January 2nd 2024
Sports Day
Yesterday, when I awoke, the plan was I was going to kick off the year by writing a piece about New Year’s resolutions.
Instead, I spent all day watching sport on TV.
And when I say I spent all day watching sport on TV I do mean all day. Twelve hours, pretty much, from the first kick-off to the final final whistle, across four different live games, in two very different sporting codes.
Now even if you really do not “get” sport (and I know many, many people who do not see sport the way I see sport), please do try and stay with me here, because although it would be easy to argue that I have completely wasted all of January 2nd 2024, I very much want to beg to differ.
This is because, as a writer of drama (and comedy), I love sport because of the stories sport can tell. At its best (and its worst) sport can do, unscripted, what I spend most of my working life trying to craft.
And yesterday was a gift to me, as a writer.
To set the scene, on January 2nd 2024, I watched three games of American college football and one game of actual football. I started with the Fiesta Bowl, between the Oregon Ducks and the Liberty Flames. I channel-surfed between this and an English Premier League match between Liverpool and Newcastle United. The rest of the day was taken up with the two CFP Semi-final games: the Rose Bowl, between the Michigan Wolverines and the Alabama Crimson Tide; and the Sugar Bowl, between the Washington Huskies and the Texas Longhorns.
If these names mean nothing to you, that is quite okay. But again, hang in here with me.
And let me be clear, as we tiptoe into this labyrinth, that none of the teams involved in any of the games I watched yesterday are teams I ‘support’ in the sense of having a long-term emotional attachment to them. I quite like College Football because these are young players with a dream of untold riches ahead of them, so they tend to try and impress by doing the improbable, which makes them more interesting than the NFL, by which time a lot of those instincts have been trained out of them. And I do have a soft spot for Liverpool, but only because the team I actually support is too crap to be in the Premier League. It’s kind of like how in cricket New Zealand is every other team’s second favourite team.
But back to my day of sporting nothingness.
The Fiesta Bowl. The Oregon Ducks versus the Liberty Flames. For many this would be a meaningless, season-ending, money-spinning event. For those playing the game it is a last shot at glory for the season, whilst hoping not to be injured if you’re going into the NFL Draft. For me, at 7am on January 2nd 2024, it was the very definition of America in a Presidential election year.
Oregon. A public university in a left-wing, Democrat-held state that is, apparently, the birthplace of Antifa in the USA. Also being called the Ducks is just so cute and not very threatening.
Liberty. A private evangelical Christian university in Lynchburg, Virginia, training “champions for Christ”. It has an Honor Code (the “Liberty Way”) that bans every human instinct you would expect a Christ-champion-training facility to want to ban. Also, the Flames, as a team name, brings to mind some pretty unsavoury imagery of angry white men carrying tiki torches.
Heroes and villains. That’s what drama is about, right? So I watched the Fiesta Bowl for political reasons and I was duly rewarded when the Ducks extinguished the Flames to the tune of 45-6.
Sorry Christ, but sometimes there is a God.
But I still reserve the right to worry that the Presidential election will not follow the same playbook.
I enjoyed the Liverpool/Newcastle football match as much for the football as for the fact that, on January 2nd 2024 (NZT), a bunch of hugely-overpaid prima-donnas are attempting to play the Beautiful Game in the shittiest weather, in Liverpool, in January.
The dramatic takeaway from Liverpool v Newcastle, for me at least, is that it is important for your characters to suffer. If your characters are earning millions of dollars, by kicking a ball into a net, then doing it in the rain and the sleet and the gloom of mid-winter, post-industrial, post-Empire England seems only fair. Thus, every time they fall down and cry and roll around on the wet grass; or flap their hands as they yell at the referee, I am warmed by the knowledge they are freezing their nuts off as they do so.
Anyway, Liverpool won 4-2 to go top of the table. Mo missed a penalty but was not put off by this when he stepped up to score the next penalty, which was kind of heroic in a classical sense. There were a few of those football stand-offs where the rich kids look angrily at each other before they look angrily at the referee because their feelings have been hurt by all the angry looking. Then Jurgen lost his wedding ring as he thanked the fans but luckily he found it again. Meanwhile I was off to catch more of the American version of football.
As a quick aside, here are two things about American football I still struggle to understand: (a) why you need 500 players and coaches and support staff (and Matthew McConaughey if your team is Texas) on the sidelines; and (b) just because you’re wearing a helmet doesn’t make leading with your head in the tackle a good idea.
Game 1 of the CFP thingy was a great reminder that in storytelling, as in college football, having your protagonist and your antagonist equally matched leads to great dramatic tension. Michigan and Alabama went back and forth right to the final whistle, and then beyond, before Michigan edged it in overtime. Football (and drama) were the winners on the day.
Then Game 2 managed to flip the script by having Washington look like they were going to walk away with it, only for them to start to get cutesy on it, which seemed to piss off Texas to the point where they came back and almost stole it. When you are down to 1 second on the clock and Texas have 1 shot to win, then you have crafted a great ending. But they didn’t and the 500 people on the Washington benches ran all over the field looking very happy and relieved.
All in all, a day that reaffirmed my belief that sport is drama and fuelled my desire to write drama about sport.
So thank you January 2nd 2024. A job well done, even if I actually did nothing.
PS: for some follow-up study about sport and life maybe you might want to read this lovely piece by the late, great Clive James.