I fortuitously turned to John Lanchester’s ‘Diary: Getting into Esports’ piece in the London Review of Books (42/16, 13 August) after soaking up a bit of day four of the first test match between England and Pakistan. I’ll often have live sports on in the background with the sound down so I can feel like I’m still engaged with the ebb and flow of the game, while also doing something I can more readily define as productive. Today, a muggy Saturday morning, I’ve taken my computer outside, but still within range of the WIFI, so the cricket can silently unfold while I read. Turning directly to Lanchester’s piece was one of those little serendipities that one needs to accept without overthinking; the themes immediately resonating and the writer’s command of personal reflection, focused analysis, and wider contextualisation, invoked that acquisitive thought: ‘I wished I had written this’.
Specifically, the article is about the rise of Esports, the ecology of competitive video-gaming and its incredible popularity. This, in itself, is of little interest to me, I weaned myself off videogames in the final year of my undergraduate course at university and have never really taken it up again. I understand the pleasures of playing video games but I fail to comprehend what one gets out of watching others play. I’m happy to assume the mantle of dinosaur or Luddite (I’ll draw the line at old fogey) when it comes to Esports, and even more sanguine about letting the whole thing pass me by. The interesting aspect of the article for me was how Lanchester uses the rise of Esports to think about ‘what sport means to me and why I have spent, or wasted, so much time watching it.’ Whereas watching Esports seems to me like a colossal waste of time, I’m ready to defend watching ‘real’ sports as, for me, it touches something emotionally and intellectually vital about human ‘beingness’ in the world. I’m willing to grudgingly concede that this is a matter of personal psychology and socio-historical context, rather than an assertion ‘real’ sports are somehow objectively superior. Like Lanchester I don’t get the ‘it’ of Esports; ‘this version of the sporting ‘it’ doesn’t connect with any other memories or experiences’.
The article’s questioning of why watching sports commands so much time and symbolic value takes on a further layer of intangible meaning in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The loss of live sport has arguably triggered an almost existential crisis for those whose time, friendships, and sense of escape depends on it. Sport’s paradox as an inconsequential consequence has become more apparent in its absence. Indeed, the clear dimensions of sporting drama, seem all the more attractive in an era of chaos and uncertainty. Like Lanchester, perhaps as a kind of defence mechanism, I took to rewatching classic sporting contests and moments, a phenomenon facilitated by organisations and broadcast channels uploading past footage to Youtube. Allied to this has been an explosion of think pieces and podcasts that have fused the lack of sporting supply with the ready nostalgia for the stories and personalities of bygone eras. Dramatic games of the past, perceived historical transformations in sports history, unresolved controversies and the age-old ‘greatest of all-time’ question, have become the centre of journalistic copy and social media debate. The BBC, never shy of indulging in this retrotopia of sporting yesteryears have, for me, pushed sporting nostalgia to the limit of my tolerance with their airing of the 2012 Olympic opening Ceremony (along with highlights of the games’ best moments). I remember vividly watching this spectacle, and having any cynicism I previously had about UK’s staging of the event, thoroughly exorcized. But rewatching from the hellscape of 2020, the rebroadcasting the London games felt like Auntie engaging in a deliberate act of trolling.
Lanchester also frames his sporting obsession as something that he feels ‘slightly embarrassed to admit’. The crux for him is that sense of something that controls you, that can’t in the end be intellectualised. In that way, sports are like an addiction. It’s an anxiety I share, but why? It’s not just about the time given over to live sport, or, for example, the difficulty of truly understanding (never mind explaining) the inbuilt vagaries of something like test match cricket. It is more about an anxiety built on the need to rationalise, sport’s value. Not just on the personal level of enjoyment, but in terms of a more universal level of importance. Sports-watching is often associated with a certain kind of fandom. Support of the local or national football team, for example, offers a tribal belonging to the imagined community (to borrow Benedict Anderson’s concept). Furthermore, the sense of shared experience is often percolated in a heightened atmosphere, engendering euphoria and desolation in moments of triumph or defeat, and thus taking on quasi-religious dimensions.
