SPECTATOR SPORT
The stuff of novels
Simon Barnes
SPORT? How can you possibly spend your life writing about sport? To admit to liking sport is to declare yourself an intellectual PYgmy. Indeed, to express a total distaste for all kinds of sport is prima facie evidence of considerable intellectual distinction.
It is intellectually acceptable, therefore, to read the front page of a newspaper, but not the back. And so the intellectual is stuck with — let us take a paper picked up from my floor at random — something about insurance, the latest on the royal Yacht, and something about party politics: tales of cover-up and secrecy and matters of infinite triviality. Turn to the sport, and You find two gorgeous creatures in a crisis of personal combat, each trailing clouds of strange personal history — lovely girls exposing themselves, for in the agonies of competition an athlete is stripped naked before you. A tennis match is about fore- hands and backhands, but it is also a per- fectly crafted dramatisation of what hap- pens between parents and their beautiful and talented daughters. Those who write on politics deal with matters of pressing attention that are ephemeral. But we who write on sport are dealing with eternals. I do not find myself drawn to writing about insurance. I prefer to take as my subjects, say, love, self- destruction, obsession, beauty and betrayal. If you write on sport, your stock-in-trade is the stuff not of journals but of novels.
Which brings us to Mary Pierce, whose chief affectation is to describe herself as 5ft 111/2 in. The first things you notice about her person, or are intended to, are her breasts. She wears tennis outfits specifically designed to maximise the impact — if that is the word I am looking for — of those impressive items. She is an Amazon who gives double value, and she queens it about the court, mistress of a million affectations.
Yet the fact that she does so at all is miraculous. Her father, Jim Pierce, was the tennis parent from hell, and that is an acco- lade that takes a bit of winning. His wild bullying of his daughter became a legend. He is now banned from tennis and estranged from the daughter he still refers to as 'a goddess'. The goddess was beaten in the final of the Australian Open, the first Grand Slam tournament of the year, by Martina Hingis, a 16-year- old with wonderful shots, a won- derful tennis brain and wonderful Slavic cheekbones. Another product of a maniacal parent? No: Hingis is sane, and as balanced as any teenager with a ten-million-buck clothing sponsorship.
She is not a hothouse prodigy whose life has been nothing but tennis and parental ambition; she lives. For example, she fell off a horse in the middle of the tourna- ment. What normal tennis parents would let their beloved millionaire within a mil- lion miles of a horse during a Grand Slam? She and her wise mother Melanie were often seen crazily rollerblading together in the stadium carpark, without knee- and elbow-pads. Pierce was a childhood prison- er — of her father and her talent. Hingis is free; long may she remain so. The rivalry between this neatly matched, antithetical pair is the stuff from which novels are writ- ten, and these matters are rich and reward- ing to us all, dramatised as they are in the bink and bonk of sport.
Not a bad theme for a novel, and, in fact, come to think of it, I have already written it. My own Rogue Lion Safaris, though more or less sport-free, is about rivalries and, as I discovered some time after I had completed it, also about fathers and sons. But sport is full of such stuff. 'Blast the sports pages,' wrote Marshall McLuhan, `creators of pickled gods and archetypes.' But that is precisely why sport is so rich.
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