Knowing the Score, by David Papineau

Title: Knowing the Score - What Sports Can Teach Us About Philosophy (And What Philosophy Can Teach Us About Sports)
Author: David Papineau
Publisher: Constable (UK) | Basic Books (US)
Year: 2017
Pages: 328
Order: Little, Brown (UK) | Basic Books (US)
What it is: Philosophy meets sport
Strengths: A couple of good chapters that mix sport and philosophy and draw conclusions that are relevant to the 'real' world and not just the sporting one
Weaknesses: A lot of it feels like it's just some weekend warrior chuntering on about himself playing cricket or tennis or whatever and regaling you with familiar sporting anecdotes

Shelley Rodhe: What have you got out of football all these years?
Bill Shankly: Everything I've got I owe to football. You only get out of the game what you put into it, Shelley. So I put in all my heart and soul, to the extent that my family suffered.
Rodhe: Do you regret that at at all?
Shankly: I regret it very much. Somebody said: 'Football's a matter of life and death to you.' I said, 'Listen it's more important than that.' And my family's suffered. They've been neglected.
~ Former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly interviewed five months before his death in 1981

Here's a philosophical brain teaser for you: why do we celebrate a workaholic like Bill Shankly while looking dimly on Tim from accounts who seems to eat, breathe and sleep monthly management reports? While that one's percolating through your brain, let's talk about Knowing the Score - What Sports Can Teach Us About Philosophy (And What Philosophy Can Teach Us About Sports), in which the philosophy professor David Papineau (King's College London and the Graduate Center, City University of New York) "uses sport to illuminate some of philosophy's most perplexing questions, showing that the study of sport clarifies, challenges and even advances crucial philosophical debates."

Cycling is one sport that is no stranger to the gaze of philosophers. Roland Barthes is forever being rammed down our throats. Robert Redeker and Peter Sloterdijk have shown knowledge of or an affinity for cycling. Bertrand Russell perhaps less so, on both counts (especially the latter). We tend to consider commentators on the sport such as Dino Buzzati, Antoine Blondin or Paul Fournel to be philosophers (but then we also tend to think of cyclists from Peter Sagan to Dorino Vanzo as philosophers). Not a very big list, I know, but we can now add to it Papineau, a relatively recent convert to the charms of cycling:

"I came rather late to road cycle racing. Generally I am not fussy in my sporting interests. Tennis, soccer, rugby, cricket, baseball, golf, basketball, American football, sailing, squash, Australian rugby league ... the list is long. But I drew the line at cycling. It looked like a tedious trial of strength, and I attributed its fanatical support in Europe to a Latin predilection for machismo over sporting subtlety."

Fortunately for us Papineau was encouraged to see the error of his ways by the London Olympics and the high hopes of the home team in the men's road race. And while cycling features only fleetingly in Knowing the Score - Papineau has a clear bias toward sport with balls (golf, tennis, cricket, soccer, baseball) - you can be damned sure that future listicles and miscellanies will feature his name prominently as one of our own.

Despite his long career in philosophy and his lifelong interest in sports - he was born the same year Fausto Coppi took his second Giro d'Italia victory - it is only in recent years that Papineau has let these two parts of his life meet:

"Until recently it never occurred to me to combine my two enthusiasms. There is an area of my subject that goes under the heading 'philosophy of sport'. But it has never excited me. Central topics are sport and politics, disability and enhancement, the ethics of drug use, the definition and value of sport, and so on. The normal strategy is to take some contentious topic that exercises sport practitioners or administrators, and then analyse the solutions implied by different philosophical theories. It is all a bit earnest, as if the writers want to counterbalance their frivolous subject matter with the sobriety of their prose. I have always kept away. I enjoy sport, and this seemed to make it dull."

Papineau's own strategy tends toward taking some mildly contentious comment and dismissing it before telling us what should have been said, drawing on his own experience as a weekend warrior in various sports and his knowledge of sporting anecdotes acquired as an armchair pundit. A democratic, man of the people approach, you could call it.

