“KOKKINAKIS BANGED YOUR girlfriend. Sorry to tell you that mate.” Thus spoke the Australian tennis player Nick Kyrgios to his opponent Stan Wawrinka during a Masters match in Montreal in 2015. Kyrgios was referring to his Davis Cup teammate Thanasi Kokkinakis, who had partnered Wawrinka’s girlfriend, the young Croatian star Donna Vekić, in the mixed doubles in the Australian Open the year before. Kyrgios was one set down at the time, but after this remark Wawrinka not surprisingly lost concentration, dropped the second set, and then retired with a “back problem” at 0–4 in the third.
Is it always unacceptable for athletes to try to unsettle their opponents mentally? Not necessarily. Conduct like Kyrgios’s clearly breaks the boundaries of the tolerable. It would be bad behaviour in a bar, let alone on a tennis court. The Association of Tennis Professionals had no hesitation in slapping him with a $10,000 fine.
But other ways of trying to disconcert your opponents are part of normal sport. You don’t need to be Kyrgios to take a toilet break when your tennis adversary is running away with a series of points, or to give your golf opponent time to think about missing a putt.
The 1947 US Open went to an 18-hole play-off between golfers Sam Snead and Lew Worsham. On the final hole, with their scores level, Worsham had a two-footer left for par. Snead missed his birdie putt from fifteen feet and left himself a marginally longer one. By this stage of his career, Snead was known to be yippish on the short putts. He was about to play when Worsham called for a tape measure to check that Snead was really further away and so due to putt next.
By the time it had been confirmed that it was indeed his turn, Snead was flustered. He pushed his tiddler to the right, leaving Worsham to hole out for the championship. It wasn’t exactly generous of Worsham. Still, all he did was create time for his opponent’s mental frailty to manifest itself.
Another of my favourite examples is cricketer Mark Ramprakash’s second-innings dismissal in the third Ashes test in 2001. He’d been batting steadily and had reached 26, when for no apparent reason he charged down the wicket to Shane Warne and was stumped by miles.
The cricket writers were not sympathetic. As Jack Bannister saw it, “The red mist descended and he charged down the pitch… his attempted slog… would have been unacceptable in village cricket.” David Gower was perplexed: “Nobody but Ramps can imagine what was going through his mind when he decided to play that shot at such a crucial time.”
In fact we later found out exactly what was going through Ramprakash’s mind. Apparently Shane Warne had been goading him for some time. “Come on Ramps, you know you want to.” Warne was a great psychologist as well as a great spinner, and he knew his man. Once he had inserted the tempting vision of a lofted drive into Ramprakash’s thoughts, the batsman’s commitment to a steady test innings was soon undone.
You might think that ploys like this have no place in sport, and that healthy competition should be based on generosity and openness, rather than psychological trickery. But this strikes me as unrealistically idealistic. Manoeuvres designed to gain a mental edge have always played a central part in top-level sport, and always will.
As we saw in Part I, competitive sport is as much a trial of mental powers as physical ones. Success demands that you maintain focus on your game plan, often for sustained periods of time, and do not allow yourself to succumb to performance-undermining distractions. Given this, any serious competitor will look for ways to nudge the opposition out of their comfort zone, to make them start thinking about things they shouldn’t be thinking about. If you can befuddle your opponent, the match is half won.
You might worry that sporting codes that license mind games will inevitably degenerate into outright nastiness. Once the needling starts, what is to stop it escalating to personal attacks like Kyrgios’s, or worse? But that isn’t how it seems to work.
For a start, there are the players’ own understandings of where the limits lie. As the last two chapters showed, each sport has its own sense of fair play, and this restricts the moves that most players are prepared to make. Someone who makes a habit of Kyrgios-like personal taunts will soon be ostracized by his peers, and few athletes are happy to pay this price.
