Sports fans come in many categories. There are the anoraks, those who can tell you the exact results of the 1988 FA Cup fifth round or the winning scores of the 1976 European Tour. There are the casual fans, those who will watch something if it's on, but who won't actually know the minutiae. And then there are those in between, those who will hold forth on subjects and know just enough about their subject to get by. I would hopefully count myself in that category, though others may beg to differ.
The classic wannabe question in a sport is "who is the best ever?". It sets off a debate, makes them seem more intelligent than they are, and conveys the impression that they have considerable knowledge about their field. In recent years, however, the growth of TV has moved sports in this direction. Forty years ago, almost no sport published rankings. Today, almost all of them do. The idea of "best ever" is here to stay.
The problem with this is that it is completely disingenuous, as "best ever" is almost unquantifiable. Sure, there are names that will forever be considered to be the top in their field. Think of Pele in football, Babe Ruth in baseball, or most obviously Muhammed Ali in boxing. Every talent since then gets compared to these.
It's human nature to compare things. Oasis spent most of their career being compared with The Beatles. Every dark fantasy novel is referred to as "the new Twilight". The problem is that in sport, while it seems easy enough to make a valid comparison, given that the rules of the game don't change, in practice no comparison ever is valid.
Tiger Woods has fourteen Majors to his name. Jack Nicklaus has eighteen. Ergo, Nicklaus is the best ever. However, this is flat wrong. If Woods, playing at his peak in the early part of this century, was to play against Nicklaus at his peak, there would be no contest. The Tiger would wipe the floor with the Golden Bear. The reason that Woods has yet to equal Nicklaus's record (he has plenty of time to do so) is because great though he is, he isn't as good relative to the rest of the field as Nicklaus was. Since Nicklaus's time, courses have been made longer and harder, and top golfers have moved from being semi-professional types to being full-time players who train from childhood.
The same applies to boxing. Much as people might like to dispute it, Lennox Lewis would probably have beaten Muhammad Ali if both fought at their peaks. Heavyweight boxing had simply moved to a different level. Of course, the most obvious field that this is shown in is athletics, as records continue to fall with every World Championship or Olympics. It is just over fifty years since Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile. Now hundreds of people have done it.
However, there is a flip side to all of this. In Pele's time, football boots were poorly made lumps of metal with nails in them. Nowadays, the things are designed on computers. Similarly, when Jack Nicklaus went out with his three woods, the things were actually made of wood, unlike the titanium affairs of modern times. The switch from wooden racquets to metal ones in tennis coincided with a change in the gameplay to focus on serving rather than rallying, as metal racquets gave players increased hitting power. The fact is that the differences in ethos, training and equipment make comparisons over extended time periods worthless.
A second question arises when we move from looking at the best ever to the best of the moment. World rankings in sports are a comparatively recent invention. Golf's ranking system only started in 1986. The reason they became useful in certain sports was twofold. Firstly, the sheer profusion of events in fields like golf or tennis make it difficult to judge who the best is. Particularly in golf, very few players will win multiple tournaments in succession. When the only tournaments worth talking about were the Majors, it wasn't as important, as there were only four competitions, so anyone could follow it. Now, with the profusion of golf competitions out there, there isn't as clear a proxy, so we rely on the sporting federations to do our thinking for us. The second reason is the rise of television.
One of the things about American sports that so baffles outsiders is their obsession with statistics. American football pundits are the worst offenders. One cannot watch a ball being thrown in an American football game without a talking head informing you that it was the third longest throw this month, or something similar. I suspect that one of the reasons America still hasn't really taken to Association Football is that the sport doesn't lend itself easily to statistical analysis.
However, it's worth noticing that with the spread of television, statistics are now part of every sport. The fact that they use subjective measures means that to the anorak, they are useful only in demonstrating their obsession. After all, the world golf rankings award huge points for winning a Major, despite the fact that the courses are no more challenging than anywhere else on the tours. They are the prestige tournaments because we have decided they are. The same applies to tennis. People complain that Caroline Wozniacki is World No. 1 on the Women's tour without ever having won a Grand Slam, yet this misses the point. While she may not have won a Grand Slam, she's consistently performed at everything else, and after all, Wimbledon is no more technically challenging than any other grass court in the world.
Television has led to the mass-marketing of sport, and thus the growth of the casual fan. Previously, the only way to experience sport was to actually be physically at it. This meant a) sports fans tended to have a much deeper interest, and b) it would be in a much narrower field. A football fan could really only be able to attend one team's home games, which obviously gave him a much deeper understanding of this team, but a more introverted field of view for the league as a whole.
Nowadays, television has made it possible to watch much more sport than before. However, the amount of sport to follow has also shot up. In the 1970s there were twenty events on the European Tour. Now there are forty-seven. It has become increasingly difficult for a fan to follow all of this. Numbers simplify things nicely. Rather than having to keep track of every player's ongoing performances, the casual fan can simply check on a golfer's rankings to bluff his way through a conversation.
As sports continue to globalise, we can expect more of this. Sporting fans are more likely than ever to be unable to see events live. The amount of tournaments, matches and games to keep track of is going to grow, as developing countries see having a golf or tennis competition as a badge of prestige. The anorak fan, who knows the minutiae of Stoke City for the past fifty years, is dead. In his place is the fan who watches dozens of sports from across the world on satellite TV, and needs numbers to make sense of the whole thing.
Pundits, numbers, and statistics are now part of sport. We, the fans, have created the beast. Now we can but hope it won't destroy us.
Greg Bowler doesn't own an anorak, but is good with numbers.
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