How can we make sports better – more exciting, safer, simpler, more interesting, more popular, more unpredictable? I am away from home and my books, and so thought to write on this less serious subject. Oops! Sorry. I know many people think there is no more serious subject than sport. Bill Shankly, the famous Scottish manager of Liverpool Football Club, once said, “Football is not a matter of life and death. It’s much more important than that.” (He pronounced this transcendental game “foyba”.)
I also know that my opening question contains contradictions. Safer and more exciting might be incompatible. In ancient times people loved watching gladiators fighting to the death, and there is no reason to suppose they would not love it today. I am told that at motor races the biggest crowds gather at the places there is most likely to be a fatal accident. Nor do many people necessarily want sports outcomes to be unpredictable. Polls among English soccer fans show that they would much rather their own team won a boring game 1-0 than lost a thrilling game 3-4. Nonetheless I’m going to try to think of ways of changing the rules and the judging of sports to improve them. Most of the time I shall not succeed. There is only one sport I know that could be greatly improved by a simple change. The list of sports below is arbitrary.
Soccer. Soccer or football is an excellent game. It has mainly simple rules; it is clean, free-flowing and open, so that everybody can see exactly what is going on; it is exciting and occasionally unpredictable. Sometimes low-ranked teams beat high-ranked ones, sometimes they win leagues unexpectedly. The big problem, perhaps not such a problem, is the off-sides rule. In the defending team’s half, there must be at least two defenders between the ball and the goal. If not, the defenders get a penalty kick. This rule is artificial and, as far as I can see, intended purely to make the game more entertaining. Without it, as far as I understand, each team would concentrate on defence, with only one or two attackers standing permanently next to the other team’s goal, waiting for the occasional long kick. I wish I could think of a way round it. I cannot.
Rugby Union. Rugby is the inverse of soccer. The game seldom flows freely. It is often impossible to see what is going on in the scrums. The rules are immensely complicated, ever-changing, and somewhat mysterious, suggesting that only the elect can understand them. I was caught up in the fervour of the recent World Cup and watched the whole final between the Springboks and the All Blacks. Not once did I understand why the referee had blown his whistle. In fact, not once when he awarded a penalty kick did I understand why he had done so or even which side had got the penalty. He was considered a very good ref. The man must be a genius. The way to make rugby more free-flowing would be to do away with the scrum and replace it with something quicker, simpler and more open, such as they have in rugby league. But that would “change the character of the sport”. This was a phrase used by Henry Cooper, a British boxer, when a journalist suggested boxing could be made safer if you were only allowed to punch to the body. Neither rugby fans nor boxing fans would like the character of the sport to be so changed.
Cricket and baseball. If you think cricket is boring, you should go to a baseball game. At school I was useless at cricket and scared of the hard ball, but many friends were cricket enthusiasts and told me that the game was deeply interesting and full of subtle physical and psychological skills that need to be studied to be appreciated. I have been to one big cricket match, South Africa vs Australia at Newlands a few years ago, and one big baseball game, Washington vs Baltimore in Washington a few years before that. I can tell you that the cricket match was positively pulse-racing compared with the baseball game. If you just see bits of baseball from American TV, or hear about legends such as Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio, you get the impression that it is thrilling. It is not.
Runs
In cricket, runs are scored frequently and in large numbers. In baseball, runs happen seldom. There are two reasons. In cricket the bat has a large run-scoring surface, in baseball the bat has a tiny such surface. The baseball bat is completely round, and only a few degrees of its circumference can score runs. In cricket, the batters can score runs 360º about them, forward, backward, to their sides. (We must now refer to the batter not the batsman – here’s to you, Laura Wolvaardt.) In baseball, the batters can only score 90º in front of them; otherwise the ball is out of play. The result is that even the most highly skilled batter – and many are highly skilled – seldom scores runs. The fielders in baseball have big catching gloves in their left hands (if they are right-handed). They are super-accurate at throwing and never miss at catching. This adds to the boredom. And to make things worse, the game is played in a spirit of almost unbearable good sportsmanship and courtesy. None of the players I saw ever even got excited. Nobody questioned the referee’s decision. Actually, I never even heard a referee call a decision. Even when a batter reached the base at what looked to me the same time as the fielder caught the ball, he just quietly walked off if he thought he was out. No “Howzat!” or indeed any outcry at all. In fact, I realised later, I don’t think I ever saw a ref. The only excitement at the stadium was an electronic ribbon around the stands that occasionally lit up with adverts and artificial enthusiasm. I would have been bored stiff if it had not been for the novelty of the game for me. I found out later that the rest of the crowd would have found the game as boring as I had if they had been watching it, which they had not. You could make baseball more exciting if you replaced the baseball bat with a cricket bat and allowed the batter to score in any direction he wanted, but then there is that “character of the game” thing again. Anyway, the boredom of baseball does not matter.
