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What sport tells us about life
This extract is taken from a book by writer and former cricketer Ed Smith, in which he investigates
the sociology and psychology of sport.
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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 your 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 know what is going on. 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 melee and searching for the right strategy. More common, I
expect, is the fan who watches the 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.
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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 improving, why do today's players seem less good than yesterday's giants?
What part does luck play in top-class sport?
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 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.
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 our 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 prejudices,
perspectives and historical changes the unavoidable stuff of life. Sport is a condensed version of
life only it matters less and comes up with better statistics.
Adapted from What Sport Tells Us About Life, by Ed Smith.