WHEN THE NUMBERS ARE THE STORY

Rolando Prats-Paez

           As every four years, these days of World Cup the metaphor that the world has shrunk into a ball —a football, for that matter, or a soccer ball, depending on which side of the English Ocean you are looking from at the customarily called “world’s biggest sports event”—is an acceptable stretch. It goes without saying that the number of those who avidly, or even rabidly, follow this event would always pale compared to that of those who can do without, by ignorance or will, but also that among the first group there surely are much more casual or newborn fans than those that any other sport would attract on a comparable occasion. The latter may have to do with both the fact of the immediate beauty of this game (which from this point on we are going to call soccer, in order not to alienate the American reader), a beauty easily perceptible but also realizable in its no less immediate fluidity, and the circumstance that four years is a time long enough to invest with aura or prestige whatever happens with such, rarer by the day, infrequency. Let's not forget that the quality of the infrequent is intrinsic to the game itself, for in soccer goals are scored with incomparable less recurrence (ability?) than points in basketball, football (the American one, that is), volleyball ..., or runs in baseball, even though the final score of a baseball game can be 1-0 or, most of the time, any combination of two numbers bigger than that but smaller than, say, twelve. A beauty, it must be added, embedded in the intertwined play between the simplicity of both the object of the game and the means to achieve it, on the one side, and the complexity of the task, on the other. Basketball too is quite a simple game, but points in basketball are scored with such relative easiness that even when a player has practically no chance of missing the target he or she would take the time and the care to add, through acrobatics, some luster to an otherwise standard fare. Soccer, no doubt, has its own subtleties or intricacies, yet for the most part they are of the virtual kind —what an individual player or a team formation can do or could have done in a particular situation. Whoever watches a soccer match for the first time is most likely bound to grasping all the essentials as well as the intangibles of the game before the first half is over. For in soccer either you attack or you defend, either you pass the ball or you shot it at the goal, either you foul or are fouled, either you score or, most often than not, you fail to. And that’s it. The rest is running out of breath or, even worse, running out of time. Thus, as even getting a credible shot at shooting at the goal with some margin of success is only slightly less difficult than scoring proper, soccer is at the same time a game high in drama and suspense but more than relatively poor in statistics, that is, in performance indicators. Times that, say, Ronaldo has got a cross in the right side of the box during the game’s last ten minutes and failed either to score or to pass it back, anyone? Thus, bis, the place than in soccer memories or preferences have over naked, dry records, opinions over facts, leanings over logic—and over logs.

            Last Sunday, for instance, I watched England play Ecuador. A mere eleven minutes had passed since Ecuador had kicked off the ball when one of its players, Carlos Tenorio, was found wide open by a long pass before seeing his shot hit the crossbar after the British Ashley Cole deflected it at the last second. Ecuadorians would not have a better shot at scoring for the rest of the game, which England would finally win propelled by what The New York Times dubbed “a wickedly curving” free kick by David Beckham in the sixtieth minute, “as perhaps only he can.” You can bet that, back in Ecuador, fans and journalists alike will endlessly mourn the golden opportunity lost by Tenorio, as well as their goalkeeper’s bad luck, for “one inch more toward the middle of the net and Mora would have got [Beckham’s kick].”[2] No less endlessly, perhaps, than fans back in England about Beckham's even more golden free kick. Over time, memories of the game will surely fade, yet do not expect its result, tout court, England 1 – Ecuador 0, to get a better afterlife, much less to enter the lore of numbers that are the true story[3].

            Which takes me back to the statement about soccer as a game whose fans mostly live on a diet rich in personal memories and unchecked opinions —Ronaldinho better than Ronaldo better than Maradona better than Beckenbauer better than Pelé? No records book will ever settle such arguments; not at least the way you can settle one about Carl Lewis versus Ben Johnson—, which is good for the sport of arguing but not for the better knowledge of sports, and forward to a recent example I experienced, during an email exchange, of soccer’s often ineffable tale. Was Maradona’s second goal against England during the final game of the WC 86 in Mexico —the so-called barrilete cósmico, or cosmic comet[4]­—the best goal ever, as many seem to agree on? It could be. However, as making a list of the top ten or one hundred best goals of all time would be as futile and tricky an exercise as making a similar list using novels, songs, or movies, and as I —a baseball fan after all, a sport in which the closer equivalent of a goal would be a home run, the longer the blast the better— find more beauty or excitement in long, beam-like shots (see, for instance, Zidane’s left-foot volley against Bayer Leverkusen during the 2002 Champions League Final in Glasgow, or Ronaldinho’s last minute goal vs. AC Milan, during a UEFA Champions League group game, on November 11, 2004 ... to mention only two), the argument was over before it ever started in earnest, for if there was a way to enjoy it there was not any to win it.