Still, this is only part of the story. Conventions evolve, in sport as elsewhere, not least under the internal pressure of players pushing the boundaries to gain an extra advantage. By their nature, unwritten codes of fair play are flexible and open-ended, and leave ample room for enterprising athletes to interpret them in new ways.
In the course of this chapter we shall look at a number of ways in which athletes have sought to steal a march by doing things differently. Innovative mind games are not the only way of stretching the limits of conventional practice. Athletes are also constantly searching for new physical techniques, new tactics, new interpretations of the rules—anything that will give them an extra edge.
Sometimes these innovations threaten to cross the last chapter’s division between acceptable conventions and objectively immoral behaviour. When the sporting authorities judge that this line has been crossed, they will normally aim to stamp out the corruption. However, athletic administrators are less than infallible in their assessment of novelty. As a species, they tend towards conservatism, and are prone to regard any change as moral degeneration. Sporting bodies are at best a crude arbiter of the distinction between benign custom and immoral practice.
Mental mind games pose a particular challenge to the authorities. It is not easy to police what competitors murmur as they explore new ways of unsettling their opponents. Fortunately, a number of moderating mechanisms keep such psychological ploys under control.
One is the threat of retaliation. A player who oversteps the line will be marked down as fair game for future abuse. This applies especially in high-level professional leagues, where the players are likely to meet each other many times in the future, and perhaps even be traded to the same team.
The impact of needling remarks—“trash talk” in America and “sledging” elsewhere—is also typically moderated by humour. “Why are you so fat, Eddo?” an Australian fast bowler asked the Zimbabwean Eddo Brandes, frustrated at his failure to dismiss the plump tail-ender. “Because every time I screw your wife she gives me a biscuit,” replied Brandes.
In the end, the most important brake on bad behaviour is probably the need to keep your own mind on an even keel. Players who get caught up in trash-talking matches will disconcert themselves as well as their opponents. Losing your temper is the enemy of concentration. Many top athletes find it easier to lock themselves into their own world, and not to worry too much about what their opponents are thinking.
The word “gamesmanship” has negative connotations nowadays. But it wasn’t always so. The term was coined by the British humourist Stephen Potter in his runaway 1947 bestseller The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship. The book was subtitled “The Art of Winning Games without Actually Cheating” and describes a range of ploys designed to put your opponent on the mental back foot.
Potter’s account of his first introduction to gamesmanship is worth quoting at some length:
In those days I used to play lawn tennis for a small but progressive London College—Birkbeck, where I lectured. It happened that my partner at that time was C. Joad, the celebrated gamesman, who in his own sphere is known as a metaphysician and educationist.…
In one match we found ourselves opposite a couple of particularly tall and athletic young men from University College. We will call them Smith and Brown… fifteen-love… thirty-love.… Now Smith was serving again to Joad—who this time, as the ball came straight towards him, was able, by grasping the racket firmly with both hands, to receive the ball on the strings, whereupon the ball shot back to the other side and volleyed into the stop-netting near the ground behind Brown’s feet.
Now here comes the moment on which not only this match, but so much of the future of British sport was to turn.… Joad called across the net, in an even tone: “Kindly say clearly, please, whether the ball was in or out.”
Crude to our ears, perhaps. A Stone-Age implement. But beautifully accurate gamesmanship for 1931.… These two young men were both in the highest degree charming, well-mannered young men, perfect in their sportsmanship and behaviour. Smith stopped dead.
SMITH: I’m so sorry—I thought it was out. (The ball had hit the back netting twelve feet behind him before touching the ground.) But what did you think, Brown?
BROWN: I thought it was out—but do let’s have it again.
JOAD: No, I don’t want to have it again. I only want you to say clearly, if you will, whether the ball is in or out.
There is nothing more putting off to young university players than a slight suggestion that their etiquette or sportsmanship is in question. How well we know this fact, yet how often we forget to make use of it. Smith sent a double fault to me, and another double fault to Joad. He did not get in another ace service till halfway through the third set of a match which incidentally we won.
