Myopia
It is a minor regulation of human nature that if a man retains any interest at all in sport at age thirty, his interest will grow only deeper and perhaps more desperate as he gets older. For some, the passion flows thickly early on in childhood and never tapers. One is thinking of those men who, if they have not got tickets to the game itself, organize to gather around the television on a Saturday, or to go to a bar, with friends, on Sunday afternoons; who can carry a bright green or mauve or orange polyester oversize jersey on their backs lightly enough; who during the week visit internet message boards or Facebook to expatiate on players and techniques among friends and strangers alike.
For another set of fans, the interest in sport is only germinal through adolescence. It is likely that this faction is filled with those who were as boys quite useless and uncomfortable in their shorts and white socks: shivering, hardly running, loathing the shower and changing room rituals, resenting the jocular, acerbic man who got to wear tracksuit pants in February and order them around, even afraid of sports like cricket or baseball that involved the smaller, harder, faster orbicular objects – although things had always played out quite differently in their imaginations. As they grew up, and as sport became less mandatory, less participatory, less of a physical activity and more a sedentary leisure of watching, so it began to take root in their lives. The difference is, for this type of person, by now thirty or forty, it often exists as a wholly private enthusiasm, an hermetic ardor, like voyeurism or gardening. Not for him are the beery mass crowd-events of the arena or the sports bar. He watches at home, on television or the internet, preferably alone.
The first boy comes to know physical domination, or at least bonding and teamwork, on the field. As he gets older, richer, busier, lazier, or fatter, he enjoys more the off-the-field solidarity, the vicarious physical conquest and feelings of nostalgia that watching sport imports. For the other boy, though, sport has evolved into a subject of knowledge and memorization, of research and statistical analysis, of connoisseurship, even of interpretation. As a measured and recorded event, it enters at last his own domain of capability. It could be seen as a surpassing of his own body, this empowerment, but if not that, then at least some form of redress for the myopia, the goose pimples, the butter fingers, the jelly legs, and the lily liver, all the palestral embarrassment that for years he has suffered of himself.
Suspense
Beneath the external distinguishing characteristics – mechanical, geometric, aesthetic – of a given sport, there is a peculiar architecture of suspense that specifies the experience of watching it. The rules of a sport act as an internal valve that constricts to build suspense, and opens to relieve it. The tension itself derives from the general condition of opposed strengths, or to put it another way, from not knowing who will win. But how great the ebb and flow of the tension, and when it releases: there are many different ways of not knowing.
In the aggregation-type sports, points are accrued until an agreed terminus is reached, either in time or in total number. These points can be won consecutively in a fixed sequence of a limited number of possessions or opportunities (baseball, cricket); or consecutively in a fixed sequence of indeterminate number (football, rugby league); or in less fixed sequence (basketball, rugby union); or at any time, without any fixed sequence (soccer, hockey). And there are the literal first-past-the-post-type of sports, i.e. any kind of racing.
Tennis and its relatives, like ping pong and volleyball, present a queer combination of the two types: an accumulation of points in no fixed sequence in order to pass a nested series of posts (game, set, match) first. The result of this combination is that, for tennis watchers, the result of every contest, as a function of its rules, is always substantially in doubt until the final ball has been played, unlike any of the sports mentioned above. Tennis shares this quality with apical-type contests like the various lifting, throwing, and jumping disciplines. But each orchestrates the release of tension in its own way.
A singularity in all of sport is the nature of the suspense in boxing, whose sober points system exists in parallel with a constant and overriding sudden-death regime: an abrupt, irrational tour de force overturning the rational calculus, a brutal coup that comes from somewhere arguably outside the realm of sports entirely. A spray of blood, a collapse of muscle and bone onto canvas, wild roaring.
Empiricism
The rise of the purely statistical reporting of sport, and its reclusive experts, is evidence that what is irreducible in sport is what is empirical, and not aesthetic or cultural as some would have it – that it is fundamentally a set of phenomena to be measured and compared rather than a sensuous object or performance one beholds. It is for the same reason that the pleasure in watching a match accrues principally from the pulsing of tension, while the appreciation of the moments of sublime physical grace and skill or fluid and instinctive teamwork is, strictly speaking, only auxiliary. Another way of seeing this is to consider the existence of systematic odds-making and betting on sports.
It is possible for people to enjoy a sporting event just by following the graphical or verbal description of its completed actions, or their quantification, without ever viewing the physical movements and embodied decision-making that vivified them, though one presumes they would enjoy it more if they did. Amongst other effects, radio stations and fantasy sports leagues profit from this. Others can become enflamed by games or entire leagues in which the standard of play, as a spectacle, is very low, as long as both sides in the fight have a decent chance of winning. Neither is cultural specificity an insuperable barrier to understanding and enjoying a sport, as it is for some art forms: uneducated, I can grasp what is intrinsic in sumo wrestling or kabbadi but never in Chinese opera, not even minimally. The aesthetic and cultural lineaments of a sport can be removed and what remains is still sport. But the same cannot be said of the rules, the measurements, and the scoring, all that structures the play of probabilities, the facticity at the heart of sport.
The resort to optical technologies to determine the outcome of close calls in various sports confirms the priority of the empirical. Whenever there is a disputed refereeing decision during play, or a player appears to have broken the rules, the controversy never concerns how attractive was the coordination of eye and hand during the offense. It is inevitably about the thickness of lines, inches, relative positions and times. Likewise, an allegation of cheating beforehand – an athlete taking performance-enhancing drugs, for instance, or someone bribing the match official – is always at root a complaint that the balance of strengths has not been properly disclosed to the viewer, retrospectively ruining the pleasurable suspense of the contest and casting suspicion on other contests. It is an issue with the experimental conditions.
The essence of sport is early modern in this respect. For people involved in an indeterminate and multiform culture, who spend most of their working lives looking at art or making it, reading about this or that media success, or wondering about so and so’s family connections, it is a welcome interval. One team is categorically better than the other. Frauds are ruthlessly found out. The best, most talented player is always given the most money.
Final Form
In the U.S., you read about your local franchise in the Sports section. In Britain and the Commonwealth, the back page of the daily newspaper is usually titled Sport. There may be something more than inane morphological difference here (though I also notice that while in Britain you say maths, in the U.S. you say math).
Sports, plural, would imply a panoply of different contests connected by some vague criteria, such as: it must be physical, it must be a competition with rules, it must be contested by human beings. And there are many “sports,” such as fishing, car racing, dog racing, and poker that seem to bend or break these fuzzy rules and demand a separate term. In any event, Sports connotes a kind of plenty, a multiplicity of athletic achievement, a democracy of effort, abundant choice in entertainment and good cheer. Sport, on the other hand, seems however diffusely to gesture towards an ideal, probably a classical Greek one, of peacetime physical competition between people – sport in itself – that transcends even the winning and the losing. In this sense, every striving in every match in every sport is pointed towards an unreachable perfection, a single, abstract, and final form. There is a slight analogy here to the relation of the term art to the arts, the latter term, of course, comprising things like macramé, kazoos, and tap dancing.