Sport as Spectacle

Just what makes it so? What makes one sport more watchable than the other? A search for some satisfying answers

My mother, once a loose-limbed college athlete and a lifelong John McEnroe fan, got me hooked to tennis in the mid-1980s. I can still remember feeling disoriented at a very visceral level when the chair umpire called an increment of 15 points, as we watched my first Wimbledon match on our old Dyanora black-and-white TV set, which we had to whack hard on the side every few minutes to be rid of white noise. Why 15, why not 1, I asked my mother, who shrugged distractedly, not even noticing that I was displaying phenomenal arithmetic skills. But as I got the hang of it and stopped questioning every single thing, I found myself, like my mother, immersed in the pleasure of watching Jimmy Connors take those peculiar short steps as he raced all over the court only to have McEnroe storm the net for the kill: it seemed nothing could zip past our man’s motor mouth.

Back then, I was still developing the vocabulary to explain why I liked what I liked. But instinctively it seemed to me that the joy lay in the suspense of it: would the ball land clean inside the tramline? Would the volley sneak over Connors’ head? Would the savage backhand beat McEnroe’s languid reach?

Cultural taste is relative. Unlike the more primal instincts, my predilection for suspense is an individual response—not something that must be shared by everyone. Some who regard Test cricket as outdated are partial to the brevity of the T:20 format; others who mock the vulgarity of the IPL treasure the sanctity of the long form. A music critic might be drawn to the rhythm of snooker balls crashing chaotically into each other. It’s impossible to predict what might appeal to the human senses.

Even so, there must be larger socio-cultural factors that go into making one sport watchable in the opinion of a fastidious audience and another quite impossible to promote. What is it that draws us toward spectacle? Why might cricket be more gripping than croquet? How big a role does the media play in shaping our interests? Is there an element of self-selection involved? To answer all of these, we ought to begin by examining the nature of viewership pleasure itself.

It may be fair to say that most people don’t connect with something visually until they have experienced it firsthand. Playing something makes it watchable. (After having spent years under the watchful gaze of his taskmaster father, hitting some 2,000 balls a day in practice, Andre Agassi claimed he didn’t even like tennis; but going by everything he confesses in his autobiography, Open, you would suspect he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.) In his seminal New York Times essay on Roger Federer, David Foster Wallace—once a regionally ranked junior tennis player— wrote, ‘Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments… The Moments are more intense if you’ve played enough tennis to understand the impossibility of what you just saw him do.’ This is a variation on the old argument that to wholly enjoy a sport and gain a sophisticated appreciation of it, you need to play it at least at the club level. But does that always mean there is no pleasure to be gained otherwise? Such an ideology seems needlessly exclusionary.

Wallace’s deconstruction of Federer’s game is knowledgeable and thorough. He emphasises television’s distancing effects on the viewer, and stops to reflect upon all that it captures through close-ups and the details it misses. Yet, I envy how he offhandedly detaches himself from an audience that presumably pays to watch tennis on television.

I play squash myself, at a level of proficiency sufficient to grasp nuances when I watch others compete. But squash’s misplaced reputation as a rich man’s hobby frustrates me; it can ill-afford to alienate a potential audience through snobbery. Is the pleasure gained from watching sport really enhanced if one has played as a gifted amateur or professional, or is Wallace’s brush-off an instance of gratifying the ego? Could this be a case of both?

Although research confirms that hands-on involvement enriches and crystallises one’s perspective by activating our sense of empathy, it is probably not, strictly speaking, necessary to have played to enjoy the sport—and maybe not even to be able to hold forth with any authority. Understanding a sport is not the same as speaking lucidly about it. Few soccer or cricket players can harness everything they know and feel in the commentary box; conversely, the pleasure a dilettante derives is not necessarily passive and ignorant. A good commentator could well make the difference between making something watchable and rendering it torturous. To make the Sherlock Holmes argument: in the extreme case, if a dilettante’s powers of armchair analysis have evolved sufficiently, he might outdo the ‘expert’ and provide a diversion to the audience.

While a seemingly elitist sport like tennis continues to resonate more with the club membership-owning, racquet-swinging bourgeoisie than with the working classes, TV and the internet have helped bridge such divides. High-quality commentaries and analyses are increasingly accessible and have deepened our understanding of sport, while simultaneously diversifying viewership.

Age is no longer necessarily a barrier to watching or participating in athletic activities. Trying to establish any correlation between gender and liking for sports is similarly fraught with risk; I say this, mindful of the detail that it was my mother—not father—who introduced me to sport. While the term ‘couch potato’ signifies masculine identity, it’s easy to convince anyone that more women exercise at gyms than men. Who is to say an afternoon spent competing against a partner in the swimming pool (or, for that matter, in a half-marathon) does not count as enjoying a recreational sport?

Let’s just say, instead, there may be no convincing those men and women who instantly switch off when confronted by a sporting moment. I have acquaintances of that variety who split hairs about Proust’s insights on memory, but make a face when conversation turns towards sport. It is safe to presume they wouldn’t want to read a word of this essay.

Most casual viewers who keep an open mind automatically connect the word ‘watchable’ with ‘beautiful’. That last word connotes different things to different people. Many enjoy the presence of a pretty face or buff body. Someone I know has researched every documented case of streaking on YouTube, which is odd but fair enough: if that’s what it takes to draw eyeballs, then so be it. The slam-dash of Sehwag, showcasing physicality without resorting to ungainliness, is in its own way gorgeous to watch. Others subconsciously or consciously privilege economy of movement and effort over  huff-and-puff. Spoilt by the likes of Federer and VVS Laxman, these watchers have come to expect professionals to display a degree of grace and wince when someone wins in an ugly way.

