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Tuesday 2 December 2008

What Sport Tells Us About Life

Always employ a slow bowler

David Crane reviews Ed Smith's book of sport & life

As every ‘sports psychologist’ is endlessly telling us, though, it is vital to focus on the ‘positives’. And in this case there are enough of those to make it good advice. Smith’s conclusions might not rock the nation, but they are not really the point. Smith knows his sport, has an eclectic — and very trans-Atlantic — range of sporting references, and his purpose is as much to provoke argument as to answer it. He does it well, too. This is the sort of book that will feed all those brawling arguments that fill half-times in pubs or wile away race-train journeys back from Sandown or Ascot. Amateurism v. Professionalism, nature v. nurture, talent v. application, players’ wages, they’re all here, and all likely to stir dissent.

Does he really think, for instance, that horses are not getting any faster? (Viz. Dancing Brave’s ‘Arc’) And does he think anyway, as Luca Cumani put it, that time is of interest to anyone outside prison? And Zidane’s ‘kiss’? ‘The madness of genius’? I don’t think so. Surely, the only surprising thing about Zidane headbutting Materazzi is that he beat it to all the tens of millions of fans across Europe who have been wanting to get him themselves for years.

A matter for argument, anyway, and if this kind of debate has as long a future as it has a past, Smith has found himself a rich seam. In 1855, a Captain Campbell, an officer in the 46th, wrote home from the Crimea about the problems of finding staff-officers who were not complete imbeciles. There was no point in asking colonels, he decided, because they would only choose their witless nephews. It was no good looking for linguists, because they would be keener on playing billiards in European cafés. ‘I think,’ Campbell concluded, ‘if I had the appointment of the whole staff, that faute de mieux, I would commence by choosing all the best slow bowlers, as I have never seen a good slow bowler who wasn’t a tolerably clever fellow . . . and perhaps, to give Scotland a chance, I would admit some golf-players and curlers’. Now there’s sport impacting on life. Forget another season at Hampshire, ‘Warney’: it’s Helmand Province for you.

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