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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Mint-on-sunday/  What makes a sport beautiful?
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What makes a sport beautiful?

It's not just the world's most gifted athletes who make sport beautiful. Sometimes it's you

Photo: AFPPremium
Photo: AFP

Meanwhile in Canada, some of the world’s most dazzling football players are battling for the World Cup. Wait a minute, you say, the World Cup? Wasn’t that last year? That German thrashing of Brazil 7-1 in the semis and then they went on to win it all? True. But that was the men’s cup. This year it’s the women, and as you read this, the US and Japan are getting ready to play the final.

The tournament has already seen some spectacular highlights. Check Norway’s Maren Mjelde scoring against Germany, a soaring pinpoint free kick into the far corner of the net that gave no chance to the German goalie. Check Josée Bélanger sending Canada into the quarterfinals with an alert lightning strike through a small crowd of converging players.

Those are some of the reasons why they call it the “beautiful game". You only have to watch some of the intricate moves that play out on the field, or the electrifying goals one lithe player or another conjures up out of nothing, to know why the phrase applies. I say so even though I have never much enjoyed playing the game. And watching it? Come World Cup time—men’s or women’s—I will content myself with a few highlights. That’s it.

Yet I have always been intrigued by that word “beautiful" as applied to football. It’s usually credited to the great Brazilian, Pelé; he called his 1977 autobiography My Life and the Beautiful Game. You know why he used the phrase. This was an artist with the ball, after all. You can imagine that in his mind, he saw the game unfolding as a rich tapestry, Pelé in the middle of it painting a picture of breathtaking power and elegant skill. The beautiful game, without doubt.

But why football?

Part of the answer is that yawning gap between their skills and ours. You see a supple-bodied attacker feinting left and right as she races down the field, defenders scrambling to keep up, the ball yo-yoing off her feet as if she really has it on a string, and then she shoots a bullet that leaves the goalkeeper sprawling… you see that, you gasp in wonder and you think, damn that was gorgeous! I will never play like that, but oh, what a thrill to watch!

But part of the answer is also that with football, the players can look like you and me, if also rather more athletic than you and me. Meaning, they are not especially tall, or hefty, or muscular. In contrast, American football is played by helmeted human bulldozers; rugby by barrel-chested Lotharios with solid thighs; basketball by long-limbed men who fly like meteors and pass like magicians. (Forgive the stereotypes and generalizations.) This even applies sometimes in that apparently more genteel sport, cricket: I once stood next to an Indian star and was struck by the power that hid in those broad shoulders.

But the young women playing their hearts out at the World Cup? Take a look, they could be your neighbours. I mean absolutely no disrespect when I say these players are that ordinary looking. Except, your neighbours are nowhere near as adroit with the ball as they are. And that’s what really makes watching them play so breathtaking. They actually make me think, if these folks can play this game, and with such silken elan, so can I. There but for the grace of some remarkable skills, I think, go I.

And when you look at it that way, it isn’t just football. Dhyan Chand in his prime must have painted a similar picture, playing his unearthly brand of hockey. So with so many other great sportsmen and women in so many different sports: Evonne Goolagong, Brian Lara, Saina Nehwal. Even Marion Jones, until she was disgraced by a doping scandal, won her 100m and 200m races with an intoxicating mix of power and beauty.

So, what makes a sport beautiful?

You already know my answer: it’s the people who play the game. Though not all of them, for I also realize this is purely subjective. Ivan Lendl and Jimmy Connors were two of tennis’s greats, for sure. But if it’s tennis beauty I’m seeking, I will take their equally great contemporary and rival, John McEnroe, every time. The incredible angles he found on court, the unreal control he had over his racquet while volleying… We sports nuts know well the poetry our favourites evoke, as they do what they do best.

Like that otherwise overly pretentious writer, Neville Cardus, who once remembered a famous English cricketer from a Test at Sydney in 1946-47. His effort that day was worth “only 37, but so dazzling in clean diamond-cut strokes that old men present babbled…" Who played these “diamond-cut strokes" to set the old men babbling? The English master Len Hutton.

And it can come closer home. Sometimes it’s not just the men and women in some sporting arena with their clean strokes and jaw-dropping volleys. Sometimes it’s you.

Take the Cambridge professor of French, Andy Martin, writing in Walking on Water about… well, himself. He surfs a wave all the way to shore and this is how it felt: “I leaned over, slid my weight onto my right foot, and the (surfboard) carved a voluptuous line along the crystal-blue wall, like Michelangelo shaping his Madonna."

Whoever would have thought that surfing can bring to mind Michelangelo?

And every now and then, I get a glimpse of just what Martin means. I’m an adequate swimmer, that’s all. While I admire its elegance when done well, I have never quite got the freestyle stroke down right: its rhythm has always proved elusive. But when I’m swimming regularly, when I’m attempting the freestyle regularly, there will come a moment when I feel my arms, and my body and legs behind them, working in almost joyous tandem. For that moment, I can feel myself, like Martin, carving smoothly through the water.

Voluptuously, even.

Once a computer scientist, Dilip D’Souza now lives in Mumbai and writes for his dinners. His latest book is Final Test: Exit Sachin Tendulkar.

Twitter: @DeathEndsFun

Death Ends Fun: https://dcubed.blogspot.com

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Published: 04 Jul 2015, 11:32 PM IST
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