NICE GUYS FINISH LASTING WORK

“For when the One Great Scorer comes/To write against your name,/He marks – not that you won or lost,/But – how you played the game” (Grantland Rice, Alumnus Football).

I cannot but wonder why anyone follows – let alone pursues – sport. Save for a very, very few practitioners and punters, sport means recurrent disappointment or (in media histrionics) heartbreak, tears, tragedy, a shattered dream, the end of the world, etc. Even for Tiger Woods, even for Roger Federer, there is occasional “defeat” to weather along with the regular “victories” to be savoured. Dominating sportsmen like these inevitably begin to aim higher and then, if they do not manage to surpass some ancient record of achievement, they feel obscurely that they too have failed. Oh please. Take up gardening.

This weekend, apparently, Christine Hamilton (whose talent I have evidently underestimated) failed at the last to win some driving contest, having led the race all season. (I hadn’t known one race could go on so long). I guess she’s still a shoo-in for BBC Sports Personality of the Year, a title that I have always thought to be the most extreme contradiction of the multimedia age. Good grief, it’s been won in the past by a woman wholly devoid of personality, Princess Anne’s numbskull daughter, who proudly boasts that she’s never picked up a book in her life. (Sports Bore of the Year would be a much more close-run contest).

Before Christine’s shame, some bunch of rugger buggers was seen off in Paris by a team from a nation that surely needed the psychological boost of victory more than England did. I read that the English players had been so written off at the contest’s outset that, had they won, many bookmakers would have been bankrupted (aha, one tangible reason to have wished the English team good fortune). To have done as well as they did was apparently a remarkable achievement and “they can hold their heads up high” unless, like me, you think they should have grown out of such a schoolboy activity long ago. (I saw the English rugby captain on a news bulletin. He sports one of those so-called cauliflower ears that boxers always had in the comics of my childhood. Not attractive).

To pursue or follow any sport is to elect to spend almost all of your time sunk in dismay. After all, “there can only be one winner” (sport is of course rife with cliché). This means that trailing behind the winner is a crowded field of losers and also-rans, all of them disheartened, self-disgusted or proclaiming forlornly “we wuz robbed”. Most of them anyway are on steroids and other performance-enhancing (i.e. cheating) drugs. Why would any sentient human being want to subject his leisure hours – or worse, his (inevitably short-lived) career – to recurrent frustration?

I suppose the only comparable field is politics. J Enoch Powell, a shrewder observer than he was political operator, once declared that “all political careers end in failure” and with very few exceptions he must be deemed right on the money. Most politicians want to get their hands on one or two of the levers of power and, once having done so, begin to fancy their chances in the top job, be it president, prime minister or dictator-for-life. Consequently, almost all of them fail as the number that reaches what is sometimes called “the top of the greasy pole” is of course a vanishingly small proportion of those who think they might like a shot at it. Of those who do get to perform the top job, even fewer leave office with enhanced reputation and the enduring love of the people. There are barely any winners in politics, only better or worse losers.

Sport is not dissimilar. Even those who rise to be champions again and again inevitably continue to compete when their skills are waning and so at last fall to younger, fitter, hungrier contestants who want to become even more famous champions than those they supplant.

The arts offer so much more satisfying a field of endeavour. Of course there are meretricious awards and lists of supposed “greats” so that the media and, to a lesser extent, followers and consumers of the arts can feel that they have tamed the artists by providing a framework of competition and struggle and so a spurious sense of triumph and loss. That shrewd old bird, the Irish playwright Brian Friel, graciously accepting an Olivier award for his magical play Dancing at Lughnasa in 1991, declared to the assembled dignitaries: “Success is merely the postponement of failure”.

But happily the arts are not measured by the mechanistic standards of sport: score lines, worth totted up in points. In art, in self-expression, “success” and “failure” are far more complex and subtle notions than the winning of a tennis game “to love” or a golf match “four and three” or a cricket match “by an innings and 17 runs” or a wrestling bout by "two falls, two submissions or a knockout". Accordingly, books and paintings, movies and musical compositions, verses and dances, plays and programmes have a more lasting and mature relationship with their audiences than a sports event ever can. Of course sports fans mistily recall a George Best dribble, a Len Hutton cover drive, an Arnold Palmer sand chip, a Muhammad Ali upper cut and in such images lies the poetry – all the poetry – of sporting prowess. But who would prefer a whole season of flat racing to a single bar of Bach or a stanza of Shelley? Plenty of people, you reply, and I counter: “but they’re all STUPID people”.

And of course there are far more stupid people than the other kind, so sport is perceived to be more popular and newsworthy than the arts and therefore Doris Lessing, Nobel literature laureate (not in competition with anybody for that award), gets considerably less media coverage than the aforementioned Christine Hamilton. It seems to me, however, that Lessing brings far more credit to this country for the recognition of her extensive body of work over many years than does the failure of various journeymen in the objectively judged struggles of this week's sporting event. No motorcade to Trafalgar Square for Lessing. No special stamp issue. I hope there was a message from the Queen and a statement by the Prime Minister but I heard tell of neither. Lessing at least has this consolation: if there are humans still extant a hundred years from now, her work will still be read when all trace of Johnny Wilkinson – is that his name? – is forgotten.