Why it’s more than just a game

Simon Barnes, the brilliant writer about sport and nature, would never claim he has had much influence. No, he would say with a journalistic shrug, influence? Me? Of course not: I merely describe, amuse and draw attention to significant events. But his sportswriting, some of it for The Spectator, has been so original and insightful that he has redefined the genre. In doing so, by showing that sportswriting can reveal profound truths about human nature, he has also changed the way many of us look at sport itself.

Appropriately, his new book, The Meaning of Sport, has a dual nature. It is about journalism, what life is like as a newspaper’s chief sports writer, and it is about sport — the essence of the stuff itself. Though the book is completely new, it draws together and elaborates themes that have run through Barnes’s work for the last two decades.

The book contains portraits of some of the greatest sportsmen Barnes has watched — Redgrave, Federer, Best, Rooney and many others. But what makes these sketches unusual is that Barnes is able to isolate the one strand of their personalities which sets them apart. Barnes pinpoints the heart of the matter — such as Federer’s ability to seem so masterful that his opponents appear complicit, mere accomplices in Federer’s excellence.

Myth, Barnes explains, is central to the whole business of sport. Not myth meaning the avoidance of reality (though there is plenty of that too), but myth in the sense that sport taps into essential stories about human nature. Sport, he argues, derives from our innate need for narrative and for metaphor. Sport provides both. The magic lies in sport’s capacity continually to write new versions of the oldest tales — bravery, fear, competitiveness or acquiescence.