Albert Einstein, the most celebrated scientist of the 20th century, has been quoted as saying that understanding physics was child’s play compared to understanding child’s play. Whether there was a hint of sarcasm or not in those words is hard to say now.
But this much is sure: the world is full of fully grown men and women of more-than-average intelligence who appear to be taking adult play — call it professional sport if you wish — a little too seriously for sport’s own good.
Nirmal Shekar Fighting for its soul Using cutting edge technology, experts in the business of sport have turned the simple act of playing into something larger than life. And the result is predictable: sport is now fighting for its very soul, something that turned it into a pleasurable activity both for the players and for those watching.
A poorly played square cut is reduced to a few freeze frames and pixels plus five bullet points and we get to see 25 replays; a crosscourt forehand played from wide of the court lends itself to the sort of interpretation that scientists at NASA might find a bit complicated; a simple ‘no ball’ is analysed to such extent that men and women working in the Large Hadron Collider in CERN might worry about their own analytical skills.
Yes, it is helpful when a new piece of technology — Hawk Eye — is able to determine whether a ball was wide of the line or not on a tennis court in an important match. And yes, it is equally rewarding when you can be sure if the ball made contact with the bat edge or not before lodging itself into a slip fielder’s hands in a cricket match.
But when the technological whizzbangery gets to a point where it strips the game of all its romance and charm and turns it into some sort of lab experiment, sport, rather than becoming super-sport, dwarfs into sub-sport.
Reductionism may work perfectly in science but in the unsexy business of day to day life, as well as in the mock-serious business of sport, to reduce is not necessarily to reveal.
And the whole process of using technology, and Big Data, to explain away anything and everything in sport on television is rather tedious. While it may be foolish to expect today’s expert commentators to achieve the incisive lucidity and astounding brevity of a John Arlott, it might help to remember that very often the best of sport is best left unexplained.
The late, legendary Dan Maskell’s favourite response to a great shot at Wimbledon on BBC TV was a simple “Ooh, I say,” and it said it all because we were ourselves seeing the action.
Nadia Comaneci’s Perfect 10; a Lionel Messi goal that appears to defy the laws of physics as the great little Argentine coaxes the ball between a defender’s legs and past the goalkeeper; a Federer half-volley that flirts with the upper tip of the net before settling like a snowflake on the other side of the court…
To reduce these things to scientific explanations with the aid of technology is nothing short of wilful cruelty even in the screen-and-scream era in which we live.
Dip in appreciation levels Over-interpretation of events on the field with the help of technology actually leads to under-appreciation, as counter-intuitive as this may seem. For, any tech aided explanation robs an event/act/process of its essential mystery.
How does knowledge of the physics of a moment of Messi magic enhance the enjoyment of that spectacle?
Why is the Blue Morpho Butterfly of Central America as beautiful as it is? Why is listening to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 as transcendental an experience as it turns out to be every single time?
Or, shall we, really, shall we, attempt with the help of Big Data to reduce Shakespeare’s Hamlet into a set of six simple questions and answers as an ultra-modern form of literary criticism?
Interestingly, some time back, I was speaking to a famous television sports presenter and was beginning to probe some such question when he said, “You know, we live in the age of information, and to not analyse the information might mean we are not good at what we are doing.’’
You might be drowned in information; but only if you wish to be. As the Internet scholar Clay Shirky said, “There is no such thing as information overload. There is only filter failure.’’
And sport today clearly needs filters because it does not come to the consumer — on TV and other media at least — unmediated.
Where the absence of critical information leads to myth-making, surely the experts are always welcome to blow the scales away from our eyes.
But to turn an uncomplicated beautiful thing into a list of complex explanations rendered simple by technology in the world of sport is nothing but an attempt to turn subjective experience into purely objective reality.
And the question is, is this necessary in an area of human activity that is mostly insignificant in the larger context, although it doesn’t seem so when we follow our favourite teams or players.
