, and connecting it with life itself. I could not merely say “yes” and be done with it. Something in the tone, perhaps the expectation of an unexpected answer, told me I had to have a more involved response.

All of us begin as fans. We are vaguely aware while growing up that, strictly speaking, the athletes do not need us to complete themselves; at some point, we come to the realisation that perhaps we need the athletes to complete ourselves. There was something about watching a John Mcenroe play (in pic) or Carl Lewis breaking a record that made us proud. We didn’t articulate it thus, but we sensed these were people like us who just happened to do exceptionally well something that gave us such pleasure. And we reciprocated by being nice to those around us.

Pleasure is the bottom line (an overly defensive batter or a boringly repetitive tennis player can provide pleasure too, if that’s your temperament). We watch sport because we enjoy it. And we are grateful to those who give us the pleasure.

For most of us, it begins and ends there. Joys and ecstasies interspersed with disappointments and anticlimaxes. A career in sport can, within a few years, pack into it a lifetime of normal events, from promise and success to fame and fortune to decline and surrender (or not). A philosopher ended a book on sport with the words, “Are athletes for me, in their grace and elegance, with their violence and their unsuitedness for normal life, that ‘other half’ of myself that I have not managed to claim and become?”

It is not a thought that I have found useful. As a young boy, like other young boys, I dreamt of being an international sportsman as well as the first Olympian to win a Nobel Prize in one of the sciences and be elected the country’s Prime Minister. There’s no point in dreaming small.

Sport builds character, we are told, but then so does writing about it. A middle-order batter might have three or four players waiting to get into the team if he fails; a reporter has hundreds in the media box!

It builds character in other ways, teaching patience, understanding, compassion, neutrality, the importance of justice, the role of luck, and the ability to absorb disappointments.

But watching without participating or commenting has always been limiting. Someone said, “By watching sports, we can enjoy, in our imagination, certain lives that we have neither the time nor the talent to live.” Perhaps.

But the writing of it, the discovery of a star-in-the-making, the backing of your judgement with irrefutable logic as well as unsupported instinct—all that is just as enjoyable for those who can’t do it but can both teach and preach. And, as a bonus, our careers last longer!