Most of the gambits proposed by Potter are similarly innocuous. For example, he suggests standing in the line of your opponent’s putt at golf, but then jumping out of the way with profuse apologies just as your opponent is about to ask you to move. As Potter explains, this is particularly effective when reiterated through the course of a round. (“A simple but good gambit. And remember, to make it effective, repeat it again and again and again.”)
Another trick is to make your opponents feel as if they have taken unfair advantage. It is hard for them to press hard if you quietly let slip that your old injury is playing up. In a similar vein, I find that it is normally worth at least a point or two to insist on giving the opposition any close line calls in tennis.
On the Sunday morning in the 2015 Solheim Cup between the European and US professional women golfers, the final fourball match, carried over from Saturday, had Suzann Pettersen and Charley Hull all square with two holes to play against the Americans Brittany Lincicome and Alison Lee. On the 17th Lee missed her birdie putt and it ran eighteen inches past the hole. Under the impression that her opponents had given her this short tap-in, she picked it up for the half and started off for the 18th tee, together with her partner and Hull.
Pettersen stood fast, however, and insisted that the putt had not been conceded, leaving the match referee no choice but to award the hole to Europe. The Americans were aghast, and Pettersen was asked whether she wanted to reconsider, to no avail. When the last hole was halved, that put Europe 10–6 up and needing only four points from the remaining twelve singles matches to retain the Cup.
I was watching and promptly went online and made a bet on the USA to win at 4–1 against. It was a big deficit for them to make up, but I knew the Europeans would be in mental disarray. They wouldn’t be able to maintain their intensity, knowing that they had gained a point by sharp practice.
As Mel Reid, one of the European team, explained afterwards: “It was difficult because we were in a lose-lose situation then. If we’d have won the cup we’d have had bad press and if we lose it we’ve still got bad press.” In the event, the European team collapsed and lost the Cup by a point.
This particular wound was self-inflicted. It was Pettersen who was responsible for the Europeans gaining an undeserved point. But the story illustrates Potter’s idea. If you can arrange for your opponents to feel that they have gained an unfair advantage, they will be hard put to keep trying.
Incidentally, the “C. Joad” whom Potter credits with the origin of gamesmanship was a small, spiky philosopher who, apart from being Head of the Department of Philosophy at Birkbeck College London (where I myself later lectured for a year), became a national celebrity during and after World War II for his appearances on the radio panel show The Brains Trust, where he invariably began his contributions with the words “It all depends what you mean by…”
He came to a sad end, though, impaled by his own sharpness. In 1948 he was caught travelling by train from London to Exeter without having troubled himself to buy a ticket. His fame meant public humiliation and dismissal by the British Broadcasting Corporation. He died a couple of years later.
As I said, the term “gamesmanship” has acquired a negative connotation since Potter introduced it. But I think that this does Potter a disservice. He may have had his tongue in his cheek, but in my view his book liberated a generation of athletes from outmoded attitudes. I like to think of Potter as exposing a body of secret lore that had previously only been available to a privileged few.
Potter was writing soon after the sweeping 1945 general election victory of the Labour Party had marked the end of aristocratic domination of British life. The novelist Kingsley Amis and the poet Philip Larkin, both from lower-middle-class backgrounds, were leaving Oxford and embarking on their mission of “stamping their taste on the age”, as Larkin later put it. Amis’s anti-hero Jim Dixon in Lucky Jim (1954) was unrelenting in his crusade against upper-class phoneys and phoniness, not unlike his transatlantic counterpart Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye.
I don’t think it’s too fanciful to view Potter’s The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship as part of this movement. Potter too was from an emphatically middle-class background (as indeed was his friend Joad). The whole thrust of Potter’s book was to puncture the myth of the gentleman amateur who owed his sporting victories to nothing except his effortless superiority.
