Up With People

Rejected title 1: Stop me if you think you've heard this one before

Rejected title 2: Jaysus, it's been what, nearly a week now? Let it go, man



Were I at all consistent, of course, I would right now be curled up on my bed, sobbing self-pitifully about the passing of yet another cataclysmic sporting event. I should be cursing the gods for denying me (not 'us', mark you - 'me') just another little taste of their private stash of 'for special occasions only' ambrosia. I should be writing very bad poetry. The Shins should be playing in my headphones. Sure, I'd come to terms with it, for one must. But predisposed to the nauseating shudder of sports-induced melancholy as I sometimes am, I would need to ease myself back into tepid normality.

This is different, though. That tennis match has left me like a python who's swallowed an entire gazelle in one go. There's no feeling sorry for oneself when one has had the privilege of seeing that. There came a point during it when you just surrendered yourself to its will and allowed it to take you wherever it damn well pleased. I looked forward to it for weeks before it appeared on the Order of Play, confident (though secretly with held breath) of its inexorability. I had dreams of being awed by its splendour, only for it mock me for my lack of ambition. I am a happy fool.

So I write this not with the laptop tilted at a near-90-degree angle, propped against the pillow. This is not a lament for a briefly intense but now extinguished romance. This is a celebration, a meagre offering of appreciation, a gurgle of contentment. You're still getting the bad poetry, though. And I'm listening to the Shins anyway.

Actually, no: let's change the soundtrack to something more suitable:



That's more like it.

Let us pray.


Yeah, there comes a booming sound...

I'm currently reading Simon Barnes' The Meaning Of Sport. Well, skimming, really - partly because the book's division into 158 numbered sections invites it, and partly because I'm trying to read about ten books at once, thus giving due attention to none. In any case, there's one piece that struck me as I read it today: it's a quote from Paul Westphal, former coach of the Phoenix Suns, following an NBA finals demolition at the hands of the Chicago Bulls and You Know Who Scored 55 Points in 1993. Of Jordan, Westphal said (this is in section 82 if you're following, folks) "He inflicted his will on us".

It used to come from underground, uh-huh...

Barnes expands: "not just a matter of physical ability. It was his ability to seize an occasion and to do what he wanted with it that was so perfectly devastating". It is, if I may be so bold, Simon, that and more.

Now it emanates from a kind of welfare state of the soul (yeah baby, of the soul)...

Sport is about the body like Hendrix was about the plectrum. It's one percent perspiration and ninety-nine percent inspiration. An athlete's physical gifts are but a lot of dumb gristle without the brain to put them to use. In the long term, it is the mind which drives one to utilise these finely-crafted tools and hew the body, slowly, into a glorious living sculpture. In every case, of course, the body eventually screams in ultimate protest to the mind: sometimes after it's been gainfully and plentifully employed, sometimes with cruel prematurity. Either way, it would have nothing to protest about had it not been paced and cajoled and coerced by its owner. Talent is inert unless instructed otherwise.

Not that sweet, sweet soul / Let's be certain of the deliberate monologue...

In the immediate term, in the irreversible moment, in the theatre or arena or battlefield or whatever it is, the mind is what matters. Especially at the most rarefied level, it is a contest of wits. One mind is trying to peer through the keyhole of the other, to see what's going on behind the locked door - to perhaps see some kind of pattern which might reveal to it what the other mind will do before it itself knows. At the same time, it is steadfastly guarding itself from prying eyes, keeping watch in case its own secrets leak out. In this exalted world, technique and physicality become mere analogues of the will.

As sure as if it will fall across you, unto you...

And by some quirk of nature, the visible manifestation of this encounter happens to be wonderfully pleasant to watch. In justifying our love of sport, we may invoke the greatest practitioners and the most beautiful shapes they make, but the same pleasure can come watching a pair of Wimbledon-watching enthusiasts play on a tennis court streaked with the long shadows of a late June evening, or an under-10s football match on a muddy winter's morning.

Will most certainly leave the doing, the doing undone - come on undone, come on undone...

What was beautiful about Sunday was that two great minds, two human minds, each forced the other to go places minds rarely go. Federer has played better matches before, but sometimes it seemed not so much like pushing through an open door as the door disintegrating by his mere presence in the room. Why this could almost be considered his greatest victory is that he met an equal (I'm not claiming that Nadal is absolutely equal to Federer per se, just that he was at least that in this case) who raised the stakes to ridiculous levels - and not only matched them, but himself raised them in counter-attack. Nadal would do likewise, and Federer would again respond in kind. Just as one man thought he might have the whole thing figured out, he would quickly be rebuked for his impudence. They achieved the feat (if you exclude the first two sets) of always being one step ahead of each other.

(Of course, you can substitute Nadal's name for Federer's in much of the previous paragraph.)

We are doing and we are screwing up our lives today, up our lives today...

If you are apt to think from time to time about why exactly you devote much of your time to watching and pondering on sport, you will at least once have an out-of-body experience and look down at yourself and wonder what the hell you're at. It probably won't happen in the throes of a great match; it's more likely to be during a god-awful one, say, or maybe while writing an overwrought blog post. To a non-dogmatic mind, it cannot be called unreasonable.

It's this we've chanted; it's this we've planted:...

Sport is played by humans, possessed of the same matter as you or me. One feels squeamish about using the word 'hero' to describe a great athlete: they don't save lives or make them materially better. Some people, I'm told, manage to go their whole lives without being bothered about the presence of these athletes in the world. Anyway, you're supposed to grow out of believing that an Anders Limpar poster in Shoot magazine is a representation of heroism. No, sportspeople are people too. They do their job in a heightened state, routinely pushing their minds to levels we ordinary Joes rarely experience in our workaday lives. The ways this is physically represented - bashing a ball back and forth across a net, kicking a synthetic bladder around a field - may appear trivial when looked on from a certain angle. But I don't believe they are - as we've touched upon already, there is no shame to be had in being moved by the dance, or swept up by the improvised drama it often provides. And underneath the show-stopping superficies, there are ordinary human minds thinking extraordinary human things. It may be that these things are bad qualities, and this we must accept as part of our lot. When they are good qualities, we can claim a stake in them too: these athletes' greatness is an embodiment of what we as a species can do, what one as an individual can, maybe, just maybe, do. We're not just observers of the game - we're playing it, too.

Come on, progeny...Come on, progeny...Come on, progeny...Come on, progeny...

Simon Barnes has also talked about how society has "come out of the closet" with our attitude to sport in the last couple of centuries; we are at last open about the value of the sporting instinct (which, by the way, Barnes believes is mammalian, not just human). I count myself lucky to be around in such an age. Perhaps it is rather safe and de-humanising to experience all this vicariously through others more willing than you, be they real flesh-and-bone people in front of you or what are essentially characters in a television programme. Perhaps. I'm also thankful that I live in a part of the world where going to such extremes is an option and not a necessity. I'm thankful to be part of a species that can create such conditions, when it really puts its mind to it. And I'm thankful, in my passive-consumerist, too-comfortable-in-my-ass-groove way, for those who excel and let us see them do so.

Doo-doo doot-doot-doot-dooo doo-oo-ooooo....

(Next time on Sport Is A TV Show: All-time top 10 John Terry dick jokes!)

Photo by Kevin In Canada