Mulling over David Mamet’s Three Uses of the Knife while watching the 2010 Olympics, I was reminded of why sports competitions have enjoyed such an important role in the history of western civilization, because sport obeys dramatic principles. Or is it vice versa?
If this galvanizing event we’ve just witnessed does turn out to be – as some predict – a defining moment for Canada, the cause surely lies somewhere outside the issue of how many medals “we” won. It isn’t, in the end, about the medals.
Sure, winning is great. It makes the play a comedy in the technical sense of ending happily, gives rise to exuberant celebration, and is certainly better than losing. The CTV cameras lingered on the faces of defeated American players for an excruciatingly long time. They were devastated – a word the Sunday New York Times used to describe how Canada would feel, if our team should lose.
Losing throws the competitor into despair, and afterwards, gives rise to soul searching. But the truth is, several excellent Canadian athletes failed to win the medals they deserved and could have won, had fate or the wind gone their way in the crucial five or ten seconds between one rank and the next. The ever-present element of chance in competition is one of the main sources of excitement. It is the god element. The game of hockey is incredibly fast and all the players outstanding, but both teams are shadowed by the invisible, a death-like presence hovering over play, outside anyone’s control.
What made these games so absorbing for me, someone who normally gives sports a pass, (except when I was courting a Welshman, then boy did I get interested in rugby) was the stunning three-act structure of the entire two-week event, the bigger game, day-by-day, how are we doing? To be honest, I spent far more time reading about the games in various publications that land on our doorstep and are accessible on the web than I did in front of the TV. Sure, I saw the highpoints. I tuned in long enough to get sick of those talking car ads and other inanities. (“Some people call it B.C. We call it home.” Dah. That would be because you live there, we don’t.)
But mostly I read what my favourite writers had to say, an exercise that revealed just how thorough is the connection between national stature, national pride and certain august writers’ critical sensibility. Here’s what Nancy Franklin (New Yorker TV writer) had to say in the March 1 issue (printed mid-way through the games): “Vancouver won’t be remembered as a great Games; it will be remembered for the senseless death that occurred before the competition even began. Each night, NBC showed the medal counts of the leading countries – a list “sponsored” by McDonald’s – and the exercise seemed jarring, the numbers meaningless in the face of Kumaratashvili’s death. As much as I love the Olympics, these Games can’t be over soon enough.” Dead and buried at intermission? As F. Scott Fitzgerald was moved to say, American lives have no second act. Short attention span or what?
To dismiss a neighbour’s party mid-way through by lingering on a freak accident is to reveal a variety of snobbery that says far more about the Empire’s wounded pride than the neighbour it seeks to demean. I couldn’t help but detect in this piece, and in so much of that was written by the British and American press, that by daring to declare an intent to win, Canada was cast as the younger brother, criticized and ridiculed for stepping into the limelight.
Act Three. The protagonist takes many falls but remains calm and confident and somehow triumphs, hours before the whole show ends.
In the flush of Team Canada goal’s winning goal, one announcer declared: “A nation is relieved”. How Canadian. How modest. I hope we don’t change. I just hope we do go on winning.