The ideal peddled to schoolboys at the time was of sportsmen who tried hard but were never less than fair. Playing the game honourably was more important than the result. As Potter himself portrayed the character, he was the kind of chap who purported not to “care a damn whether he wins or loses, as long as he has a good match”.
Perhaps C. B. Fry (1872–1956) was the most perfect example of the species. Educated at Repton and Oxford, he played cricket and soccer for England and equalled the world record for the long jump. A successful writer and diplomat, he was offered the throne of Albania when the country found itself in need of a new king during the interwar years.
Fry ceded to no one in his advocacy of the gentleman’s code. When the penalty rule was adopted by soccer in the 1890s, he professed to be outraged at the suggestion that soccer players might deliberately cheat. In his view, “It is a standing insult to sportsmen to have to play under a rule which assumes that players intend to trip, hack and push their opponents, and behave like cads of the most unscrupulous kidney.”
But somehow, despite their insistence that results didn’t matter, the gentleman amateurs always seemed to win. Fry played for the Corinthians, a soccer club founded towards the end of the nineteenth century to uphold amateurism. They refused to play in the normal professional competitions, but on occasion they played charity matches against the winners. They beat the 1884 FA Cup champions Blackburn Rovers 8–1, and in 1903 they defeated the winners Bury 6–0. The following year they thrashed Manchester United 11–3—still United’s biggest defeat.
The Corinthians must have been a formidable side to achieve these victories. But I bet that their air of patrician unconcern gave them an added advantage—not just because of the extra confidence that comes with class superiority, but because their professed attitudes would inevitably have dulled their opponents’ competitiveness. It’s not easy to exert yourself against a side that says they are only playing for fun. (When I returned to England in the late 1960s after ten years as a teenager in South Africa, I didn’t realize that all those languid public schoolboys were really trying their hardest, both on and off the sports field. It took me a while to learn to watch out for people who say that results don’t matter.)
Edward Charles Bambridge (“Charlie Bam”) was one of the Corinthians’ greatest players, scoring eleven goals in his eighteen games for England. There’s a well-known story about an important match that he was in danger of missing because of a broken leg. On the day, he arrived in a dog-cart, with a shin pad ostentatiously strapped outside his stockings on one leg, and played through to the end, scoring the winning goal.
As the story is normally told, Bambridge put the pad on his good leg, in order to direct his opponents’ attention away from his injury. But, even apart from that, the whole story strikes me as something straight out of Stephen Potter. Imagine the other side’s reactions, on seeing their star opponent turn up hobbled and apparently unable even to walk to the pitch. They would have been hard put to stop themselves relaxing at least a little bit.
In any event, we have Potter to thank for bringing these issues into the open. None of us need have the sporting wool pulled over our eyes anymore. By giving us the concept of gamesmanship, Potter has improved our understanding of the psychological side of sport. Nowadays all serious competitors know that they need to be on guard against mental trickery, and have their own defences ready.
Getting inside your opponents’ heads isn’t the only way of “winning games without actually cheating”. Athletes are constantly looking for new ways of getting ahead of the opposition. They stretch the limits of technique and explore the boundaries of the rules. Sometimes this leads them to ways of playing that simply weren’t envisaged by their predecessors. They find unconventional ploys that expand the range of skills and tactics demanded by the game.
The natural conservatism of the sporting authorities tends to resist such novelties. If you ask me, any such innovations should be evaluated on their merits. I am certainly not against those who want to preserve the character and traditions of their sport. As I shall argue later, sports are defined by their history. Without a past of famous contests and iconic figures to celebrate, they would be little more than idle pastimes. Still, we can respect tradition without resisting change in any form. All institutions must evolve, and there is plenty of room to allow sporting novelty without rejecting the past. New ways of playing will often add to the attractions of a game, building on the old traditions to create something yet better. In some cases, the sports administrators are sensible enough to recognize this. But as often their traditionalism makes them dig in their heels, and mistake healthy innovation for a degeneration of standards.