            Which keeps taking me forward, this time to the humble, almost self-proving hypothesis that there exist at least two types of sports, or perhaps only one, for I would question that the sports gathered in the second group are sports proper —were we to follow the etymology of the word, that is: sport (v.) c.1400, “to take pleasure, to amuse oneself,” from Anglo-Fr. disport, from O.Fr. desport “pastime, recreation, pleasure,” from desporter “to divert, amuse, please, play [...]”[5]—, or games in which physical abilities and technical skills are certainly of the essence but whose main value resides in their power to produce entertainment, or, if you wish, a form of social theater in which everybody, players as well as fans, spontaneously plays themselves yet following strict rules.

            1) Sports played primarily for show, thanks to their aesthetic or entertaining value, and the manifold skills and the toughness, physical and mental, required to play them: soccer, football, basketball, volleyball, hockey ... These are sports, or games, whose historical records are a luxury, not a necessity, a sort of talking bonus for the benefit of sportswriters rather than fans: Michael Jordan is an icon and a brand whose exploits live on replays, photos, witnesses’ memories, rather than hard numbers, iconic, brand records, even though he has as respectable a number as the highest points per game career scoring average: 30.1 PPG, which he shares with Wilt Chamberlain; His Airness will be remembered more for his six NBA championships (a team record for that matter) than for having topped ten times the season’s scoring list; he ranks only fifth on the all-time one. There are not much more relevant or meaningful statistics in basketball than in soccer, football, volleyball ... a dozen or two, or even less most often than not. No wonder that soccer, football, and basketball are among the most popular in the world —provided that the U.S. demographics are added to the equation—, for they have benefited, and will continue to benefit, from both the loyalty of their fan base and the easily-induced curiosity of the casual fan, the nonprofessional fan —the professionalization of sports has translated into the professionalization of fanhood—, for the passer-by doesn’t need to understand the inner workings of the game, and that for a reason: it has none. What you see is what you get: rules so simple and self-explanatory that to enjoy watching the game, or, better, a game —regardless of season, records, all-time history—, you just have to watch, with no less nonchalance than the one at play in doing peoplewatching from a sidewalk terrace at a Paris brasserie. These are sports because these are games, no more, no less: they are not driven by the quest for overcoming human barriers, they are not consubstantially indebted, both textually and numerically, to their own history, they are not played against nature but after society, they have become showbiz.

            2) Sports played, or rather, performed, against both opponents and records, like track and field, swimming, weightlifting, even cycling. These sports are played against their own history —one that is simultaneously cultural and natural—, but also against nature, or their practitioners’ against itself. Thus, winning a tournament or a medal can guarantee the winner a place in the books of history, yet only by breaking a record one may add a link to their nature’s chain. In this sense, these sports could be compared to applied sciences; they are, in a way, competitive applied science: their main use lies not in producing knowledge for its own sake but in developing technology through problem-solving—in the case at hand, the human body, and a target skill or two, is the machine or technology that can and should be improved. Without records to break, for all practical purposes most of these sports would be if not totally unwatchable at least unfollowable, for if there certainly can be fun in watching a 100-meter race, there would not be way to tell a Carl Lewis from a Maurice Green if it were not for the records. Looked at closely, not even the thrill of record-breaking can save swimming from its fatally flawed ability to entertain: under the water all icebergs are wet[6]. Or, these are undertakings in which the process of achieving something is of a lesser relevance than what is achieved: the beauty of the action counts less than the truth of the result. These are not sports in the etymological sense of the word, but controlled experiments put on public display for both confirmation and peer review. In these experiments chance, bad calls (e.g., Australia vs. Italy’s outrageous penalty call, to the latter’s benefit), opinions, emotions... matter little, if any. To these experiments fanhood is rather of a background-noise quality. More importantly, in these experimental sports the heroes—to resort to Daniel S. Milo’s thesis about the possibility of “reading novels as experimental protocols”[7]—are also guinea pigs; moreover, they are expected to be monomaniacs of the kind defined by Milo as ones supposed to “[be] but 'this', do but 'that'”[8], that is, to be one-dimensional, for while in sports such as soccer or basketball a Zinedine Zidane or a Michael Jordan are expected and even asked to double, in and off the field, as playwrights and actors of their own legends (some even complaint, in the case of Jordan, about the fact that he is not, or seems to want to be, but a basketball player), in others like swimming or cycling, par contre, a Mark Spitz or a Lance Armstrong are expected or asked to do but one thing: to test a thesis on themselves —that is, how many more Olympic medals or races you can win, how further you can break the records: how much faster, how much farther, how much longer—, or, to go from performance to record and back[9]. 