There is much to be said for the bewitching power of elegance when discussing audience pleasure. Watching Warne turn the ball from a leg-stump line to hit off is to experience joy that is soul-satisfyingly intense. The extent of turn and bounce is unpredictable, its effect mystical; the cause of the sensations it provokes obvious even to the rookie.

The medium of reference matters too. Watching something on TV or the internet is very different from following it on the radio or checking scores online (which are both one step removed, an abstract kind of watching through the mind’s eye). And none of these is anything like witnessing an event live.

Whenever I watch cricket on television, I morph into an adrenaline junkie addicted to the thrill that spikes in the fraction of a second between frames as the camera switches focus. My breath shortens every time Laxman—my favourite batsman—plays the ball uppishly in the direction of cover. I know it usually means a four or the loss of his wicket, and I cannot bear to find out what the TV screen is about to reveal.

I hate that television is inherently a constraining medium: you can only see all that is within the confines of what the cameramen choose to capture. It was more liberating to imagine Mohammed Azharuddin bat while listening to commentary on All India Radio as he scored that magnificent 163 not out against South Africa in Kanpur in 1996, although again, the information was rationed out by the radio man.

I have had the privilege of watching Roger Federer in his pomp dismantle opponents with a flick of his wrist as he drifted and hung over the grass, 40 feet away. The Centre Court press box at Wimbledon gives you a slightly side-on view of the action; I am convinced of the merits of its positioning. Being there also allows you to observe the little things, to wander into nooks that the TV camera avoids, and to meet real characters, as I did (among many others) an eccentric old gentleman, a senior member of the All-England club who had ushered members of the press into their allotted space for more than four decades. Restricted as we are by the precincts of the mainstream media, these simple freedoms can be a luxury.

I once asked the world chess champion, Viswanathan Anand, during an interview if he thought 32 pieces on a square board had the makings of a televised sport. Anand is one of the most fascinating and articulate sportsmen I have met (and who, by the way, makes a great case for regarding chess as a sport). He is telegenic in a pleasantly chubby sense, and someday would do brilliantly as a talking head. Always in control of his public image, he is slightly reserved but nonetheless charming, and a far cry from the dissident recluse cliché that defined Bobby Fisher in his later years. His ideas are refined and in conversation tend to emerge fully-formed.

“The internet has worked miracles for those trying to popularise the game, but in India better use must be made of the television medium,” Anand said, and proceeded to compare chess to Formula 1. “At one level, it’s really very similar to the way Formula 1 functions: you have cars whizzing past. How boring is that? Then some bright chap decided to install cameras inside the car, give the viewer multiple perspectives. Suddenly, F1 gets a lot more interesting, doesn’t it?”

And then, “You’ve got to be creative. Maybe, get better commentators to tell the viewer exactly why a particular move was brilliant, I’m not sure. But it’s certainly possible to do something about it. F1 could act as a model for chess.”

I can see why he cites the case of F1: as a spectacle, chess and F1 are both sports geared exclusively towards remote audiences. F1, by the way, is a fascinating thing. Despite the phenomenon of crowds in the stands, it is a sport made for television. The press box consists of a large room lined with hundreds of cubicles with a TV monitor hanging over each of them. No journalist could write his story watching F1 from the stands.

But the more I think about it, I am not sure I entirely agree with the association Anand draws. Maybe F1 offers viewers a vicarious and cathartic release from following traffic laws, but few people have ever stepped into a racing car whereas many likely played chess at least once, however badly. And unlike F1 racing whose post-camera enhancement thrills are in theory comprehensible to almost everyone—especially those who play simulation games—chess discriminates on the basis of intelligence.

There is a more meaningful comparison to be drawn between and among sports that exploit the same skill sets. Racquet sports like squash and badminton could learn much in terms of expanding their audience from tennis. Comparing chess to F1, on the other hand, might be a bit of a stretch. To a prodigious mind like Anand’s, it might seem plausible that expounding on the intelligence of a move would by itself draw an audience; but his argument ignores the fact that most people are accustomed to sport as a leisurely pursuit, not something that demands even more intellectual investment than their job does.

Chess is the definitive elitist sport. I played it in school, and while I know how involving it can be, it seems that in the absence of physical and other forms of demonstrable action, this is the rare kind of game one can’t enjoy unless one fully comprehends the motive behind a move.

Now it’s all very well to appreciate a sport for its qualities, but fans are not unbiased creatures. They need something to root for, colourful characters to valourise and pillory; they want war without the consequences of bullets.

There is a biological correlation between a viewer’s investment in the spectacle and the quality of performance of a favourite player or team. A German study conducted during the 1994 Soccer World Cup indicated an increase of 28 per cent in testosterone levels in Brazilian fans whose side was winning, and a 27 per cent decrease in Italian fans whose side was losing. According to the study, levels of testosterone in fans rise in an anticipatory manner prior to competition. ‘Winning’ can further elevate levels, while ‘losing’ can result in a decrease.

Rabid fans, haters and indifferent grumblers celebrate together when the spectacle in question exceeds the sport, as was the case the night India won the 2011 cricket World Cup. And yet, whether or not you are a fan, the novelty of seeing a racer like Schumacher win race after race fades quickly. Once, people complained when Federer was pulverising every player in sight. Now he is back in their good graces. The status quo must be quickly overhauled, and the underdog must win to keep things interesting.

Fingers crossed, Novak Djokovic will meet Rafael Nadal in the final of this year’s French Open. Failing that, a decider between Federer and Nadal would be preferable to practically anything else.

Feeling sorrow for someone’s loss is just as life-affirming as celebrating a win. In the end, it’s the humanising aspect that makes or breaks a sport: the drama that makes it watchable or unbearable.