I have never been a fan in that way. I’ve always reflected that in every match/game someone wins and someone loses (yes, I know, there are draws too), but the essence of sport has to go beyond mere victory or defeat. (Indeed, as an aside I remember in the documentary Manufacturing Consent Noam Chomsky deconstructing the ideological function of spectator sports when he asks himself: ‘why do I care whether or not my team wins the ball game. I don’t know anyone on the team. It doesn’t make any sense’.) I empathise with Lanchester’s perspective whose sports-watching ‘isn’t primarily social. It’s more like reading: private, solitary, concentrated’. Similarly, I seek to intellectualise sports-watching, casting myself as the informed observer of detail and appreciator of nuance. A student of the game who sees clearly, without the fan’s emotional blinkers. I’ve always been less interested in the result than in the display of genius or idiosyncrasy of circumstance that makes a sporting moment unique. Even a desire to elevate the sport to the level of sociology or art in the vein of my favourite sports book: David Foster Wallace’s String Theory. Yes, I’m fully aware of the lurking pretentiousness here. But this is a way of reconciling myself to unproductive 2 1/2 hours i spent on the sofa the other day watching Graf V Sabatini in the 1990 US Open final.
One aspect not touched upon by Lanchester is the relationship between spectatorship one’s own aspirations as a player. This element informs my continued engagement with sport and is a hangover from childhood. Mark Ruffalo’s character Paul Hatfield in the film The Kids Are All Right at one point admiringly defines his son Laser (yes Laser) as a ‘sensitive jock’, a designation is apt for my own boyhood. I was never ‘one of the lads’ but nevertheless held a place on nearly every school sports team just on ability. I preferred individual sports as the macho posturing of the locker room (changing room I should really say coming from the UK) was a place I endured rather than actively participated in. I never excelled academically at school, being far more interested in P.E. lessons and after school training, but maintained what I had to do in other subjects ostensibly just to stay out of trouble. The problem, as I see it now: I was a sporty kid who was OK at everything, but not great at anything. Easily the best tennis player at school, the one time I went for county trials I realised just how many others are in the pool of good but not outstanding. The fact that I would never have made it as a pro is something that really only becomes clear in hindsight and even then it’s difficult to get out of a ‘coulda been a contender’ fantasy. I also like to put my failure down to the fact I was working-class without the financial support to succeed in an exclusory sport like tennis.
When I moved into an academic career, sport definitely took a back seat. To the extent that I began to look down on it. This generally took the form of a kind of cynicism towards the commercial element of elite sports, particularly football. Billionaire primadonnas, diving theatrically to the floor at the slightest touch, were indicative of a moral and intellectual vacuum endemic across a bankrupt sporting milieu, was my self-righteous assessment. I continue to play sports, mainly just cycling and tennis, which have become my main mode of relaxation. Over time, I have found switching-off increasingly difficult and any forays in the realm of meditation or mindfulness have been somewhat futile. The motivation, focus and drive that I seem to still be able to draw upon while participating in sports, along with the physical effort and competition, more with the self than with any opponent, seems to reside deep in my psyche. Even now, ask me if I fantasise about being a film director, rock star, literary genius or part of a trifecta of 1990s tennis dominance rivaling Sampras and Agassi, it would still sheepishly admit it would be the latter every time.
Perhaps the lockdown hiatus has brought home just how much narratives of sport, whether doing or watching, speaks to a clear sense of ‘the real’ that has become increasingly hazy. Maybe this is not just because of the lockdown in itself, but the canceling of live sport has meant the loss of a realm where we still cling to definable rules, whether it’s the dimensions of the court, the benchmarks of time, or the binary logic winning and losing. Indeed, I don’t find it purely coincidental that there has been an explosion of serialised sports documentaries in the age of streaming. Last Chance U, The Last Dance, All or Nothing, and The Test offer a further level of storification and thus meaning-making that asserts sport as evidence of realities that we can still wrap our heads around. As I reflect on these questions, of why we give up so much time to the exiguous necessities of this so-called sporting life, and John Lanchester’s assertion that it soothes ‘a mind always in pain’, the England cricket team is closing in on unlikely victory. I’ll finish here, so I can once again immerse myself in sport’s glorious inconsequences.