Built by sport,

revealed by
sport
How does the word character apply? First you played to develop it,
now you develop it to play
SIMON BARNES | AUGUST 2016

"I t's all about character." How many times do

we hear this in the midst of a protracted
sporting encounter? It's not about how strong
your arms and legs are, it's about how strong your
character is. We talk about character every time we
have a sporting conversation.

So it wasn't Sachin Tendulkar's hand-eye coordination

that made him great, it was the serenity of his
character. Likewise Roger Federer. And it wasn't Kevin
Pietersen's strokemaking skill that made him such a
great match-swinger, it was his turbulent nature.
Likewise John McEnroe.

Character has always been a significant word in sport.

But words are slippery things, and what character
meant in sport a century back is quite different to
character as we understand it in modern sport.

We invented sport because it's fun. Often quite serious

fun, but fun all the same - a chance to savour your own
courage in a relatively safe environment. But sport
came into the mainstream of life because people
believed that sport taught moral lessons. Sport made
better people of those who took part. In short, sport
built character.

That was the idealism at the heart of the modern

Olympic Games. Their founder, Baron Pierre de
Coubertin, said: "For each individual, sport is a possible
search for inner improvement." Not better results,
better people.

De Coubertin, an Anglophile, adapted the idea from the

English public schools, which cultivated team sports as
a vital part of education. It taught the boys how to sink
self in the common cause - a sentiment forever caught
by the poem "Vitaï Lampada": "There's a breathless
hush in the Close to-night - Ten to make and match to
win" and so forth. Here, quite explicitly, the values
required to win colonial wars are compared with those
acquired in sport: "Play up! play up! and play the
game!"

Television flattens perspective, diminishes

distance, and makes every kind of action look
simple, but always it gives us faces. And
emotion. And character

But as sport became a profession and a business, the

emphasis changed. We don't watch sport to improve
ourselves, or to watch other people improving
themselves. We watch sport because it's enthralling. It's
enthralling like a novel, an art form that depends on
the revelation and development of character.
This is now mainstream thinking in sport. It's summed
up in lines normally attributed to the American
sportswriter Heywood Hale Broun: "Sports don't build
character; they reveal it." So when Jonny Wilkinson
dropped the winning goal for England in the rugby
World Cup final of 2003, he was praised not for his
endless hours of practice but for his intense and
dedicated character.

They are both legitimate interpretations. If Wilkinson

wasn't intense and dedicated he wouldn't have
practised so hard, and he wouldn't have had the skills
and the muscle memory to perform the trick under the
greatest intensity that his sport can offer.

This insistence on character is largely a product of

television. On television - but not at the ground - we
can see the faces. They fill the screen. Faces reveal
character; reading faces is an aspect of being human.
Television flattens perspective, diminishes distance,
and makes every kind of action look simple, but always
it gives us faces. And emotion. And character. So sport
is increasingly talked about and written about as if
character was all that mattered.
Joe Root had the character to change his character so he could enjoy cricket more © Getty Images

We often talk about sport as if its entire function was to

put character to the test, as if bodies and skills were
almost irrelevant. Marlon Samuels was mischievously -
even rather vindictively - inclined to put West Indies'
victory in the World T20 finalearlier this year down to
the character weakness of Ben Stokes, who bowled the
last over at Carlos Brathwaite. He called Stokes "a
nervous laddie", and claimed that his sledging of
Stokes was decisive. Really? And not the power-hitting
of Brathwaite, who hit four successive sixes?

It seems that sport itself has swallowed the idea that

character is everything. That, after all, is the No. 1
selling point of the sporting industry, more important
even than partisanship. The pursuit of excellence - the
highest thing in sport - is way down the list of
priorities.

Sport is now sold as drama - the dramatic revelation of

character.
But things have already taken yet another twist. The
more we learn about the mental issues in sport, the
more it seems that character is becoming a skill itself,
one that can be improved by practice and expert help.
In all professional sports, including cricket,
psychologists are part of the landscape. It's no longer
about sport building character, or even sport revealing
character. These days, athletes work on character as
part of their skill set. They do so not in search of inner
improvement, but of outer improvement. To win.

Joe Root was a talented cricketer eaten up with

intensity. But after being dropped by England he
resolved to be more forgiving of himself. To enjoy sport
more. This conscious adjustment of character made
him one of the world's top batsmen. Perhaps the point
is that he had the character to change his character.
Certainly character in sport is a different matter from
what it was when time and cricket began.