In 2008 Kevin Pietersen introduced the “switch-hit” to cricket, turning himself into a left-hander in mid-delivery to slog-sweep the ball over the cover boundary. This put some pressure on the existing rules, as they take account of which stance the batsman adopts. In this case, to their credit, the Marylebone Cricket Club took the view that the novelty only added to the excitement of cricket, and declared it legitimate.
In a similar spirit, the athletics authorities raised no difficulties when Dick Fosbury started “flopping” over the high-jump bar in the 1960s. As it happens, it wouldn’t have been crazy for them to decide against Fosbury. High-jump rules have always pretty arbitrary. For example, two-footed take-offs, tumbler-style, have never been allowed, even though they would probably add a couple of feet to the world record. Still, I think the rule-makers were right about the flop. There was something very pedestrian about the “scissors”, “straddles”, and “Western rolls” that preceded Fosbury.
Golf is probably the most conservative of all sports. In 2016 it outlawed “belly putting”, in which a long putter is anchored against the player’s stomach or chest. I never saw the problem. If belly putting suits some players, then why not? You might as well outlaw unusual grips, or marked pauses at the top of the backswing, just because they’re different.
The joint statement by the US Golf Association and the Royal and Ancient Club of St Andrew justifying their new rule was revealing. In a document of some thirty-two pages, they nowhere raised the issue of whether golf would be a better game if belly putting were allowed. Their objection was solely that it would be different. As they saw it, the trouble with belly putting was that it did not preserve “the essence of the traditional method of golf stroke”. I suppose it’s not surprising to find the golf authorities winning the prize for mindless conservatism. They’d probably prefer a world without electricity too.
And then there are the guardians of gridiron football. In the 2015 play-offs, the New England Patriots found a way of using the NFL’s complex regulations about pass-receiving “eligibility” to so bemuse the Baltimore Ravens defence that Tom Brady was able to complete a sixteen-yard pass to a wide-open tight end, and then to repeat the gambit a few plays later. The NFL owners’ response was to promptly change the rules. No doubt they were fearful that ingenuity might become a permanent feature of football.
There is one particular species of gamesmanship that sometimes get people very worked up. In many multi-stage tournaments, a group competition is followed by a knockout, with the match-ups in the knockout stage determined by positions in the groups. (The winner of group A plays the runner-up in group B,… and so on.) If the organizers aren’t careful, this can create opportunities for clever competitors to manoeuvre themselves an easy path through the tournament by being economical with their talents.
In the 2012 Olympics, the women’s badminton doubles featured a groups-followed-by-knockout format for the first time. The trouble started when one of the top Chinese pairs failed to win their group. This meant that the top two teams in the adjacent group, already assured of progress to the knockout stage, both had an incentive to lose their final group match and so sidestep the strong Chinese in the next round.
Just the same situation arose in the other half of the draw. The upshot was that spectators at the Wembley Arena for the final group games were treated to two “looking-glass” matches, in which both sides tried their hardest to lose. The players repeatedly served out of court, put the shuttlecock in the net, or missed it completely, prompting jeers and boos from the crowd.
The organizers’ response was to disqualify all four pairs, for “not using their best efforts to win a match” and “conducting themselves in a manner that is clearly abusive or detrimental to the sport”—with the result that the gold eventually went to the Chinese pair that had initially failed to top their group (a placing that in retrospect itself came to look suspect).
Most commentators sided with the organizers, lamenting a deterioration of standards, shameful manipulation, letting down the Olympic spirit, and so forth. I had the opposite reaction. I thought it was outrageous that the players should have their Olympic hopes shattered, just for doing their best to win the tournament. What did the organizers expect, if they didn’t have the sense to organize a competition properly? The hazards of group-knockout competitions are well known. If anybody betrayed the Olympic spirit, it was the incompetent badminton authorities, not the players.