So what does he talk about? The book is broken up into five sections beginning with thinking, before moving on to regulation, followed by two linked areas, teams and tribes, with the values of sport closing the book out. It is only in the last chapter of that final section that Papineau gets round to defining a key term used throughout Knowing the Score: sport. The definition of which is, of course, a staple of so many books on the philosophy of sport.

Papineau's definition is simple enough: "any activity whose primary purpose is the exercise of physical skills." Which is a definition, I think, that must surely exclude those activities whose primary purpose is the generating of profit (either through direct revenue raising or indirectly through marketing of particular products) which, historically, has been the primary purpose of cycling. This, of course, is the perennial problem with philosophy of sport: its practioners are forever trying to create a simple rule that will encompass the diverse world of sport without allowing in things like, say, ballet.

Sticking with the norm in the realm of philosophy of sport, Papineau's use of cycling sees him entering the world of game theory¹ to explain the behaviour of individuals in teams, with two chapters featuring cycling. These allow him to discuss the prisoner's dilemma (which ought be familiar to most of us by now, having been used time and time and time and time and time again to explain doping) and the related Nash equilibrium (which is also sometimes rolled out - such as here and here - to explain doping, though you're likely to be more familiar with it from the Russell Crowe film in which it is used to show the best strategy to pick up women in bars). The two races Papineau uses in these chapters are the women's road races at the 2012 Olympics and the 2014 Commonwealth Games and in both cases his reading of the race will probably differ from yours, calling into question the philosophical lessons he draws from them.

In the latter, Emma Pooley broke away but was chased down and dropped by her England team-mate Lizzie Deignan. Sort of like the way Greg LeMond chased down Jock Boyer at the '82 Worlds. Except that here Deignan took the gold medal, Pooley the silver. Papineau - despite his personal reservations about the morality of Deignan's actions - accepts this as an example of altruism (a collectivist desire among the riders): "from the riders' point of view, all that matters are the teams, not their individual members." The problem with this comes when you read Deignan's account of the race in her chamoir, Steadfast, in which she describes her own actions as ruthless, driven by the knowledge that Pooley was already thinking about retirement and already training for triathlons. Pooley, she says rather bluntly, didn't deserve the chance of victory. Which is pretty much the way most people read it on the day. It seems strange that philosophy should use the outcome of an action to decide whether the individual was being selfish (LeMond) or altruistic (Deignan).

Cycling also merits by-the-way mention in two of the better chapters of Knowing the Score, one dealing with the issue of rules and cheating and the other genetics. The latter first: here Papineau considers the idea of sporting dynasties - families that top their sports across several generations - and the perplexing question of nature versus nurture.

While cycling is full of familiar family names, it has not been very good at producing proper dynasties like, say, Graham and Damon Hill or Keke and Nico Rosberg in Formula 1, the only two father-son pairings to have won the F1 championships. There are many examples² of brothers on the bike (Pélissier, Coppi, Bobet, Pettersson, Moser, Madiot, Roche, Indurain, Schleck, Quintana, Yates), plenty of father-son relationships (Merckx, Roche, Wiggins, Moser, Phinney, Van Poppel, Zabel), and occasional mother-son (Carpenter/Phinney) or father-daughter (Sukhoruchenkov/Zabelinskaya, Knetemann, Gillow, Pieters), mother-daughter (Burton, Jones, Donker/Knetemann, Brambani/Parkinson) or sisters in cycling stories (Burkhart, Trott, James, Barnes, Garner, Druyts). We even have husband-wife pairings (Carpenter/Phinney, Trott/Kenny, Armitstead/Deignan). But there are no real examples of proper success - as opposed to just being there - spanning the generations, examples of success breeding success: no father/son pairing (that I can think of) has shared success across the Grand Tours and the Monuments³.

That, Papineau would argue, is because success isn't in the breeding: when it comes to dynasties, nurture trumps nature.

"Across the board we find family dynasties in those sports that depend on special environments rather than on special genes."

