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Even the rodents ceased. The breath stuck down one thousand throats stuck still. Sheffield conformed itself to function; doing service as the grimy, weathered body to a vital, throbbing heart.
They call it the Crucible, a theatre that got teased by the office blocks. Aesthetes avert their gaze and the conventional tourist scuttles away. There must be a cathedral somewhere.
This was the 2010 World Championship Final; dialed to that seminal juncture, when a victor receives the option. Golfers get their putt, footballers that flash of empty net, and jockeys a horse-shaped gap with a furlong of available racetrack. The cruelest sports provide mode and time enough to baulk; and avail oneself of the alternative.
Three balls still lent themselves to felt: the white (as facilitator), the pink (as next permissible prize), and the black, with its power of culmination.
Scottish Graeme Dott – built to steer horses himself – had declined to pot the pink and show intention. He was two frames astern and recognised the stake; to tap his rival’s shoulder, or to lose and nod consent. And nod he did.
Crowned of unfeasibly blond hair, his opponent set upon the table and made his survey. It were an ugly configuration; white ball kissed by cushion – midway centre and corner pocket – and mandatory pink jammed one foot right of the adjacent other corner.
Snooker supplies one with a role; as prosecutor or pragmatist, to enforce or to withstand. One makes the play or makes darn sure the other cue doesn’t. Strategy informs selection, selection becomes execution, and execution picks your path. World champions go the place the loser lets them.
So thus was the scene. Two relevant men, the modified green table, and the mice in their abeyance; observed by the stillness, fixated on the balls. The blond bloke knocked white into pink and three down to two; readied the mantle then roared amidst the din.
This was Neil Robertson; a victor in the Crucible and virtual sovereign over snooker’s every table. Australians had a mint-fresh sporting hero if only it could be bothered to collect him.
But it never really seemed as if we were; to permit an observation. And he’s swept the northern hemisphere for several heady seasons ever since. They hail him ‘The Melbourne Machine’; we furrow brows and scratch our heads. He entered last week’s 2014 World Championship edition as paragon of the ranking graph – and before relenting to outright winner Neil Selby in a semifinal – brought something to assault the most jaded sporting palate.
Australian Neil Robertson, he of the snooker cue, peroxide bottle, and truckload of unacknowledged talent, became the first player to complete 100 ‘century’ breaks within a tournament season. The distracted ought to know the connotation even if he didn’t assuage their interest at the time. This was Gordon Coventry’s hundredth goal and Sachin Tendulkar’s hundredth ton; a feat to smudge the record books and choke committed voices. It mattered.
Viable professional sportspeople rarely need an advocate; furnishing dreams as most do in preference to the commuter train or the extra shift. But Robertson’s is a shortened straw; and the Sporting Gods have duped him.
Consider the treachery in plying one chubby little hand with a cue and another with a golf club. Adam Scott should be bended at a pew. They dared stash a football in Harry Kewell’s toy-box and gave Lleyton Hewitt a cut-down racquet for Christmas. He must feel like the incidentally-parked car to Buddy Franklin’s borrowed Jeep; verged to shake that prodigious chalk-tipped wand at an unfathomable sky.
And he might as well snap it over knee instead of pondering Alex Rodriguez or Kobe Bryant’s compact with the deities. Or their diamond-encrusted pool tables. The talents are commensurate, their dividends unfair; and then there are the gymnasts and the divers and the archers that would aim at Neil with envy. Curse those wicked Sporting Gods, for they have been transgressors.
But those nods we make with unacquitted heads. Albeit the Gods’ prerogative to ladle talent by dollops meagre and obscene, it is the unbestowed that choose which sports to sponsor and which to spurn. Australians laud their favourite codes and players by convention; we burn leisure time to watch them work, we goad and toast them, we doctor our number plates and engrave our skin. We’ll even swap breakfast cereals or consult hair-replacement therapists based on their remunerated advice.
So, how much product would Neil Robertson shift if his chosen purveyor of hair bleach sought endorsement? And if we wagged expedient fingers at mainstream media – citing lack of agency and insufficient chance to reckon with his feats – would we buff the blame unduly?
They dance to commercially-frantic tunes as obligation: to lock and load the content we wanted yesterday – pattern-recognisers first, trend-setters secondarily at best. No one sensible confronts Simon Whitfield near a pub dartboard anymore; but Robertson could sting a procession of axe-wielding fools around any pub-bound pool table in Australia.
Big media might defer the heat accordingly: that it’s for the sport to supply the product (think Premier League Darts), that the best products entice the punters, that the punters’ proclivity commands the space, and that athlete wealth comes consequentially.
To agree is to install media executives as arbiters of modern sporting career paths. The Sporting Gods are dead, they’d say. Nobody compelled Neil Robertson to pick up a snooker cue. Popular sports are lucrative, lucrative sports are popular; and any valid imperative confirms as much.
If he wanted a scapegoat, he should try the administrators of that game he’s learnt to master. They’re the problem. Have them devise the next Premier League Darts, or Twenty20 cricket, or State of Origin rugby league series; then we’ll see what happens. Fit the paradigm, or pot away.
But what travesties lie down those executives’ roads. Sport as commodities, participation as investment; and fulmination as but wasted breath. And the Sporting Gods don’t want to help. The task befalls us barely and unbestowed – as observers, punditry, and fans – to celebrate sporting talent for its purest, simplest sake. To ride those Olympic bandwagons through closing ceremonies, until obscurity is nothing. To confer attention unto media outlets that afford us such a chance.
To serve every Neil Robertson that decoration they deserve, for we sense there’s plenty more. Extraordinary sporting bundles kept by faces unbeknown.
Let’s roar and have the Sporting Gods take note: that pot luck isn’t bad luck any more.
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