HERE AND NOW is a published collection of letters exchanged between the novelists Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee in the years 2008 to 2011. I am a big fan of both writers and enjoyed the volume (putting aside the parts where they set themselves to solve the world’s socio-economic problems).
One of the main attractions of the book, from my point of view, was that Auster and Coetzee are both sports fans. Much of the book is devoted to their athletic enthusiasms. At one point, Coetzee raises an interesting question. Why, he asks, do no new sports get invented anymore? Nearly every well-known sport had its rules codified in the second half of the nineteenth century. Since then, scarcely any new games have emerged. So what blocks their creation? Coetzee and Auster both offer answers, but neither is particularly convincing.
In keeping with his day job as a professor of literature, Coetzee wonders whether there is a limited number of viable sporting forms. Perhaps there is some deep structure of games that allows only a restricted range of constructions from a universal sporting grammar.
Auster, as one might expect of a North American sports fan, puts it down to the power of big business. In his view, the giant commercial monopolies that run major spectator sports make sure that no upstarts get a look-in.
I think we can do better than that. I’d say that Coetzee’s suggestion is belied by the rich variety of sports that can be found in different parts of the world. And one wonders whether Auster realizes how far North America is an outlier in its devotion to business-led professional sports. Pretty much everywhere else, the principal sports rest on a broad base of amateur participants.
I favour a different answer. The problem that faces any new sport is its lack of tradition. History is an essential component of sport. All established sports can tell tales of past heroes and famous victories. This adds to the significance of athletic achievement. It is one thing to be good at hitting a little ball across the countryside with long sticks. It’s another to follow in the footsteps of Old and Young Tom Morris, of Ben Hogan and Sam Snead, of Seve Ballesteros and Tom Watson.
That is why it is hard for new sports to become established. They lack a past to add substance to their contests. They aren’t able to look back to a record of memorable achievements. It’s not the kind of thing you can manufacture on demand.
If you turn on the television on a winter’s Saturday morning in Melbourne, Australia, you are likely to see a group of large men engaged in earnest conversation. They are dissecting the afternoon’s upcoming “footy” matches, analysing possible tactics, rating the players, measuring them against past titans like Ted Whitten, Bob Skilton, and Ron Barassi.
You would be hard put, given the gravity of their demeanour, to tell that the game of which they speak is little played outside their city. In Melbourne, “football” means Australian rules football, a very specific variety of the genus, played on a huge oval field with eighteen players on each side, featuring tall rangy forwards who leap high to catch the ball and take a “mark”. The main clubs take their names from Melbourne suburbs, and the annual Grand Final attracts a crowd of 100,000.
However, in Sydney, the nearest big city, and Brisbane, the next one north, “football” refers to a quite different game. Here it is rugby league, a thirteen-a-side contest that is itself largely peculiar to the east coast of Australia and the north of England. It is not dissimilar to the more widespread rugby union code, but is distinguished by its history of professional players and working-class roots.
In Sydney, Aussie rules is viewed as a quaint southern oddity, and it is the league heroes that obsess the media. In 2014 the rugby league Grand Final between the South Sydney “Rabbitohs” and the Canterbury “Bulldogs” filled the huge ANZ Stadium and attracted a TV audience of 4.6 million. The Rabbitohs’ victory was a triumph for their owner, film star Russell Crowe, whose backing had taken the struggling inner-city team to their first final victory in forty-three years.
Intellectual commentators often bemoan cultural imperialism. Hollywood films and English-speaking TV are swamping the world, they complain, eliminating local traditions and turning everything into a homogenized cultural soup.
I wonder how many of these intellectual pessimists are sports fans. They might be right about some aspects of mass-market media—though if you ask me they would do well to get out more—but they are certainly wrong about sports. Each region of the world has its own sporting traditions. There is little sign that they are being eliminated by global brands.
If anything, the opposite is true. Attempts to export sports to new markets are typically ineffective. Sports administrators tend to be evangelical about their own codes, funding development programmes and promoting showcase matches in foreign locations. But it’s not clear that these initiatives ever make any difference.
The American National Football League plays some of its games in London each year, but I can’t say I’ve ever noticed the locals paying much attention. Similarly, Major League Baseball held the first game of the season in Australia for a while, but now seems to have given this up as a bad job.
