The sporting spirit

The Greatest

The Quest for Sporting Perfection

Matthew Syed

Hachette 

287 pages; Rs 399

The idea of collating their newspaper columns into a book is a common feature among today’s journalists, buffeted as they are by falling readership and the onslaught of technology. While it might make sense to do so, if for no other reason than to have everything one has written in one place, such books cannot allow for the sort of long-form ratiocination that is, well, the raison d’être of writing a book in the first place.

Matthew Syed is a sports journalist who has written for The Times of London for close to two decades. In The Greatest, he has compiled columns that give ballast to his central thesis: Sport is a timeless human activity that remains, in an agreeable paradox, altogether contemporary, permitting us to distil the raging social, political and cultural debates of the day. 

The book is divided into five sections but it tackles broadly two themes. One, the ability of sport to both give free rein to and keep in check mankind’s more atavistic instincts. Of the many columns that explore this line of thought, the one on Andy Murray’s victory over Juan Martin del Potro at Olympics 2016 is the most affecting. “I suspect that people up and down Britain, and perhaps in Argentina, too, were shedding tears,” Mr Syed writes about the outcome of that marathon match.

Mr Syed repeatedly calls sport “trivial”, writing at one point: “Hitting a tennis ball is not like inventing a vaccine.” Yet, the triviality of sport, he concedes, is a façade, a cover for a story of blood and guts that plays out in the public sphere, be it the gladiatorial combat of the Roman Empire or the deafening silence in the stands when Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal are up against one another.

Beyond this, The Greatest delves into the political ramifications of sport, its unique ability to, on the one hand, bring into the mainstream otherwise closed societies like China and, on the other, celebrate athletic success regardless of the markers that traditionally divide us. In a column he penned in 2012 called “Football and War”, Mr Syed recounts the experience of Robert Earnshaw, the Wales striker who was playing for Maccabi Tel Aviv on loan from Cardiff City at the time.

“On Sunday morning, we were just coming out of the dressing room when it happened again,” Mr Earnshaw told Mr Syed. “The sirens, and the shouts to find shelter. We heard the sound of two missiles being launched…It’s not something you ever think will happen to you. It’s not something I expected to find myself in, in the middle of a war.”

Sportsmen and soldiers are perhaps the only category of professionals who are required to be in hostile territory, and while we stand in unison to celebrate the courage of soldiers, it is the sportsman’s presence on enemy territory, as, for example, the charged cricketing encounters between India and Pakistan, that brings out something far more visceral in the spectator.

In the book’s final section, “Icons”, Mr Syed celebrates those men and women whose sporting triumphs refracted, for good or ill, their personal lives. This turned out to be my favourite part of the book — Mr Syed’s voice here is generous, balancing praise and criticism to fashion outstanding portraits of sporting superstars. Each of the profiles — of Billie Jean King and Andre Agassi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Tiger Woods — is eminently readable, but it is the one on Muhammad Ali that, not to belabour the point, hits the ball out of the park. 

Written right after Ali’s death in June, 2016, “Unquestionably The Greatest” succinctly relates the fascinating life story of a man whose dominance in the ring was only one of the many hats he donned — civil rights campaigner, anti-Vietnam protestor, and in later life, an advocate for sufferers, like himself, of Parkinson’s disease. Ali was never one for temperance. In the 1970s, he hobnobbed with the Ku Klux Klan — as a member of the Nation of Islam, he believed that whites and blacks could not live in proximity. 

Yet, it was Ali’s sheer malice in the ring that Mr Syed most damningly spotlights. He separately profiles Joe Frazier, who lost to Ali in “The Thrilla in Manila” in 1975. Ali severely taunted Frazier in the run-up to the fight, wounding Frazier’s pride. On the 30th anniversary of the bout, Frazier said in an interview: “There were bruises in my heart because of the words he used. I spent years dreaming about him and wanting to hurt him.” The physical injuries had long since healed but the psychological damage that Ali wrought on Frazier took far longer to alleviate.

On balance, The Greatest is worth purchasing solely for this final section. Mr Syed, who has written other sporting books, is a gifted writer whose ideas do not suffer on account of being restricted to bite-sized chunks written to fit pricey print real estate.