What sport tells us about a counterfactual historian
Financial Times, April 12th 2008
Simon Kuper
Does Ed Smith ever imagine how his brief career playing cricket for England might have panned out differently? In a Notting Hill restaurant, a few doors down from his white stucco flat, Smith pauses over his lamb to deliver an erudite lecture on counterfactual history.
But he hasn’t answered the question: does he often think about his three ill-fated Test matches for England? “Yes,” Smith admits in his public school and Cambridge tones. “I used to run the tape back a lot more than I do now, in my mind. I don’t look back on it as a bad period in my life. I wish I’d had more luck, I wish I’d got more runs. But I wrote in What Sport Tells Us About Life that I wouldn’t rather life was more pallid.”
And as a good counterfactual historian, Smith adds that if he had been away touring with England, he would never have met his girlfriend.
Tall, handsome, polite, posh, fine batsman, Smith looks like he has just walked out of a Merchant-Ivory film set in 1923. That, however, is just the outer casing. There is nobody else like him in sport today: an excellent sportsman, and an excellent thinker about sport. At 30, he will captain Middlesex in the new English cricket season, and he has just published his third book.* It draws from psychology, statistics, historiography, even music to explain why Zinedine Zidane delivered that headbutt in football’s last World Cup final, or why there has never been another sportsman as dominant as the cricketer Donald Bradman. But Smith asks big questions about himself too: is playing sport a worthwhile life? Is writing about sport? And will England ever recall him?
The restaurant swells with the chatter of wealthy London. Smith, up since 6am training with Middlesex, orders extra mash for the carbs. As we embark on the medium-bodied Italian red, he argues he is much more maladjusted than his outer casing suggests.
“I was out of sync throughout my childhood because I liked adults more than children. And I liked to talk about ideas. The world I cultivated the most was the private sphere. And sport was a realm of wish-fulfilment, where I made what I wanted to happen very real. So by the time I got there, I never suffered from vertigo. I scored hundreds on just about every debut: school debut, first-class debut. I got 64 on my Test debut, but part of me was in disbelief when I got out. I thought I was going to get a hundred, because I’d always envisaged getting a hundred.”
Smith had turned professional after getting a “double first” degree in history at Cambridge. “I was probably unusual at Cambridge because I never had doubts about what I wanted to do. I wanted to play for England, I wanted to write – I didn’t know what – and I wanted to think. I saw no contradiction.”
He solved the problem of what to write while visiting New York. “Surprising things happened. The first was having this bizarre conversion to baseball. Second thing was, there was a sphere of sportswriting that seemed to coexist in this unified culture. People who liked opera liked baseball. There were great writers who just loved sport, and found sport part of the narrative for the human struggle. And that was liberating, because, all right, I grew out of this idea that writing about sport somehow wasn’t quite the thing.”
He wrote a book comparing baseball and cricket, and a diary of his 2003 season, during which he was selected for England after scoring six centuries in a month. As he had also attended Harvard, one newspaper asked: “Could this be the brainiest man ever to play for England?”
“The biggest disappointment of my Test career, such as it was,” Smith ruminates now, “was that it wasn’t long enough for people to see that when things get nasty, I tend to play better. Five innings and two bad wickets and a bad decision was the sequence. And we all know about slices of bad luck here and there.”
He wrote the book after England had dropped him, and his friend the writer Vikram Seth told him: “Why don’t you stop thinking about the sort of book you should write, and just work out what book it is you have to write.”
What Sport Tells Us About Life is guaranteed some easy praise. Reviewers will say: “Look, an athlete who writes!” Smith retorts: “The attitude I’ve had to both careers is: I want to be judged exclusively on the grounds of that profession. So I’m very proud of the fact that in the last six years, Mark Ramprakash has scored the most number of runs, I’ve scored the second most. In the same way in writing, I just want to be judged as a writer.”
And, over peppermint tea, he recites what sounds like a Smith mantra: “Every day’s the day you prove yourself. That’s the biggest challenge in sport, and I would say that’s exactly the same in life.”
But that’s obviously wrong: even the London yuppies in this restaurant don’t have to prove themselves every day. In life, most people can coast. The thought seems to startle Smith. “I never could,” he says.