In truth, sporting traditions reach too deep to be uprooted by marketing exercises. They are passed on from generation to generation, and command a loyalty that is central to many people’s identity. From an early age, youngsters acquire sporting heroes, team affiliations, and an ingrained sense of how their games should be played. These are not things that you can learn from an advertising campaign.
The term “football” is itself a testament to the diversity of sporting traditions. Melbourne and Sydney are not the only places that attach their own meaning to the word. In much of the world, of course, it stands for the round-ball game formally designated as association football. But in Ireland it is generally understood as meaning Gaelic football, in New Zealand it’s traditionally used for rugby union, while in North America it refers to the gridiron version of the game. As a rule, “soccer” is the term used for the association variant in these places where other forms of football are dominant.
In the early 1990s, I was fond of a UK-Australian co-produced television series called The Boys from the Bush. It was set in a Melbourne detective agency and featured Tim Healy as a British expatriate originally from Shepherd’s Bush and Chris Haywood as his Australian counterpart from the outback.
The programme had many virtues, not least its strand of deadpan humour. There was plenty of fun along the lines of “You won’t find him in the office—he’s gone to the football.” “No, that can’t be right, he said he couldn’t stand the game.” Sadly, the series was discontinued after just two seasons, though it has since acquired a cult following. Perhaps not everybody found the football jokes as funny as I did.
The use of “soccer” to refer to association football is itself a complex cultural phenomenon. When I first started writing about sport, I found it natural to use the term as a stylistic variant for “football”, even in contexts where there was no possibility of confusion with other codes. Rather to my surprise, a number of my British readers challenged me on this, asking why I didn’t stick to the normal English term.
At first I supposed that they were objecting to the outmoded class connotations of the word. My father, who was born in 1910 and played the round-ball game at his private school and Oxford college, never referred to it as anything except “soccer”. The word originated as a corruption of “As-soc-iation”, and it contrasted with the now little-heard “rugger”, for rugby union, in line with the tiresome Oxford practice of forming slang words by adding “-er” on the end.
It turned out, however, that it wasn’t the class angle that was bothering my readers at all. Their gripe was rather that I was surrendering to American influence, allowing transatlantic usage to alter my writing style.
Their complaint was quite misconceived. My objectors had had things back to front. In truth it was they who were guilty of succumbing to American influence.
Until a couple of decades ago, “soccer” was a perfectly normal alternative to “football” in British English. It was common in everyday speech and journalism, and by no means restricted to people who went to Oxford. Since then, however, the term has fallen out of favour. The reason is the increased interest in association football among North Americans, and their co-option of the term “soccer” to distinguish it from their native gridiron game. The British have reacted by coming to think of the usage as a foreign imposition, and now make a fetish of avoiding it themselves.
There is something sadly self-defeating about a country abandoning its own customs in the mistaken belief that they are alien imports. It betrays a neurotic lack of confidence about national identity.
The reaction against “soccer” is by no means an isolated case. Take the alternative “-ise”/“-ize” spellings for the ends of many words. The British now widely suppose that “-ize” is American usage, and insistently shun it in their own writing. But in fact “-ize” was historically the dominant variation in British English. My massive two-volume 1970 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t even offer “realise” as an alternative spelling for “realize.” I wonder how many of those who nowadays studiously avoid “-ize” know that that they are distorting their own language in response to a phantom fear of American influence.
But let me return to sports. Coetzee is right to observe that nearly all mainstream sports settled into their modern forms in the second half of the nineteenth century. The different codes of football are a case in point. In England the basic division between association and rugby football was decided when the Football Association laid down its rules in 1863 and the Rugby Football Union followed in 1871. The Gaelic Athletic Association codified its form of the game in 1884. Earlier than all of these, Australian rules had already gone its own distinctive way when the Melbourne Football Club fixed on a code of rules in 1859.
Why did all this happen in so short a period? The obvious answer is the railways. The first commercial freight trains started in the 1820s and by the 1850s all industrialized countries had widespread passenger networks. Until then, each area and educational institution, especially the English public schools, enjoyed their own versions of football. But now it became possible for them to travel to play each other, and this created an obvious need for standardized rules.
