The art of writing about sport.

First time I ever watched football a team with a lion as captain and a surly gorilla in goal were playing against a side whose striker was a leopard so fast he set the ground alight as he streaked across the pitch. I blame my complete lack of interest in real sport on exposure to art at an impressionable age; I must have been six when my dad took me to see Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks when mum was busy having my little sister. Compared with the pretend version, real sport was dull, drab, slow and completely lacking in burning leopards. Sport was never going to compete.

Trouble is, the arts can turn you into bit of a snob. Pretentious, pompous, solemn, the sort of person who pretends to be above all that running and jumping and kicking stuff. You think sport is for people who don’t get the finer things in life; who gather in mobs to cheer and jeer raucously at the opposing team (in the arts, dahling, we clap, appreciatively); who, for heavens sake, support Leeds United.

For quite a while that was me. I assiduously avoided the very mention of sport. I prided myself that I didn’t know the rules of any game or the names of any celebrity player. I couldn’t care less if “we” won or lost. I hadn’t a clue who “we” were, and I preferred to keep it that way. The only time I came close to enjoying sport – accidentally – was when I agreed to go see a film called ” Eight Men Out” without checking what it was about . . . not what I’d anticipated. Still, it was a very homosocial film, if you know what I mean.

But recently I’ve been thinking more about sport. Or about sport more, which is almost the same thing.

Not that I’ve actually seen any. You’ll not catch me gawping at a screen the size of a goalmouth in a shirt with a giant number on the back downloading the vuvuzela app anytime soon. I’ve been reading a book, that’s all. By a sports writer. It’s about as close as I care to come.

The book’s by a guy called Red Smith, and I only picked it up because I recognised his name as author of one of the most famous quotes I know, one that I’ve seen repeated in countless anthologies and books about writing. He famously said; “Writing is easy; you just sit in front of a typewriter and open a vein.” Anyone who could turn a sentence as neatly as that, I thought, couldn’t be all bad.

Smith wrote a sports column, often six days a week, for over forty years. And, on the evidence of the book I just read, a compilation of his best work, he was an artist, easily on a par with better known novelists and playwrights of the time. He mainly wrote on baseball, so not something that I have the teensiest interest in following. But reading him you get the impression he could have taken any subject and made it fascinating – any subject except men’s fashion, obviously. He may have been a genius, but even geniuses can’t do the impossible.

Partly it’s the way he tells them. Each small piece – they are only eight hundred or so words long – is a perfect little story relying on traditional story telling devices; specific scene, discrete action, vivid characters, and brilliant dialogue. The first piece I read contained a beautiful description of a baseball player “jumping four or fourteen feet into the air to make a catch,” who “stayed aloft so long he looked like an empty uniform hanging in its locker.” On the next page there’s a bureaucrat smiling “with the warmth of a brave man having splinters thrust under his fingernails.” And he always ends his tale with a nice little twist, such as the story he did about some player appealing against a suspension for throwing a temper tantrum; “If he does he’ll get a hearing,” Smith writes, “though it probably ought to be in juvenile court.”

But it’s mainly down to his attitude towards the subject and his commitment to his craft. This quote sums up his attitude:

France and Algeria heaved in ferment, South Americans chuckled rocks at the goodwill ambassador from the United States, Sputnik III thrust its nose into the pathless realms of space – and the attention of millions of baseball fans was concentrated on a grown man in flannel rompers swinging a stick on a Chicago playground called Wrigley Field.

He wasn’t mocking the fans of the guy in the funny get up or diminishing the gravity of the political situation. He was calling for a sense of proportion. Play is important in the big scheme of things.

Some intellectuals deem an interest in games evidence of arrested development . . . theirs is a foolish snobbery that exposes their own inability to see a whole, round world in which games have a part along with politics and science and industry and art

I’d like to see that quote above the desk of every Culture Vultures editor and contributor, I think it just about sums it up.

I think we could learn something from Red Smith’s writing habits too. The finished article sounds “so smooth, so natural, it reads as though you knocked it off while running for a bus,” he said. But he sweated blood to make it sound that relaxed, as though he was talking to you at the next bar stool. He once said that he wanted to make each word dance, and he knew exactly how much effort, discipline, and determination dancing took; much like the sports he loved, a lot of practice and sheer hard work went into making the performance look so beautifully easeful.

It puzzles me that so much writing about art is ugly, so much writing about culture yawningly banal, so much writing about style written without the slightest smidgen of style in evidence, and yet sport can produce a Red Smith. I doubt that I’ll ever care much about baseball, but I do care about writing. And I don’tthink there are many who mastered the art like Red Smith.