*****

            The overwhelming majority of my colleagues at work are either from Spain or South America.  Except for an aberration or two —a Spaniard who neither likes nor understands (sic) soccer—, or a mutant or two —an Argentinean whom long years in America may have finally drawn to baseball beyond the threshold of touristic curiosity— they are soccer animals. Among them, for those who have any, the opinions, or mere reflexes, about baseball are not terribly imaginative:  a quiet, slow, quasi pastoral or bucolic sport (it all may mean little more than “simply abstruse” or “plain boring”) in which very little or nothing (sic) happens[10], or so it seems. In other words, another instance of American parochialism. It would be unfair to everybody’s lack of time, though, to expect from my colleagues to be aware of the fact that baseball is not only the most popular sport in countries as diverse as Cuba and Japan, South Korea and Venezuela, but also that in some of these countries it has been practiced for over 100 or 150 years. Were I in their shoes —but then again, precisely because of baseball I may be too analytical of things that are not worth a serious thought, like baseball— I guess that I would ask myself, at least, one thing: how is it that America, the land of the free and the home of the brave but increasingly, too, the Mecca of the fast, happens to like baseball and harbor so many people who still consider it, by mental habit or nostalgia—it has become an article of faith that American football is the most popular spectator sport in the United States—, the national pastime? As I am in my own shoes, what I wonder is whether my colleagues take my love of soccer, and my above-average knowledge of the game, as proof that baseball, after all, cannot be anybody’s religion[11]. If soccer is a religion among its faithful, then it must be said that baseball is one too, only that soccer is monotheistic —there is no God but Goooaaaaaal—, while baseball is pagan, quasi Homeric:  Odysseus, the man of many turns, can afford reaching back home plate but on the backs of as many gods as possible: from a home run or an extra base hit through a single—be it a line drive, a ground ball, a bloop, or a broken bat—, a walk or base on balls, a hit by pitch, a bunt, a steal, a hit and run, a balk, an interference, and infield error, even a wild pitch or a passed ball after a strikeout. Or, to put it à la Clausewitz: getting on base is the continuation of hitting the ball out of the park by other means.

            These are claims that no other sport can plausibly make: soccer does, because of the demographics of its popularity and the apparent universality of its aesthetic appeal; baseball, because of the variety of the skills at stake —there is no such thing as a 5-tool soccer player, it simply is  neither needed nor allowed by the game’s hands-off rules, yet in baseball such thing is the most searched-after commodity: a player who excels at hitting for average, hitting for power, base running and speed, throwing and fielding—, and both the beauty of the movements and plays and its situational richness: there is as much allure or artistry in a goal as there can be in a home run, a double play, a diving or sliding or leaping catch, a throw to the home plate that beats the runner or is beaten  by him, a perfectly executed bunt, a squeeze, a called third strike to kill a rally or end a game ... all of them twice as beautiful as themselves: for if any of them is a treat for the eyes under any circumstance, each of them can be, under certain circumstances, the game’s decisive play; something forbidden to soccer, where a pass alone can not decide anything. On the other hand, if soccer’s rules consist of 17 so-called Laws of the Game —whoever visits the official website of the FIFA, the French acronym of the International Football Association Board, would see a 84-page booklet in PDF format, of which the rules or laws governing what may happen in the playing field as such are all covered by page 57—, the index of the Official Rules of Baseball covers 10 major chapters or sections, from 1.00 (Objectives of the Game) through 10.00 (The Official Scorer); “Objectives of the Game” alone goes from 1.01 through 1.17. The longest set of rules in baseball runs through .24, including letters, and both Arabic and Roman numerals[12]; the shortest does it through .05. Thus, in baseball there are not only such rules as 5.10(h), 7.09(k), or 8.05(m), or even 1.11(a)(1), but also 4.12(b)(3)(ii), or 6.02(d)(1)(viii).

            Says Charles Euchner:

            “Everything—the pitcher’s motion that medical researchers say involves the most violent act in all sports[13], the hitter’s complex calculations about speed and movement of a five-ounce ball traveling upwards of a hundred miles an hour, the swing of the bat that generates about ten horsepower of energy, the eight thousand pounds of force against the ball—happens so fast.

            “From the time the pitcher releases the ball to the time the ball arrives near the plate, sixty feet and six inches from the mound, only about four-tenths of one second elapses.

            “The batter has about half that time—two-tenths of a second—to decide what to do[14].”

            So much for baseball's slowness.

            Continues Michael Lewis:

            “The physical gifts required to play [baseball are], in some ways, less extraordinary than the mental ones. Only a psychological freak[15] could approach a 100-mph fastball aimed not that far from his head with total confidence[16].”

            So much for baseball's pastoral soul.

            What makes baseball, though, stand in a class of its own is neither physical gift nor psychological freakiness, but its Janus-like nature: as spectacular and suspenseful a show as there can be—in a baseball game no meaning is final until everything is said, in a conversation, for that matter, not bounded by time but framed by a last-word equal opportunity policy—, anchored in the autarchy of its clockless present, yet inherently turned toward its past, for baseball is not only the game of the one thousand and one records[17], it is also one whose achievements are not played against the odds of nature —Babe Ruth, the game’s most mythical figure, would not have passed, even at the peak of his career, the most lenient of the fitness tests nowadays, yet his unbeaten numbers, not his name, are his legend—but against the ghosts of history alone. A self-referential narrative at the same time diachronic and synchronic, for each game is played against history recorded and history in the making: baseball must be the only game whose every play, including foul balls, can and should be recorded and made sense of, not only because in baseball each situation is unique and the variables outnumber the odds, but also because every single play has a measurable impact in the final outcome and is commensurate with it[18]. Or, to put it in terms that would do homage and justice to the game's heart of darkness, in baseball everything is intertextual, even the commas.