The evolution of football codes in North America followed a similar path. Up until the 1860s a variety of games were played in different schools and colleges, loosely divided into “kicking” variants like soccer and “running” games like rugby. Matches were often played on a portmanteau basis, using the home side’s rules for a first game and the visitors’ for a second. According to legend, it was the Harvard-McGill match-ups in 1874 that decided the future. Harvard were so impressed with the rugby-style variant offered by McGill that they abandoned their own “Boston rules” and persuaded other colleges to follow suit.
Other modern sports also defined themselves in the second half of the nineteenth century. Some, like golf, boxing, and cricket, had histories stretching back into the seventeenth century and beyond, but again it was the railways that prompted their modern competitive forms. The first Open Championship in golf was held in 1860, overarm bowling became standard in cricket from 1864, and boxing’s Queensberry rules were drawn up in 1867.
Yet further sports with less well-defined ancestries materialized. Baseball, ice hockey, field hockey, lawn tennis, and basketball all became established as flourishing pastimes by the beginning of the twentieth century.
This history casts light on Coetzee’s question. It wasn’t always impossible to invent new games. Back at the beginning of modern sport, space on the sporting map was still up for grabs. Some sports evolved from earlier proto-versions, but others were deliberately put together on the drawing board. For example, both field hockey and basketball were created ex nihilo in the late nineteenth century, explicitly designed (in Teddington, Middlesex, and Springfield, Massachusetts, respectively) as safer winter alternatives to injury-threatening football.
Perhaps the most striking example of an invented game is lawn tennis. In the early 1870s a Major Walter Wingfield designed a racket game that could be played on croquet lawns. He dubbed it sphairistike, from the ancient Greek for “ball-skill”, and started marketing equipment sets in 1874. The name didn’t catch on, and only a few of Wingfield’s sets were sold, but the game itself spread like wildfire. By the end of the decade the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club was holding an annual tournament in Wimbledon.
The railways weren’t the only stimulus for the sporting boom. As important was the emergence of a mass white-collar middle class with the time and ambition for genteel leisure pursuits. Historically sport had been restricted to private schools and universities, plus the huntin’, shootin’, and fishin’ of the landed upper classes. Now tennis and golf clubs were springing up in every middle-class suburb, and anybody with social pretensions was avid to join.
Not everybody regarded this as progress. In the summer of 1914, the London Times ran an article about the golf craze that was sweeping the country. It provoked a heated series of letters, mainly from the old guard who viewed the new middle-class sports as a sad index of moral laxity. One leading cricketer wrote, “The day that sees the youth of England given up to lawn tennis and golf in preference to the old manly games, cricket, polo, football, etc, will be of sad omen for the future of the race.”
The snobbery was even more explicit in other contributions. A writer from the Stock Exchange berated one of the few correspondents who had ventured to defend golf: “He says he would rather teach his son to hit a golf ball than shoot a bird; we all know the end of that boy, and his father will only have himself to blame.” The condescension is only heightened by hindsight—given the date, the fate of the boy in question was more likely to be death in the trenches of Flanders than a life of moral depravity.
Once a sporting code becomes established in a region, it will tend to monopolize resources, and make it difficult for other games to break in. But what decides which sports gain a foothold in the first place? Often it can be a pretty random business. The history of cricket versus baseball in North America is a case in point.
If there’s one thing that divides America and the rest of the English-speaking world, it’s their attitudes to these two games. It’s a crucial component of national identity. No American regards cricket as anything but a joke, while non-Americans dismiss baseball as nothing but vulgar razzmatazz.
To most Americans, cricket means village greens, cream teas, Miss Marple and the vicar, fat old men dropping catches. Once I was playing in Battersea Park in central London—a fairly serious match between old club rivals—and I heard some passing Americans say, “Gee, look—cricket”. It was as if our match were the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, or some other such London quaintness. The tourists seemed to have no idea that it was a serious game like their own sports.
In fairness, most Britishers are the same about baseball. “Just a glorified game of rounders,” they will say, secure in their total ignorance of the game and its history. I have expatriate friends in the States who will go to desperate lengths to follow international cricket, but won’t even look at the television if they’re in a bar and the final game of the World Series is showing.
To my mind, these attitudes betray a perverse lack of curiosity. Neither group of dogmatists are real sports fans. In truth, both baseball and cricket are wonderful games, fully deserving of the huge support they command in their respective strongholds.