Why don't genes matter? Regression to the mean, says Papineau:

"You may have a strong chance of playing in the NBA if you are 7 feet tall - but you will have scarcely any chance of siring a 7-foot-tall son. Remember that half your son's genes will come from his mother - and while she may well be tall, she's unlikely to be as much of an outlier as you. The point generalizes. The children of physically exceptional parents are nearly always less exceptional themselves."

In arguing that environments matter Papineau is not making an argument in favour of the 10,000 hours nonsense popularised by Malcolm Gladwell and ripped off by his Pound Shop counterpart Matthew Syed. It isn't about the children of sports people starting earlier and practising more and better. Rather he is saying that in sports where equipment or coaching matters - and he points to cricket over, say, soccer - being raised in that environment offers you an advantage (access) that your genes don't.

Elsewhere, the issue of rules is addressed, Papineau examining the difference between the written and unwritten rules of sports and what transgressing them tells us. Papineau offers rules from various forms of football, while in cycling we all know you can grab a sticky bottle or a hand-sling, you can draft in the caravan, you can fake a mechanical or an injury in order to hang out of the team car or the medic's car for a few minutes but woe betide you if you attack the race leader when he has to stop for any reason and don't expect too much cheering if you suck wheels all day in the break only to out-sprint everyone else for the win. Breaking the written rules can be overlooked, failing to heed the unwritten ones can't. According to Papineau:

"fair play is often consistent with breaking a game's rules, and this will then suggest, against philosophical orthodoxy, that there is no general moral requirement for good citizens to conform to the law of the land."

What good citizens do have to do, though, is recognise the authority of the officials: if you are called out on your rule breaking, you have to accept the penalty that comes with it. This would have been a terrific opportunity for Papineau to address the moral issues surrounding doping - not just the issue of doping itself but what happens when you're busted - but alas the sole reference he has to the subject in the book is this:

"Until recently competitive road cyclists fed themselves a battery of performance-enhancing drugs, and this self-abuse was compounded by the corrosive hypocrisy of repeated public denials."

Doping, it seems, only happens in one sport, at least as far as Papineau is concerned.

* * * * *

Let's get back to the brain teaser I set you at the start: why do we celebrate a workaholic like Bill Shankly while looking dimly on Tim from accounts who seems to eat, breathe and sleep monthly management reports? I guess it's because of the different values we place on sport and management reports. Papineau, he has a very, very inflated opinion of the value of sport:

"According to the legendary Liverpool football manager Bill Shankly, 'Football is not a matter of life and death. It's much more important than that.'

"It's a good joke, not least because Shankly wasn't aiming to be funny. But it also highlights a real issue. Where does sport stand in the scheme of things?

"You don't have to agree with Shankly to believe that sport adds a positive element to many lives. Still, not every one concedes even this much. Another important thinker, Noam Chomsky, thinks sport is nothing but a capitalist trick. He dismisses it as: 'an area which has no meaning and probably thrives because it has no meaning, as a displacement from the serious problems which one cannot influence.'⁴

"If you ask me, Chomsky is talking though his hat. He may know all about the foundations of linguistics - though I have my doubts about that too - but when it comes to sport, I am with Shankly every time. Only someone who is a complete stranger to the joys of athletic achievement could dismiss sport as having 'no meaning'."

How much you get out of Knowing the Score will depend on the value you place on Papineau's sweeping statements (cricket fans who show no interest in baseball or baseball fans who show no interest in cricket exhibit "a perverse lack of curiosity. Neither group of dogmatists are real sports fans." Or "Great athletes are mentally as well as physically exceptional. They are capable of feats of concentration beyond the reach of ordinary people.⁵") and how willing you are to wade through sporting anecdote after sporting anecdote after sporting anecdote.

If you are coming to Knowing the Score hoping for a book that does to philosophy what David Epstein's The Sports Gene did to genetics, forget it. To borrow one of Dave Brailsford's metaphors, Papineau is more focussed on the peas (the sporting anecdotes) and not enough on the steak (the philosophy): in the end, Knowing the Score is philosophy light.

Knowing the Score, by David Papineau - UK and US covers