Rohit Brijnath: The wide, varied, wonderful world of sport

In the frozen Alaskan wilderness of sharp winds and cutting cold, racing sometimes had a cruel, incredulous cost. In 1985, the year before she won her first Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, a 1,150-mile grind from Anchorage to Nome, a moose ran into Susan Butcher’s team and started killing dogs. In eight seconds, she later told the Los Angeles Times, two dogs were dead and eight injured and Butcher had to hold off the moose with an axe for 20 minutes before help came.

I don’t know where I first read about Butcher, probably in Sports Illustrated in the late 1980s, when the magazine, full of long-form wanderings, opened my world to writing and sports I was unfamiliar with. Like this guy they called The Great One, whose nickname was compelling, so off you’d go, reading 2,000 words on an unobtrusive genius in a foreign sport called ice hockey named Wayne Gretzky.

Most of us are somewhat hostage to the hemispheres we’re born in and the cultures that surround us. I grew up to a blur in Indian blue called Mohammed Shahid and to the sound of “out yaar” ricocheting down the lane. Kabaddi was our earthy inheritance, but once in a while, even in those days before 24/7 TV sport, I’d stumble on something new. Like those zig-zagging Zorros called the All Blacks who I discovered in the 1980s in a house in Beck Bagan in Kolkata where my ex-wife’s brothers worshipped this tribe and its hypnotic haka.

In football, players have hysterical fits in the face of referees but, in rugby, men the size of earthmovers stand quiet as the referee dresses them down. In this game, where humans bruise each other and then line up to shake hands, there’s still a powerful honouring of a game’s unwritten codes.

We love our own sports—the ones our parents handed us by taking us to stadiums, or those we learnt on the street where wickets were drawn with red brick on walls, or those that came through stories our uncles told us of how Prakash Padukone could make a shuttle sigh. The familiar is powerful and rooting and comforting and our bodies retain the sting of hockey ball on thigh in the winter cold.

Yet there’s something fascinating about the foreign and a wonder at travelling out of our worlds. I’ve never figure-skated and wonder how they pirouette on what is ostensibly the edge of a knife. Once a speed-skater sent me photographs of the top of his hand sliced open, a clean, tidy carving of the flesh after warding off another skater who’d slipped. Behind grace lies pain.

After watching sport for so long there’s still so much unexplored, so many mysteries left to be unravelled. Maybe read on Scrabble champions, watch the insanity of sidecar racing, figure out Argentinian pato, dive into Rudraneil Sengupta’s wrestling epic Enter the Dangal or William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days on surfing.

In Puri, where I holidayed as a boy like many Kolkatans, I never saw a surfboard and wasn’t a fan of the Beach Boys. But later, reading Finnegan describe waves—“each have personalities, distinct and intricate, and quickly changing moods, to which you must react in the most intuitive, almost intimate way”—made me briefly wish I was Californian.

When we dip into other sporting cultures, it’s a lovely education. We’re cousins connected by rhythm, technique and fussiness. The cricketer is finicky about his bat and so is the motorcyclist about his machine. “If the fork (of my bike),” three-time MotoGP champion Jorge Lorenzo once mentioned over lunch, “is down by 1mm, I know.”

I think I know speed because I see Carlos Alcaraz, legs moving like a hummingbird’s wings, yet sometimes I spy a NFL wide receiver on Instagram and think, who knows what fast truly is? I think I have composure figured out, till two weeks ago a young gymnast gave me a tutorial on the balance beam. “Watch us closely,” she said, “and most of us are shaking.” Yet for all this dread of falling and fear of imperfection, they spring, flip, leap, somersault on a surface the size of the span of your hand. The beam is 10cm wide.

All greatness in sport arrives from curiosity—how do I get better?—and it should apply to us, its audience, as well. To keep peeking into the corners of the unknown, seeking out the rush of skiers, the paddling beat of kayakers, tuning into stadium chants we’ve never heard, and wandering through the terrific traditions of ice hockey’s Stanley Cup.

You don’t touch it till you’ve won it. And when you win it, every player and staff gets to take it home for a day. The result of these delightful journeys is that the Cup has been left on a snowbank, used for baptisms, taken to a grave, left in a swimming pool and used as a flower pot. Sure it gets dented, but then so does everyone apparently in that game.

Last week I was whining about my baseball ignorance. Everyone’s talking about Shohei Ohtani and it’s weird not to truly understand the nuance of what makes him unique. One friend told me he’d seen the White Sox play in Chicago and another remembered days when his late father worked at the American embassy in Delhi and he hit balls on their floodlit diamond. But neither could explain Ohtani to me. Oh well.

Baseball fascinates yet eludes me. I read A Hero’s Life, Richard Ben Cramer’s portrait of Joe DiMaggio, and Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer, and watched Robert Redford swing his bat named Wonderboy in The Natural, but it feels so inadequate. Maybe in another life I’ll be born in sight of Yankee Stadium, but for now I’ll manage with clips on YouTube. It feels like peering into a foreign world through the window of a passing train.

Rohit Brijnath is an assistant sports editor at The Straits Times, Singapore, and a co-author of Abhinav Bindra’s book A Shot at History: My Obsessive Journey to Olympic Gold. He posts @rohitdbrijnath.