As a member of the rare breed that follows both cricket and baseball, I can testify that both feature phenomenal athletes with unnatural skills. Indeed, many of the skills are very similar—not surprisingly given that both games feature batters striving to dispatch hard leather balls arriving at up to 100 miles per hour past a phalanx of fielders.
The differences, such as they are, mostly arise because running is never forced in cricket, as it is in baseball. A batsman in cricket can parry ball after ball exactly as he intends for hours on end. It’s perhaps this aspect that most puzzles Americans. How can it be exciting to watch a stalemate between batsmen and bowlers, perhaps culminating in a tense draw after days of play?
A cricket fan will warm to the perfection of a well-crafted inning that contains not a false stroke. In baseball, by contrast, the batting is impossibly difficult. Even the best batters hit the ball as they want only once every ten pitches or so. Perhaps the sense of satisfaction when they connect outweighs the frustration of repeated failures. I suppose it depends which game you are born to.
In any case, the development of shorter forms of cricket, like the three-hour T20 version, is bringing the games closer together. In that format, batsmen have to do or die, just as in baseball. Maybe a T20 tournament in the States would catch on. I wouldn’t count on it, though.
The fielding differences are the most interesting. When it comes to stopping ground balls and throwing to base, baseball leaves cricket for dead. The arms are much stronger, the throws more accurate, even from off-balance. And then there is the split-second ballet of double and triple plays. Cricket has nothing to compare.
But with catching, it’s the other way around. For a start, the gloves in baseball remove most of the excitement from catching lofted shots to the outfield, which is one of the most spectacular aspects of cricket. And then there is the way that bare-handed cricketers will pouch hard-hit drives or deflections coming at 100 miles per hour, often from only a few yards away. Again, the baseball gloves take this ferocious cricketing skill out of the game.
I sometimes wonder whether baseball infielders are really helped by their gloves, especially when they bring them across their body to intercept drives on their throwing side. Cricket infielders make any number of outstretched diving catches with their throwing hands that baseball fielders would never get their gloves close to.
It would be interesting to know if anyone has ever checked on this. Do infielders really do better with gloves? I can see that they are a big help to outfielders with fly balls. But it’s by no means obvious to me that a bare-handed cricketer in the infield wouldn’t stop and catch more balls on the ungloved side. Maybe someone should suggest it to Billy Beane.
Curiously, the Americans and the British weren’t always divided by their summer games. In the first half of the nineteenth century, cricket was as popular in North America as the rest of the English-speaking world. All the large cities hosted cricket clubs, with Philadelphia and New York leading the way.
What was the first international sporting contest? Surprisingly, the answer is a cricket match between the United States and Canada. Held in New York in 1844, the two-day match attracted over 10,000 spectators. The fans were said to have wagered over $100,000 on the match, and Canada won by twenty-three runs. This pre-dated the first England-Scotland soccer match by thirty years.
The rise of American baseball was triggered by the Civil War. Baseball had the great advantage of not needing a flat batting surface. Young men away from home needed ready recreation, and baseball was far easier to organize than cricket. By the end of the 1860s, the game was on its way to becoming the national pastime. The all-conquering professional Cincinnati Red Stockings toured the country, defining many features of the modern game.
Cricket limped on in the States. As late as 1908, a Philadelphia team successfully toured the first-class counties of England, and their star bowler John Barton King topped that season’s bowling averages. But by then cricket had subsided into a minority upper-class East Coast pastime. In any case, it was always unlikely that, in the modern era of codified sports, the new American nation would subscribe to a game ruled from London.
Sports fans everywhere will tell you that their own games are the best in the world, unparalleled in the skills they demand and the spectacle they offer. Of course, they can’t all be right. Not all games are equally well designed, and some are downright limited in their attractions.
But that’s not the point. Sporting traditions aren’t entries in some kind of meta-competition to find the world’s best game. Rather, their real significance is that they add depth to our athletic pursuits.
In truth, baseball fans don’t really have much idea whether their game is better than cricket, nor vice versa. What they do know about are the annals of their own games. That’s the reason they are loyal to their own codes. It’s like being loyal to your country or your family. The games we play aren’t arbitrary creations designed to amuse us. They carry with them histories that help define our lives.