Apparently, nobody goes to baseball stadiums to watch the game. They go there for the company, to meet friends, to engage in good-humoured social rituals, and to eat a lot of hotdogs and drink a lot of beer – even if it is Budweiser. Off the field, though, there seems to be immense interest in the game for the science and statistics of it. Cricket is the same in this respect. I seem to recall that at top cricket matches there used to be some expert with a big ledger (now a spreadsheet on a laptop, I suppose) filling in runs, catches, innings and other data in detail. Sometimes the commentator, familiar with the history of cricket mathematics, would announce in a hushed voice, “This is only the third time since 1957 that a left-handed batter, coming in at number seven, has scored more than 50 runs towards the railway end”. I can imagine getting sucked into that sort of thing. I think Woody Allen feels that way about baseball statistics.
Favourite sport
Boxing. This is my favourite sport, and one of the few sports where I was not absolutely useless. It’s a lovely game with simple rules and it’s easy to understand. We should be real about it though. Despite the fact that there have been more films and stories about boxing than any other sport, it is not really very heroic or romantic. Based simply on his record, I believe Harry Greb, world middle-weight champion, 1923-6, was the greatest boxer of all. He was not poetry in motion, quite the opposite. He was a ferocious brawler, blindingly fast. He was asked what he thought about “the noble art of self-defence”. He replied, “Listen, boxing ain’t all that noble, and I ain’t all that artistic.” Both statements were true. (He once sparred with Jack Dempsey, then heavyweight champion of the world, and completely outboxed him. Dempsey refused to give him a championship shot.)
Boxing is criticised as being dangerous but in fact horse riding is over a hundred times more dangerous. Critics of boxing say, “Yes, but in boxing the intention is to hurt your opponent.” That’s true. The horse usually does not intend to hurt anyone. But I doubt that would be of much consolation to a parent whose child had been accidently killed by a horse. (I’ve only ridden a horse a few times, and on each occasion I was scared stiff. I’ve felt far more fear on a horse’s back than I ever did in a boxing ring.) The main danger in boxing is to the brain. Boxers, unlike rugby-players, seldom sustain any injuries other than brain injuries, and these are rare – tragic but rare. There is a simple way to reduce them: get rid of boxing gloves. Go back to bare-fist fighting, as in the 19th Century. The boxing glove protects the hands of the puncher and the skin and face of the punched but seems to impart more percussion to the brain, and it is this that does the harm. With bare-fist boxing, there would be more blood, more broken noses and broken hands, but less brain damage.
Tennis. This is the only sport where I know how to improve the game. Tennis is already a very good game. It is open, interesting, simple and easy to understand. The big problem with tennis is that the game nearly always goes to the server. This is so much the case that when the receiver wins a game, she or he is said to have “broken service” – emphasising that it is an unusual event. For two evenly matched players, service is hardly ever broken, and there is a high level of predictability that the server will win any game. How to change this and make the sport less predictable and more exciting? Simple. Allow one serve only. If badminton, squash and table tennis have one serve only, why should tennis have two? With only one serve, the tennis server would have to make a fine calculation: try a hard, winning serve and risk its being out, or try an easy serve, sure to go in, and risk the opponent being able to exploit it. It would take most of the server’s advantage away and give more games to the receiver, so making the game less predictable and more exciting.
Judging and scoring. All sports require a referee or an umpire, and a system of scoring. Could these be improved, to make them fairer, more accurate and quicker? Again, this can become self-contradictory. More accurate and quicker can be opposites. In tennis, the camera line judge is an unalloyed good. The human eye cannot always tell whether the ball was in or out. The camera can. Dodgy calls and outbursts from such as John McEnroe should now be a thing of the past. Cameras in rugby are a different matter. Here the camera has to judge not a simple thing, such as whether the ball was in or out, but a complicated thing, such as whether some obscure rule has been violated in the dark depths of the scrum. The camera has a better eye than the human ref but a far from perfect one. The complaint is made that appealing to the camera ref takes too long and holds up the flow of the game. Better, the critics say, that the human referee quickly makes a bad decision than the camera slowly makes a less bad one. After all, they say, bad refereeing decisions are all part of the rich tapestry of rugby, in the same way that bum decisions are part of the rich tapestry of boxing (see below).
Knockout
Unless there is a knockout, boxing matches are decided by judges. In professional boxing, each round is decided by an impression, not by counting punches. The winner gets 10 points, the loser 9 or less. This is about the best system I can think of, much better than the wretched system used in Oympic boxing, where they actually do count effective punches. But boxing is cursed by bum decisions, sometimes outrageous ones. Max Schmelling clearly beat Jack Sharkey in their second encounter, Joe Walcott clearly beat Joe Louis in their first encounter, and Ken Norton clearly beat Muhammad Ali in their third. Yet the judges said the opposite in each case. Outrageous. How to stop this? Hold judges to tighter account I suppose.
If bum decisions are part of the colourful tapestry of boxing, even more colourful is corruption, often caused by the mob, which sometimes paid for fights to be fixed. Damon Runyon, in New York in the 1930s, wrote a short story entitled, “One of those things”. The champion was going to fight a challenger. The challenger did not stand a chance. But word got around town that you should bet on the challenger nonetheless because the fight was going to be – tap, tap – “one of those things”. On the day, the arena was full of expectant punters. The bell rang and the champion knocked the challenger out with one punch. There was a stricken silence. Somebody had forgotten to tell the champion that the fight was “one of those things”.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend