Breathing new life into tired games for the digital age

If, as Buggles once said, video really did kill the radio star, then TV has done something equally harmful to a whole host of sportsmen and women whose efforts habitually disappear into a black hole of general apathy.

That may seem like an anachronism, in an era of 24-hour, multi-channel, red-button sports consumerism but the fact is that some games have faces which just don’t fit while others — such as soccer, golf and hurling — clearly do.

Take James Willstrop and Nick Matthews. One is the top-ranked male player in the world in his chosen sport while the other has won the last two world championships. The pair met in Manchester in the final of the British Grand Prix five days ago, with Matthews winning 3-1.

Odds are you’ve never heard of them. That’s because they are squash players and, try as the powers-that-be might, squash is a sport that is to television what silent movies were to picture houses when the talkies first elbowed their way on to the screen.

Squash was big before TV decreed it to be passé. Real big. In the 1960s, there were courts and centres popping up all over the globe.

Ireland, as ever, took its time to realise which way the wind was blowing but the craze finally swept through the island a decade later.

Anyone who has played the game to a half-decent standard tends to be something of a zealot for a sport that combines impressive levels of fitness, athleticism, intelligence and artistry but that didn’t matter because none of it transferred through the prism of a camera.

It’s not like people haven’t tried. Glass courts have been set up against backdrops as spectacular as the great pyramids of Giza and New York’s Grand Central Station while floors and balls have been jazzed up with bright colours to make it easier on the eye, but all to no use.

Perhaps the one mistake the sport made was not approaching Barry Hearn. Only Hearn could have rescued darts from its seedy, dingy pub image and transformed it into a glitzy, glamorous affair that now has potential sponsors and broadcasters scrambling to catch the gravy train.

What Hearn and others effectively did was to take an analogue sport and reinvent it for the digital age but he has had less success with snooker, a sport he had previously dragged kicking and screaming out of the clichéd smoke-filled halls of disrepute for a life of respectability and profit.

Back in 1986, when snooker was being consumed voraciously by a mass audience, the late Gordon Burn followed the professional circus around the globe for a year and wrote his seminal book on the sport, Pocket Money, on the back of it.

This was an era that dripped with characters such as a young Jimmy White, the robotic yet fascinating Steve Davis and the recently-crowned world champion Dennis Taylor and yet Hearn — an ambitious accountant from Dagenham — outshone them all.

Burn’s book opened with a pre-season tour of China where the game’s top players were opening new snooker halls as often as White did a packet of fags and Hearn talked breathlessly about the potential for the game both back in Blighty and in the Far East.

He was half-right.

There may be 300 million snooker players in China but who among us here could say that we flicked through to the nosebleed numbers on our remote control to watch John Higgins recover from 5-0 down to defeat Judd Trump 10-9 in the final of the Shanghai Masters last Sunday?

If anything, snooker’s relationship with television has been most painful of all. Once inseparable, the two are barely on speaking terms these days, aside from their annual two-week fling at the Crucible and there are lessons there for everyone.

The question is: how far are sports prepared to go to remain relevant to major TV audiences and, by extension, sponsors and funds and everything else that entails? For some, it seems, there is little that is truly sacred, especially their very rules.

Cricket has been a pioneer in this regard, giving the green light to ever-shorter formats of the game, while snooker has adopted its own version of the Twenty20 format with a ‘Power’ version that limits frames and time allowed to play shots.

Even the America’s Cup, a supposed bastion of tradition, has been accused of adopting winged catamarans simply because they guarantee faster races and a greater volume of boats capsizing, particularly now that events have been moved closer to shore, where winds are less predictable.

Divining the whims and wants of TV is just as prone to uncertainty but if sailing can transform itself into a marketable television sport, then there really will be hope for squash and snooker and all the other sports that have been blown off course along the way.