Introduction

For the post-religious, games are one of the few means of experiencing redemption and a degree of transcendence amid the sleepwalking called ‘living’. Sports promise meaning, delivered within a fixed amount of time. They have clear stakes, characters with strengths and flaws, and there is the chance of witnessing something unforgettable. In this, sports shares some of the narrative features of stories, which may be why they have always been such a natural subject for them. Homer’s heroes in the Iliad exhibit a larger range of emotions – giddiness, sadness, frustration, satisfaction – during the funeral games of Patroclus than they do on the battlefield.

There are always purifying factions who want to clean up games, to save players from themselves. In the nineteenth century, Jeremy Bentham targeted a villainous behavior he called ‘deep play’ – games with stakes so high no rational person would engage in them. The trouble is that it’s only when performances are most ‘irrational’, when they dispense with ordinary calculation, that they become sublime. Simone Biles going for broke on the balance beam when a standard routine could still bring her the gold; Larry Bird shooting for three when a simple lay-up would be enough; Michael Jordan viciously taunting his rivals for not playing their best.

The language of winning that suffuses the modern business world often seems like a way of obscuring its more mundane character. We are meant to hail Elon Musk like some combination of Albert Einstein and Babe Ruth for channeling government subsidies toward electronic vehicles and privatizing other public goods. The imperatives of such unheroic competition are embedded in the lives of even the smallest citizens. Outside the Granta office on Holland Park Avenue, you can hear tiny besuited English schoolchildren comparing their exam results, lamenting any ground given in the race of CV-burnishing they seem doomed to run for the rest of their lives. Yet there is an unmistakable mix of magic and aggression in the air when children dream up and argue over games with elaborate rules of their own making, a capacity most lose as they grow older, but which seem to contain the seeds of culture and art. As Jean Baudrillard observed, the reduction of play to the level of function – play as therapy, play as school, play as catharsis, play as creativity – is the opposite of the ‘passion for illusion’ that once characterized its seductive power.

This issue of Granta returns to sports writing, which once featured often and prominently in our pages. In 1993, the magazine gave over nearly a whole issue to the poet Ian Hamilton’s meditations on the English midfielder Paul Gascoigne, ‘Gazza Agonistes’. Hamilton knew he had stumbled upon a special quarry. ‘[Gazza] was always looking to nutmeg defenders when it would have been easier to pass them by,’ he wrote. ‘He wanted the ball all the time: for throw-ins, free kicks, corners – goal-kicks, if they had let him.’ In contrast to most sports commentary, which sounds like an exercise of lobbing clichés back and forth, we believe sports writing is an exalted literary form which has seen some worthy match-ups over time: C.L.R. James on cricket, Joyce Carol Oates on Mike Tyson, John Updike on Ted Williams, David Foster Wallace on Roger Federer, J.M. Coetzee on rugby, John Jeremiah Sullivan on the Kentucky Derby.

The ‘Winners’ issue features the poet Declan Ryan on the heavyweight fight between Anthony Joshua and Daniel Dubois at Wembley stadium last September. Ryan not only registers the bloodlust of the spectators, the way the boxing industry treats competitors like commodities, the psychology and ingredients of the triumph in the ring, the agony of defeat, but also the emptiness of victory, when the winner can declare nothing but a canned line from the film Gladiator, ‘Are you not entertained?’ In her piece on the history and evolution of tennis, Clare Bucknell shows how the rules of a sport can shift over time to reflect a society’s values as much as its laws. Bucknell recounts her experience touring and playing a vestigial version of the game – the result of an eighteenth-century schism – that still has passionate players and courts around the globe.

‘Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing,’ is a line attributed – it should perhaps not surprise us – to an American college football coach in a locker room in 1950. ‘Red’ Sanders was a product of US military academies, who had recently returned from the Second World War, and led the UCLA Bruins to a national championship three years later. As Nico Walker writes in this issue, president Teddy Roosevelt thought of football as useful conditioning to ready men grown slack from doux commerce for the hard business of war. He tells how the changing vocabulary of the battlefield – cavalry metaphors in the 1910s, aerial bombing metaphors in the 1940s – testified to the tight compact between war and sport. ‘When you were kids,’ General George Patton told the US Third Army in 1944, ‘you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big-league ball players and the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser . . . I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost, and laughed.’

If Jim Thorpe was the all-around star of football before the Second World War, the stars in the later decades, Jim Brown and Deion Sanders and others, could no longer afford to sidestep the spectacle of hype as the game became more mercilessly marketized, to the point that winning itself fades in significance. ‘What is the college coach’s priority,’ Walker asks, ‘to win a championship or to try to get as many players as possible into the pros?’

War has its own properties. The period of European history of the Kabinettskriege – wars fought according to agreed rules of engagement, and with the minimal involvement of civilians – may be mostly mythical. But the more comprehensive victories celebrated by winning states in recent memory have often been more devastating, and often less stable than they appear. The end of the Cold War left smoldering dissatisfactions on the continent that almost any Russian leadership would try one day or another to correct. Likewise, Israel’s recent military successes in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria suggest a war that has gone better than its architects could have expected, but at the cost of arousing an alarming amount of international enmity, and dispensing in the process with the last tattered fig leaf of the ‘liberal international order’. In photography by An-My Lê and Myriam Boulos we see both sides of that order in action: the US military operations around the globe, and migrant laborers from Sierra Leone in Beirut, who have endured a cruelly compounded calamity, first as rightless workers in Lebanon’s kafala system, second as refugees bombed out of their places of employment by Israeli forces.

The fiction in this issue includes two pairs of stories: compact, dreamlike sequences by Caryl Churchill and Kathryn Scanlan from either side of the Atlantic, with Churchill finely attuned to the absurd, and Scanlan playing with the dilation of impressions. And there are two stories set in hospitals: Benjamin Nugent’s ‘Round One’ is a comic account of reproductive woe and moral hubris that carries on the American tradition of Wallace and Saunders, while K Patrick’s ‘Appendix’ is a story of a medical doctor who looks to redress some of the ways her professional commitment has crowded out other elements of her character. Set in an archipelago infested with angels, the Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu presents the reader with an inscrutable portal to another world, and Edward Salem invites us on nights out in the West Bank filled with heat and lust and rage.

Our next issue will be dedicated to ‘Dead Friends’, and in the autumn Granta will return to India for its third special issue devoted to the country.