GLORIOUS SPORT RIP

Ninety five years ago “Shoeless” Joe Jackson of the Chicago White Sox was allegedly approached by a young fan with the words “say it aint so Joe.”  The reference was to the fact the White Sox had thrown the 1919 World Series, losing to underdogs the Cincinatti Reds. Eight White Sox players including Joe Jackson were banned for life and the baseball establishment was rocked.

Today sport is very big business - global sponsorship is worth $58 billion - up 27% in the past five years. Yet sport is troubled and I suspect I’m not alone in feeling a weary cynicism towards it. Nearly all sports are run by a hegemony of people like Ecclestone, Blatter, Diack, Srinivasan (respectively, Formula One, Football, Athletics and Cricket) and  resemble recent dictatorships in the Middle East. But unravel their rule and does worse follow?

Whenever there’s a strange result in sport nowadays I wonder, I just wonder if something fishy is going on. Why is everyone getting so upset about Russia’s doping programme? They and East Germany have, we all assumed, been at it for years and blind eyes had been turned. What is sad is to see Seb “Mr Clean” Coe being turned over in the midst of allegations which he surely must have known about and simply ignored or worse… “say it aint so Coe”.

Without anyone seeming to worry too much Cricket has been taken over by India where the match fixing scandals are endemic. Just this summer two of the top sides in the Indian Premier League, the Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals, were suspended for two years having been found guilty in an illegal betting and match-fixing probe. The owners of both sides were suspended from all cricket-related activities for life. The respective captains of these sides are MS Dhoni (the Indian captain) and Steve Smith (the Australian captain). Worried? You should be. Meanwhile Chris Cairns, ex New Zealand cricket star, still on trial at Southwark Crown Court for match fixing, was compared to Lance Armstrong for the damage he’s done to his sport.

But does it really matter? Sport seems to me to have become increasingly boring and trivial. I found the recent Rugby World Cup mostly dull, Football is nearly always wretched, Athletics is a catwalk sport owned by Nike, Adidas and the others and cricket has become a wham bam of a spectacle, the equivalent of willow wielding penalty shoot-outs rife with corruption.

A friend suggested to me life would be simpler if only we allowed athletes to take whatever drugs they wanted because that’s going to be the only level playing field you’ll get. Most of my life I’ve believed in my heroes, the Seb Coes, Rod Lavers, Bobby Moores and Chris Cairns yet when the veil of romanticism is lifted there’s nothing there but a lot of money, some sweat and a lot of pretence.

Sorry but  it really is so.

Money in Sport A Conference this year in Australia

WHAT'S THE STORY?

Storytelling is on the lips of people in big business right now. I keep on coming across self- styled professional corporate storytellers and hearing about storytelling courses. Makes a change from my childhood when I got into trouble for telling stories. Nowadays you don’t get to the top unless you are a storyteller - this goes beyond advertising and branding - this is the narrative that drives the strategy.

And you can see why because we are living in a world so complex and unpredictable where for instance this week it was discovered that sawfish were commonly having virgin births. Slightly less extraordinary than one thought when the experts suggest species will go to extraordinary ends to survive. And sex is a primitive way of achieving that end.

Yuval Noah Harari has written a book called “Sapiens: a brief history of humankind”. In it he explores the reason why Homo Sapiens has been so successful. Part of the reason is the exotic and descriptive language that our species started to develop.  It was beyond nouns, verbs and rational specifics. We traded in speculation, gossip, abstract and the unknown. Homo Sapiens, he suggests in short, made it because we could imagine the future, tell stories and thereby invent things.

I was talking first to a senior executive recently who lamented the inability of his key guys to inspire people when going through their sales pitch which always seemed to become a rather left brained selling proposition-based event. Tell them I said, to get their clients to imagine a future transformed by the product or service the idea they were selling. Take the John Lennon route:

“Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try”…

And then to an entrepreneur who had a product idea imported from Asia which was priced awkwardly (sorry, that’s code for “too expensive”.) The solution I suggested would lie in packaging and marketing magic whereby the intrinsic virtues of the idea could be romanced, enhanced and increased in value. In other words it needed a story to be built around it.

Why are Game of Thrones, House of Cards and the X-Men film series such compulsive viewing for so many? How have Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Stieg Larsen and Terry Pratchett storytelling defined our view of written stories over the past two decades. The popularity of these and longer form TV series and film legends like Star Wars and Star Trek have happened because they are great primal stories involving exploration, fear, ambition and love but most of all because they carve out new worlds and new possibilities.
We’ve had a week where the Iron Throne of FIFA has been vacated and we face a future of a footballing Arab Spring…write the next part of this story but bear in mind it’s going to get very nasty. Stories like these will be spoken of long into the future.

Our lives are rich in stories. That’s why humanity got to be so smart (and sometimes so crooked.)