Serious Play

Eighty years ago, in a fascinating study of play in human culture, the Dutch historian Johann Huizinga noted that in many ways “there is no distinction whatever between marking out a space for sacred purpose and marking it out for purposes of sheer play. The turf, the tennis-court, the chessboard, and pavement-hopscotch cannot formally be distinguished from the temple or the magic circle.” No one who has ever seen a stadium erupt after a late match-winning boundary or a penalty shootout, will doubt the religious fervour of the modern spectator, but who would have dreamt, even twenty years ago, that we would now be devotees at so many temples, or that the spectacle-driven coverage of modern sport would play such a large part in obscuring its larger meanings.

In the last thirty days, audiences all over the world watched the sacred rites of modern sport performed at the very highest levels in ice hockey, tennis, basketball, golf, football and cricket. In next two months there will be a similar embarrassment of riches, right up to the opening ceremony of what promises to be a memorable Olympics in Beijing. Along the way, few of us will stop to consider how unlikely this diet of non-stop coverage seemed not so long ago. In the age of satellite television we are used to watching miracles.

Modern technology has changed the way we watch sport, and it has often heightened our interest in isolated moments of magic. But however many times we dissect Brian Lara’s late-cut or Roger Federer’s forehand in a thousand slow-motion frames, the humbling truth remains that no amount of mechanical knowledge can lessen the beauty or mystery of these strokes when they occur in real time. We are equally familiar with the wonders of Kobe Bryant’s jump shot or Tiger Woods’s driving, but endless replays of their best efforts make their virtuosity seem unattainable too. That is a pity, for most of these athletes would be the first to say that their marvelous achievements are the fruit of countless hours of practice and coaching. Each of them has learned his craft from teammates and rivals, and honed his competitive spirit in dozens of little-known failures and defeats. In fact, what often distinguishes them is not their capacity for show-stopping play so much as their determination to succeed when facing long odds.

Force of character and willpower allows great athletes to work through dry spells and injuries, or to iron out weaknesses in their game. So does imaginative and disciplined coaching. But neither of these can be easily conveyed in images except, occasionally, when they are noticeable on the field of play. Tiger Woods, for example, once won the US Open by  a margin of twelve shots, but most commentators have said that his recent marathon victory against a low-ranked  player is probably the greatest of his fourteen major tournament victories. Why? Because Woods was still recovering from knee surgery and was forced, repeatedly, to sink long putts under pressure to stay in the tournament. Shivnarine Chanderpaul’s recent form is another case in point. After 8,000 Test match runs his success seems inevitable, but how many spectators recall that he played nineteen tests before scoring his first century?

A generation ago the background to these triumphs of the spirit was recorded at length in sports biographies and reportage. In one particularly memorable study of modern baseball, the conservative columnist George Will, chronicled the obsessive devotion to craft and round-the-clock training habits of major league greats like Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn. Far from diminishing the achievements of his subjects, Will’s portraits presented them as self-made heroes, men who had worked as hard to get where they were as any artist, politician or captain of industry. West Indies cricket has been equally well-served by the writings of C.L.R. James, Hilary Beckles, Tony Cozier and Michael Manley but few of their lessons seem to have been absorbed by a generation for whom televised sport is the norm. Today we remember the highlights and tend to overlook or forget the hard work that made them possible.

In Beyond a Boundary CLR James famously asked “What know they of cricket who only cricket know?” James, like Huizinga, believed that a cricketer could only be understood in terms of the whole society that produced him. That insight is truer today, of every sport, than it was when James was alive. For we largely miss the point of sport if we fail to grasp the human drama hidden not only in the resurgence of West Indies cricket, but in every one of the many sporting contests we watch in an average week.