What Sport Tells us About Life: Bradman's Average, Zidane's Kiss and Other Sporting Lessons, by Ed Smith
(Viking, £14.99)
Before Ed Smith can get to his chosen question—"What can sport tell us about life?"—he finds that another one rears its head: "What can sports writing tell us about sport?" Of course, much sports writing is simply reportage. It tells us what happened, who won, who lost and by how much. Smith, rightly, aims higher than this, but in doing so he recognises two problems that sports writers face. First, sports writing, like literary criticism, is an essentially parasitic activity. The quality of sporting contests, novels or poems is not dependent upon reporters or commentators. Crowds can read a game and readers can enjoy a tale without any help from the critics. Second, perhaps more damningly, what gives the critic a privileged view? Sports fans and the reading public are often informed and perceptive observers. Why should the meanings that critics find in a text or a game have more authority over those found of others—even those critics who are also professional sportspeople (Smith himself is a former England cricketer and now captain of Middlesex)?
Smith's response is threefold: serious sports writing offers the fan access to "deeper pleasures"; sport, when engaged with reflectively, offers a potent "analytical resource" for understanding the world; and, finally, sport is a remarkable stimulator of conversation and debate. What Sport Tells us about Life certainly contributes to the latter, and Smith makes a good conversationalist. Across 15 short essays that range from a counterfactual history of the 2005 Ashes to a liberal rereading of CLR James's Beyond a Boundary, and from a Freudian explanation of Michael Jordan's competitiveness to philosophical meditations on the role of chance in sport, Smith is, by turns, rhetorical, chatty, argumentative, surprised and engaged by his own and other people's arguments. As was I, for what unites these musings is not topic, nor discipline, nor sport, but a conservatism that stays just the right side of fogeyish.
Consider Smith's account of one of the paradoxes of sporting culture. On the one hand, we believe that most sports have had a golden age of performance led by unassailable sporting heroes; on the other, we believe that professional sport is played at a higher and higher level. Don Bradman's (pictured, below right, in 1946) test batting average remains unapproachable by today's best, yet cricketers are manifestly stronger, healthier, more closely coached, better fed and cared for than ever before. Smith unbundles this paradox by arguing that sports have seen a relentless erosion of greatness through the forces of meritocracy and rationalisation. No one will ever challenge Bradman because, under conditions of commercialisation and professionalisation, the weaker players in team sports get better, the quality of defensive play (which is the most susceptible to planning and incremental advances) improves, and players and coaches have access to vastly more information about their own and others' performances.
It is the same temperamental and philosophical impulse that leads conservatives to the view that while instrumental reason is a necessary evil, it is one that should be modulated by convention, tradition and solidarity. Thus Smith can celebrate the brilliance of baseball manager Billy Beane, whose Oakland A's have deployed the dark arts of statistical analysis and financial arbitrage to the baseball transfer market with great success, while deploring the club's ruthless subordination of individual careers and family lives to team needs. Beane's success has come at the expense of the human dimension of team-building, with players subject to a transfer merry-go-round.
Smith is equally concerned with another conservative peccadillo: exceptional individuals, leaders who rise to the moment, the champions who possess the virtues to excel. However, his turn from history to psychology to explain this phenomenon is unsatisfactory, because as so often this approach yields theories diametrically opposed to each other. On the one hand, Smith suggests that those with balanced upbringings are more likely to excel later. He gives the example of beauty pageant queens—who are more likely to turn into dysfunctional adults than their peers—as illustrating the curse of too much, too soon. On the other hand, he argues that unbalanced childhoods often seem to be the driving force behind adult success. Emotional compensation is required, however much money and fame an individual garners.
Like most modern conservatives, Smith is also an economic liberal, and here my conversation with his book became rather more heated. It is simply not true that football's global player pool, allied to a free labour market, has ensured such a flow of talent that the sport enjoys the highest level of competitive balance among the major sports. In baseball, nine teams have won the World Series in the last 15 years. How many have won the Premier League in that period? Four. Serie A? Five. I acknowledge the Schumpetarian creativity of entrepreneurs like Kerry Packer, but I cannot share Smith's acceptance of the status quo.
So did my sporting conversation with Ed Smith teach me anything about life? I'm not sure. His account of the role of luck in sport—it's not how much you get that matters, but when you get it—was illuminating. But I found his application of this principle to social mobility (it's a lottery: deal with it) problematic. In fact, luck and chance have less and less to do with social mobility in Britain, where the distribution of life chances seems to become ever more fixed. However, our chat certainly made me meditate on the strengths and weaknesses of philosophical conservatism; and for this surprising but fruitful train of thought, I am grateful.
