Striving for resolution in information age
You could argue that such a ravening hunger for information — not knowledge, which is different — is typical of the current age, and certainly in sport there is no shortage of takers for any and all angles on the game, every aspect of the proceedings, all manner of information.
I should know: only a few weeks ago I fell helplessly into a rabbit-hole of racecourse measurement which featured such milestones as the discovery that that measuring must be done in the morning before the heat of the sun makes the ground expand...
But is the hunger for every detail not so much excessive as doomed from the start? I think so. Not only is the hoovering up of statistics and minutiae an easy way out for most observers, it can often be the very definition of the woods-for-the-trees argument.
I recall talking to a practitioner a couple of years ago about statistics in Gaelic football in which he sketched a problem so obvious it’s missed by many in the field: teams praising their increased tackle count, he pointed out, can often be oblivious to the fact that they’re not retaining the ball in the first place, and so have to tackle more.
One problem with an unbalanced focus on statistics is the inherent resistance of sport to neat resolution. This is not a tired plea for the unmeasurable quality of heart or guts or spirit, though clearly these are intangibles that are resistant to categorisation (even using the word ‘intangibles’ immediately brings up the vision of the angry scout in Moneyball).
I’m more interested in the fundamental messiness, the random collision of rigorous preparation with the chaos of reality on every level conceivable.
There was a quick glimpse of that chaos earlier this month when so many athletes had to drop out of the World Championships in London due to a stomach bug, Ireland’s Thomas Barr included.
The sheer randomness of that illness seemed to double down with its specificity - the outbreak could be isolated not just to one hotel, but one floor of that hotel.
It can be dismissed as a fluke, perhaps, but if you consult the athletics record books in years to come you won’t find any asterisk by any of the winners’ names, or footnotes in tiny type calling their gold medals into question because of other competitors’ absence.
Another David supplied the counter-argument to Dave Eggers’ Orwellian command. David Thomson, the pre-eminent film writer of the age, is the master of the throwaway description, those couple of words which encapsulate a movie director or actor. His Biographical Dictionary of Film is the exact opposite to a guilty pleasure — a virtuous necessity, maybe.
In a magisterial summary of film endings in a recent book (How To Watch A Film), Thomson referred in passing to Steven Spielberg’s ‘fatal tidiness’, a lethally precise sketch of an artist’s achilles heel — the keenness to eliminate the loose threads which can infect the entire enterprise in favour of overly neat conclusions. The striving for tidiness is an impulse which can also be found in the hunger for information in much sports analysis, a striving echoed in the proverbial, and perennial, sports resolution of a winner and a loser.
Whoever thought that sport was all about winning and losing, though?
Andy’s kindness inspiration to all
In the semi-detached house in Rathfarnham that I shared for a few years at the turn of the millennium, there were some key artefacts.
A box set of The Sopranos. A tired-looking adidas tracksuit mpants. And a battered but serviceable wok.
The wok belonged to Andy Needham of the UNHCR, who mpassed away recently in Kenya, and is one item I immediatelym associate with him.
When others in the house microwaved beans or burnt toast to stave off hunger, Andy could whip up a superb stir-fry at short notice — and share happily with the rest of us.
He was an experienced journalist who worked at the Garda Review and was a press officer for the FAI before joining the UN to work on behalf of people facing huge challenges in their everyday lives.
For instance, when news broke that he had passed away after a routine hip operation, Ziauddin Yousafzai, the father of Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai, tweeted: “Our long-timem #UNHCR friend, a beautiful human being, Andy Needham passed away today. He helped @MalalaFund our trips 2 Jordan & Iraq. RIP.”
I had lost touch with Andy in recent times but had not forgotten how enjoyable his company was. He could take it and give it when Manchester United’s performances were being discussed, and he never hid his passion for the Red Devils.
His wife Tabitha and his daughter Chessie — as well as his family in Dublin — will not need me to tell them Andy was the epitome of kindness and consideration, a man whose thoughtfulness remains proverbial among his many friends, even now.
Ar dheis lamh Dé go raibh a anam uasal dílis.
Shaken and stirred by Fleming Bond letters
Now on the nightstand, one of the most enjoyable books in terms of unalloyed pleasure that I’ve read in many a year.
The Man With The Golden Typewriter: Ian Fleming’s James Bond Letters is a collection of Fleming’s correspondence - to editors, agents, friends, spies, fans, and Winston Churchill.
Edited by his nephew, Fergus Fleming — author of Barrow’s Boys — this has a gem on every page, not least William Plomer’s advice after reading one Fleming manuscript: “I don’t think M. ought to often to speak ‘drily.’
“Shoulder-shrugging, I mregret to say, is too much in mevidence.”
“On some pages the sentences mall begin with ‘And.’” Everyone needs an editor.
