Norm Geras speculates about why it is so hard to simulate (in fiction) the passion for sport, about which people get so very, um, passionate [e.a.]:
I’m not saying that there aren’t beauties or attractions just as great, or even greater, in life; but there aren’t any that are quite the same as that provided by uncertainty in sport. And for some reason the uncertainty can’t be replicated in fiction or simulated to a sufficient degree. I’m not sure why that should be, since fiction manages to do most other ’simulations’ well enough to involve people. But the thrill of the sporting contest - well, to the best of my knowledge anyway, it can’t do that successfully.
You have to care what happens in the here and now. Hard as it is to understand why people do care about the outcome of mere games, it is harder to recreate that caring in a reader. There are many, of course, who don’t care even about the real thing. But for those of us who do, attempts to fictionalize the experience produce only a pale imitation.
Woody Allen speculated about this same subject back in 1994. He was quoted in a (June 6, 1996) New Yorker “Talk of the Town” piece (not available online) titled “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Knicks” [e.a.]:
…Allen still prefers a night at [Madison Square] Garden to one on Broadway, and not only as release and distraction. “Sports to me is like music,” he said. “It’s completely, aesthetically satisfying. There were times I would sit at a game with the old Knicks and think to myself in the fourth quarter, This is everything the theater should be and isn’t. There’s an outcome that’s unpredictable. The audience is not ahead of the dramatist. The drama is ahead of the audience, and you don’t know exactly where it’s going. You’re personally involved with the players—they had heroic dimensions, some of those players. It’s a pleasurable experience, though not intellectual—much like music. It enters you through a different opening, sort of.”
Allen went on to say, “You see, life consists of giving yourself these problems that can be dealt with, so you don’t have to face the problems that can’t be dealt with. It’s very meaningful to me, for instance, to see if the Knicks are going to get over some problem or another. These are matters you can get involved with, safely and pleasurably, and the outcome doesn’t hurt you.”
It’s called being a fan—and we all derive pleasure from fandom of one sort or another.
We all like to have our heroes and our villains, as JFK shrewdly observed in 1959, in a piece I’ve referred to before.
