I first played international sport when I represented Trinidad in lawn tennis as a schoolboy in 1949. As late as 1981 I found myself competing in trial matches for selecting the Guyana team for that year’s Caribbean Squash Championships. From the 1940s to the 1980s is a stretch of five decades. And since competing, of course, there have been an infinite number of hugely pleasurable hours spent watching and reading about and discussing sport and the great champions.
Sport has an infinity of delights to offer in this hard, unplayful world. There is the pure physical relief that comes with brisk, blood-stirring exertion. There is sport’s excitement which so often can lift the heart beating into the throat. And there is the beauty in sport – in its own way a beauty as imperishable as art or a lovely moonscape. These three attractions alone give sport a high place among the simple, enduring joys of living.
I think of Samuel Johnson, that most clumsy and unathletic of men, the greatest intellectual of his age, and how he found a kind of exaltation in physical exercise. He swam in cold rivers and he walked for miles and he ran races with pretty ladies and he even rolled himself down grassy hills, over and over in a whirl of limbs, to amuse the children and to shake up the ageing blood. When he was very old he most wisely said to a friend who came to visit him: “I have found in life how much happiness is gained, or, to put it more carefully, how much misery escaped, by frequent and violent agitation of the body!”
And he is supported by Thomas Hobbes, the great philosopher, whose favourite sport was royal tennis which he played until he was 75. About him we are told that after writing a page or two of his famous book, Leviathan, he loved nothing better than to run up and down hills and return to bed early to sing songs for an hour before he slept.
One of my most vivid memories, which has stayed in my mind for 65 years, is of Frank Worrell at the Oval in Port-of-Spain late-cutting the Trinidad bowler Ferguson twice to the boundary with all the elegance in the world in the turn of his wrist and the flash of his shining bat. That for me is a timeless image of beauty – just as much as the image of Chartres Cathedral seen across a wheat field in France or a half-moon burning in the trees along the silver Essequibo, loveliest river in the world.
And so I remember seven decades of sports’ pleasure and excitement and look forward to enjoyment still to come. I think with gratitude how sweetly sport has spiced my life. The Gods themselves would wish to take credit for such lovely inventions. And if there is a Heaven the angels will be playing matches there. And if there is a Hell you can be sure that in those burning depths there are no courts or playing fields.
And now here I am again, immensely looking forward to the London Olympic Games. Recently I have been enjoying great sporting events, one after the other: the NBA Championships featuring the muscular genius of Le Bron James; the Euro Soccer Tournament with a final showing Spain’s marvellous team in full flower after a series of nondescript lead-up games; West Indies resurgence against New Zealand, almost reminding us of old times; Wimbledon with Serena’s astonishing victory after a year of terrible setbacks and also with the historic ascent of Andy Murray of Great Britain to the Men’s Singles Final only to be thwarted there by the greatest player who ever played the game. But, still to come, I think the Olympic Games will be the best of all.
I was thinking which sporting event I have seen was the most dramatic and memorable out of the multitude I have witnessed over the years. If I could have seen it – and not just listened to crackling radio commentary – the last over of the tied Test at Brisbane between West Indies and Australia is 1960 would have won the prize. And the greatest tennis match ever played, the final of Wimbledon in 2008, when Nadal beat Federer in five continually breathtaking sets, has to be in serious contention. But I think the greatest of them all must be Usain Bolt’s double strike of unforgettable power in the 100 and 200 metre races at Beijing in 2008. In the setting of the Olympics those triumphant world record races were the very definition of sublime sporting achievement.
The Olympic Games, I believe, because of a special element not present in other great sporting occasions to anything like the same degree, possess a unique irreplaceable flavour. The Games, with their ancestry in ancient Greece, have inherited a capacity for the tragedy and comedy which ancient Greece first brought to full maturity in poetry and drama. As a result “the play’s the thing” and crude results are not all-important. This means that, while in one sense the thousands upon thousands of competitors who have no hope of medals are simply cannon-fodder for the stars, at a more fundamental level they give the Games their strongest heartbeat and their lasting value. More than any other sporting event – more than the soccer World Cup, more than Wimbledon and the Davis Cup, more than cricket Test matches and world championships in every sport under the sun – the Olympics really are more about taking part than about winning. There will be those who will scoff at such a statement. But I believe it to be true. A little of the spirit of the 300 at Thermopylae seems to enter into any Olympic competition and, win or lose, every contestant at the race’s end breathes unknowingly Simonides’s famous words:
Go, tell the Spartans, thou who passest by,
That there, obedient to their laws, we lie.
This peculiar element in the Olympics explains why over and over again the Games seem to come most to life at times of humour, heartbreak and failure. It is by no means only the great stars and the world records and the blaze of glory that catch the imagination of the millions upon millions watching the Olympics. It is why I am looking forward with special eagerness to the London Olympics. Even if there is nothing to match Usain Bolt’s sublime achievement four years ago – not even Bolt himself can hope to capture such lightning again – I know there will be more than enough human drama to make the Games one of the unforgettable sporting experiences of my life.
