You Could Not Make It Up!
Sport is improv for people who don’t trust their imagination.
Now look, I didn’t breathe when I was born and apparently this caused, the term brain damage is too severe, but according to a psychiatrist I saw when I was 10, it caused my brain to switch dominance. I have no idea how feasible this diagnosis is but it works as an origin story for my lifelong total fucking uselessness at all sport. Brain and body buttoned up badly, I was the last picked, the first to fail. In the endless playground football of childhood I was regularly demoted from player to goal post, until I found my niche as commentator - running clumsily along the touchline shouting pointlessly into my fist. A role I still fill to this day.
The nature of competitive sports, and children, and children playing competitive sports, means that early spectacular inability draws a line in the sand you never cross. I watch sport, I love sport, I understand the off-side rule and the concept if not the maths of the Duckworth Lewis Method, but I will never fully be of sport. It is a foreign country, I can visit, I can learn the language, but it is not my home. Whatever else I am, I am not a sportsman.
So I approach this argument with the same trepidation I would of saying, I don’t know, American society is descending into a waking nightmare because a culture built around the concept of a dream inherently encourages its participants to deny reality. As an outsider to that culture I would pause before sharing that thought, because I don’t actually want to offend anyone. Equally I want you to know that I pause before suggesting that sport is just a drama club for the flat-thoughted.
Travelling the tube I keep seeing posters selling horse racing as “drama you couldn’t invent”. It’s a line rarely out of the mouths of those who made a professional career from my childhood pastime. A woman steps up to kick a ball and the commentator caws “you could not make it up!!” proud that this unfolding spectacle must be superior to fiction, as if the rules of sport were the rules of physics. Sport relies on physics but it is not the same thing. That every action has an equal and opposite reaction was as true for dinosaurs, creatures whose lives were untroubled by the double fault law. Newton didn’t discover leg before wicket or fix the distance of the penalty spot. The second law of thermodynamics is not that you can’t pass forwards.
Sport has been made up. The laws that codify any sport continually evolve and they do so with one aim in mind - to increase the drama. That’s ok. Kicking a ball from one end of a pitch to another stops being that thrilling, so add a goal, then make someone stand in front of it, then say they’re the only one who can hold the ball with their hands, ok that’s unfair, that’s starting to get interesting. I’m not trying to detract from the amazing feats of athletes, rather pointing out how misplaced the surprise is when what they do is dramatic and exciting. If Harry Kane taking a penalty wasn’t dramatic no one would ask him to do it. That the outcome of a five day test match can hang entirely on the last three deliveries is not an impossible coincidence but a sign of how good the rules of the game are at sculpting a story.
Of course there is a compelling power in the way these stories are written in front of our eyes. Outside of bribery and drug taking, no one gets to workshop different outcomes across multiple drafts of a major sporting event. Sport isn’t Hamlet, it’s constructed reality, it’s improv, the audience amazed that anything even vaguely interesting is happening at all, becoming utterly exhilarated when events rise to the status of actual entertainment.
Story isn’t just what the audience go to see. For the most skilled artists and performers, story is also the biggest obstacle. What is the real challenge facing an Englishman taking a penalty kick? The keeper? Their own skill at getting the ball in the net? Or the fact of being an Englishman taking a penalty kick? At the highest level the physical action is always lost beneath the drama and only those who can quieten that story will successfully complete the action.
There is a theory of the self that plays Copernicus to consciousness. The “I” that we imagine is in charge actually exists only to post-rationalise actions it had no control over. “You” never make a choice, “you” just can’t admit this to “yourself”. In this view we are all hapless junior ministers defending the actions of a mysterious PM we’ve barely even met. Something like this powers Raoul Martinez’s book Creating Freedom, which argues for greater empathy in society. He uses the lack of free will to argue for clemency towards criminals who are, in some sense, the innocent victims of their own inchoate actions.
I am quite happy to abandon the sense of my self as the governing force of my actions, except for those moments that clarify Descartes. “I think therefore I am” sounds like “I’m a smart bastard, so I must exist” but really only points out how thoughts intrude into the process of living. I don’t write well when I am aware of myself writing. When Bukayo Saka steps up to kick a penalty, some part of his being is aware of the story his action is about to fit into. Like a writer trying to write a perfect scene on a deadline. Like an actor whose emotions suddenly all feel unnatural. The part of you that is aware of the story, the part we often wish we could silence, sadly that part exists.
Which I guess is why René Descartes never took a succesful penalty for France.
Unpicking the narratives that give sport its purpose, this is a provocative piece by Jen Offord in the Guardian arguing that actually perhaps we should treat women’s football as different from men’s.
It would also be remiss of me not to remind you that my screenwriting course returns to London (and zoom) this September. “The best investment I’ve made in writing my screenplay” according to one of my previous students. For full information click here.