The “disgrace of Dijon” was a 1982 soccer World Cup match between West Germany and Austria. Algeria had upset West Germany in the group’s opening match, which meant that Algeria would go through at West Germany’s expense if the latter failed to beat Austria, and at Austria’s expense if West Germany won by more than two goals. The only result that would eliminate Algeria was a one- or two-goal win for West Germany.
In the event, West Germany scored inside ten minutes, after which both sides played out an implicit agreement not to threaten the other’s progress to the next round, each taking turns to pass the ball around in their own half. It was a miserable spectacle, but only to be expected. Neither side had any incentive to risk elimination by contesting the match. The Algerians at least kept their dignity. In the words of their fullback Chaâbane Merzekane, “To see two big powers debasing themselves in order to eliminate us was a tribute to Algeria. They progressed with dishonour, we went out with our heads held high.”
Soccer has learned its lesson. In subsequent World Cups, the last two matches in each group have always been played simultaneously, which pretty much eliminates the possibility of a team deliberately engineering a suboptimal result in order to improve its knockout chances. The UEFA Champions League adds an extra safeguard to thwart this kind of game-playing, leaving it to a partly random draw to decide who plays whom after the group stages.
It is hard to believe that the Olympic badminton organizers weren’t aware of the dangers of their ill-designed format. What did they expect the players to do? Fight tooth and nail to ensure that they would be knocked out in the next round? Perhaps the organizers were counting on the players to be better actors and disguise their determination to lose. If you ask me, the public should be grateful that the incompetence of the authorities was so clearly exposed. They’re the ones who should have been banned, not the players.*
Not all glitches in tournament design are foreseeable, however. In the 1994 soccer Caribbean Cup the organizers decided that all matches should have a winner: if the scores were tied after ninety minutes, the games would go to a “sudden-death” extra time, to be decided by the first goal, which would count double for goal-difference purposes if necessary.
In the final game of their qualifying group, Barbados needed to beat Grenada by two goals to top them on goal difference and advance to the finals in Trinidad. At first everything went well for Barbados. They scored the two goals they needed and kept Grenada at bay for most of the second half.
Then in the eighty-third minute Grenada got one back. Barbados desperately tried to restore their two-goal lead. But, as the clock ticked down, some of their players realized there was another way. If Grenada were only to score again, then that would mean 2–2, extra time, and Barbados would then have unlimited time to score the deciding goal, which would then count double and give them their needed goal difference.
So with three minutes to go, the Barbados defenders calmly passed the ball into their own goal to tie up the scores. At which point both sides needed to think quickly. Another goal for Grenada would make them clear winners, but another goal against them would also leave Barbados without the two-goal lead they needed. This meant Grenada would go through with a goal at either end. So, for the last three minutes of normal time, the spectators watched Grenada scrambling to put the ball in either goal, with Barbados staunchly defending at both ends. (Barbados succeeded in denying Grenada, and then scored the “golden goal” they needed in extra time.)
I bet that there were some mean-spirited pundits at the time who felt that the two sides had betrayed the spirit of the game, “not using their best efforts to win a match”, and should both have been disqualified. I couldn’t disagree more. I would have loved to be there. I’m always interested when athletes find new ways of winning without actually cheating.
We need to recognize that gamesmanship, in all its forms, is an integral part of competitive sport. All serious athletes are constantly striving to avoid defeat and ensure victory. If they can find some new angle to help them, they would be perverse not to go for it. An athlete who ignores an open avenue to victory is an athlete who is not competing seriously.
Of course, there are plenty who hide their competitiveness behind a veil of affability, in the style of the old Corinthians. But this can itself be just another form of gamesmanship, as Stephen Potter so helpfully demonstrated. The most dangerous competitors are those who lull you into a false sense of ease.
Sometimes innovations threaten to degrade the game. They can shift tactics in a destructive direction or stretch the conventions of fair play into the realm of immorality. In cases like these, it is right for the authorities to impose sanctions. But, as often, novel ways of playing enrich the game. Unthinking resistance to change can impede progress in sport, as elsewhere.