APRIL 5 — Over the course of three days this weekend, I was fortunate enough to witness three different but equally exciting sporting contests.
The only one I actually attended in person was the most high-profile and glamorous of the three, Saturday’s La Liga clash between Barcelona and Real Madrid, which delivered the thrills and spills you would always expect from one of the world’s most eagerly anticipated events.
After a slow start, which saw Barcelona control possession without finding the breakthrough their play deserved, the game really exploded into life in the second half.
First, Gerard Pique headed home from a corner, sending the crowd of nearly 100,000 fans packed inside Europe’s largest stadium into raptures. But they were silenced a few minutes later when Karim Benzema hooked home a neat volley to equalise.
And although Madrid captain Sergio Ramos was then sent off, his team were now clearly in the ascendancy and, after Gareth Bale had a goal harshly disallowed for a non-existent foul, Cristiano Ronaldo blasted home a late winner to hand Barcelona their first defeat in nearly six months.
A night earlier, however, another branch of the Real Madrid sporting empire suffered a far less pleasant conclusion to their game, with the club’s basketball team losing a vital Euroleague game against fellow Spanish team Laboural Kutxa, whose Latvian forward Davis Bertans hit a brilliant game-winning three-point shot with four seconds remaining.
And my sporting weekend concluded with another spectacular ending: The West Indies beating England in the T20 Cricket World Cup final as Carlos Braithwaite hit four consecutive sixes in the final over — something which has probably never happened before in a professional game.
All three of those remarkable finishes showed why, in my belief, great sport is better than drama.
Shakespeare’s plays, Spielberg’s movies, Hemingway’s novels… they are all timeless works of art which can teach us valuable lessons about the human condition as well as keep us entertained.
But with its examples of triumph in the face of adversity, the wafer-thin dividing line between success and failure, the importance of teamwork and the ability of humans to reach deep within themselves and extract their highest possible level of performance, sport can do all those things as well.
And the great advantage that sport possesses over the creative arts is one simple but very powerful thing: It is spontaneous.
You will never see a performance of Othello which doesn’t end with Desdemona’s death; you will never read a version of The Great Gatsby where Nick and Jordan stay happily married; you will not find a viewing of Citizen Kane where Rosebud turns out to be the name of a house on the beach.
These elements have been settled and decided upon by their creators, never to be changed. When actors play their roles, there is room for a degree of artistic expression, but there isn’t room for improvisation. They stick to the story.
In sport, nobody knows how the story will unfold until it has happened — even the lead characters take the ‘stage’ hoping that their tale will finish in success, but fearing it might all end in despair.
Leicester City’s improbable, and now, seemingly inexorable ascent towards the Premier League title does not have a scriptwriter. And if it did, we would criticise him for creating a story which is far too unrealistic to be plausible — yet right now, in real life, the rags-to-riches tale of a group of unknowns rising to global prominence through hard work and talent is being played out before our eyes. But we still don’t know whether or not they’ll do it.
For this, we should value sport greatly. In addition to the thrill of watching elite athletes competing at the highest level of physical endeavour, sport provides us with a moral tapestry where personal and group conduct is examined and judged, before delivering us with a final verdict where sometimes the bad guys win, sometimes they lose, and different observers have different perceptions of who the bad guys are in the first place.
It is not and never has been fashionable or even acceptable to regard sport as a serious academic or artistic pursuit. Culturally, sport is looked down upon as a silly activity for the dumb lower classes.
I do not understand that attitude and think it needs to change. Sport can give so much to our lives, on so many levels. And one of those is its ability to provide us with real, unscripted, spontaneous drama where even the protagonists don’t know the ending. Storytelling doesn’t get better than that.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
