One of the ways I have taken my bearings as I drift inexorably into the open waters of midlife has been to rediscover certain childhood pleasures that I abandoned – more or less entirely, more or less inexplicably – in early adulthood. For the most part, this has been a result of parenthood, and of finding through my children’s enthusiasms a path, narrow and largely overgrown though it might be, back to the enthusiasms of my own childhood. The most straightforwardly satisfying of these has been sport.
Like almost every Irish person of roughly my age, the memory of my own childhood is in some sense consubstantial (and conterminous) with the Jack Charlton era, and with Italia ’90 in particular – with its torrential joy and fervour, its indelible cultural ephemera. And although my interest in GAA was a passing one at best, growing up in Kilkenny during the 1980s and ’90s I could hardly have avoided getting swept up in the communal zeal for hurling dominance.
Mostly, though, my memories are of long summer afternoons watching Wimbledon, and in particular my personal stake in the success of Andre Agassi, whose minor rebellions – soft-rock power-ballad coiffure; refusal to adhere to the competition’s fusty regulations as to sporting attire – now seem quaint and faintly risible. But in the early 1990s they were, for a middle-class tween who would himself go on to rock the establishment to its foundations every Saturday in the pages of The Irish Times, the very stuff of vital and radical self-determination. It seems remarkable to me now how much of my early life I spent watching sport on television, how deep and emotionally charged the investment in what I was watching.
It seems remarkable, I suppose, in part because of how quickly and absolutely I relinquished that love of sport in my later teens, and because of how long it stayed relinquished, all through my 20s and 30s. It was displaced by different enthusiasms, some more worthy than others, but nothing – not video games, not music, not films and not the literature that would eventually become my life and, somehow, livelihood – ever really matched the visceral joy and ecstatic anxiety of sport. Of witnessing, say, Packie Bonner save that penalty against Romania to put Ireland in the World Cup quarter finals, or Agassi come back after a first-set loss to win a quarter final match against Boris Becker.
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My mind is on all of this because I’m thinking about how, in recent years – this summer in particular – I’ve started to return to it. During Spain’s exhilarating defeat of France in the World Cup semi-final earlier this week, I realised I was roaring at the television in a way I hadn’t done since my early teens. And I’d somehow forgotten how exciting watching a tennis match could be, even when you have no special prior commitment to either of the players. It’s strange, and sort of delightful, how watching a game almost always involves a capricious process of investing allegiance in one or other team or player, for reasons that are often unconscious, and maybe don’t even matter that much in the end.
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In 1978, during a particularly volatile interlude of Italy’s so-called Years of Lead – the chaotic political violence that gripped the country between the late 1960s and the late 1980s – Umberto Eco wrote a mordantly satirical essay called “The World Cup and its Pomps”. Eco was writing in the immediate aftermath of the kidnapping and eventual murder of the former prime minister Aldo Moro by the militant leftist Red Brigades. The competition was held that summer in Argentina, which was going through violent convulsions of its own, with the CIA-backed military dictatorship “disappearing” tens of thousands of socialists, trade unionists, and student protesters – a campaign of terror which did not cease for the period of the World Cup.
“At a moment like this,” he wrote, “concerning oneself with the running of the government is traumatic. So faced with such a choice, we are all Argentines, and that handful of Argentinian nuisances who are still reminding us that, down there, people are ‘disappeared’ from time to time, should be more careful not to mar our pleasure in this sacred mystery play.” He might well have been writing about this World Cup; he might well have been referring to the killing by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican construction worker, in Houston, just a few miles from NRG Stadium where, only three days earlier, Morocco had eliminated Canada from the World Cup in the round of 16.
I found myself literally gripping the armrests of the seat I was in, clutching them as though the sheer force of the tension ... might cause me to levitate
Although for 90 minutes, or for five sets, it might offer a kind of temporary escape from worldly concerns, sport is obviously no more aloof from politics than art or any other human endeavour. It’s hard to think of a better – which is to say, worse – example here than the ignominious spectacle of Donald Trump waving an imperial hand in the direction of Fifa, decreeing the annulment of USA striker Folarin Balogun’s red card. There is nothing that is outside of politics, and the idea that sport could ever transcend the political is itself a political idea.
I will say here, as an aside, that although I have never much cared for combat sports, and least of all the frantic and frivolous brutality of MMA, I must at least nod in wary respect toward the blood-spattered cage, because by what other means would we get to witness, as we did last week, Conor McGregor suffering an agonising and decisively debilitating injury while failing to kick a guy in the face? My cheap relish at this cheap spectacle is, of course, also political.
But there is also a pure escape, a total transportation, that no other field of human endeavour is quite so capable of providing as sport. Watching Coco Gauff and Karolina Muchova’s madly riveting Wimbledon semi-final last week, I found myself literally gripping the armrests of the seat I was in, clutching them as though the sheer force of the tension of the final tie-break – its seemingly endless back-and-forth of match points, its fleeting establishments and squandering of leads – might cause me to levitate if I didn’t keep a tight hold of the furniture.
Umberto Eco might not approve of my saying so, but I didn’t think about politics once all that afternoon. I didn’t think about anything but the game, and who was going to win it.
Source: The Irish Times
