Geoff's preview chapter

Hi all, here's that chapter we mentioned from my new manuscript. We're mid-editing now and this chapter might end up being split and moved around a bit, so this is likely the only look at it the way I first wrote it. I like this as a standalone essay, so you might too. It'll be a glimpse into how structural editing works once you see the final product. 

Please don't pass this on to anyone outside Patreon, as that would run me into trouble with my publisher. Thanks. 

The Redemption Myth

Amongst the overblown themes of sportswriting, through all its stained and dog-eared lexica, the one that comes up most is surely redemption. Across the dirt of suburban outfields and the paint of city lanes, redemption and the seeking of it. Blessed is its pursuit. Something to be striven for, to be craved, to be grasped, to be squandered. Teams, athletes, entire nations take their turns to be redeemed. Someone, somewhere is always hovering on its holy cusp. The more energetic can make it a cycle, a new rise before each corresponding fall, the weekly trip through a spiritual car-wash. Each time a crowd will assemble, dancing with the idea that this time could be different. The desire to see someone rise is unquenchable. We are a world of sporting sinners endlessly swimming towards the light. 

The same concept lives way beyond sport, of course. Action heroes wrestle their pasts, the prodigal son makes his passage home. We saddle up the Xbox to ride the range in Red Dead Redemption. Even our frequent flyer points get redeemed, becoming shitty appliances in a late rush before the airline goes bust. Hold onto this receipt, redeem this offer at any participating outlet. 'I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth,' says the book of Job, and duly on a mountain above Rio de Janeiro you’ll find the firm footing of Christ the Redeemer, eternally signalling a wide. 

Sometimes the formulation fits. A team that wins the year after fumbling a final? A footballer slotting a crucial penalty after blowing it last time? The all-caps ‘REDEMPTION’ across the back of the paper reflects the feeling. More broadly though, it gets applied to any success that follows any lack of success. In the endless churn of sport results, this is less a narrative than a sequence. But Lord, we love narratives. ‘One common thread runs through almost every major sports moment so far this year, and that is redemption,’ wrote The Sport Digest in 2017. It could have been any other year. After the US men’s basketball team committed the sin of not winning gold at the 2004 Olympics, the narrative got so baked into their next Games campaign that the Dream Team nickname morphed into the Redeem Team. 

The other kind of redemption story involves off-field failings. Between all the world’s athletes, the money, the youth and the high-risk personalities, these form a substantial body of work. The basics are drink-driving, car crashes, messy nights on the town. These might aggregate into alcoholism or addictions to any of the substances ideal for those with a lot of ready cash and a need for a clean system in 12 hours. Transgression can get more boutique, like NFL player Michael Vick’s dog-fighting ring. It can be as mundane as sexual infidelity, like Wayne Carey being banished from North Melbourne for an affair, or as serious as all of the times that Wayne Carey assaulted women. There is often a stronger reaction to impropriety – consensual affairs saw Tiger Woods’ career fall apart, John Terry lost the England football captaincy – than the litany of sexual assault by athletes that reflects its prevalence in our societies. Money and legal clout ensures they’re almost never convicted, and a lack of conviction (in both senses) is used to stifle the question of whether violence and sexual violence should prohibit a return to the public arena. 

There are all kinds of unique redemption stories – Rubin Carter, falsely convicted of murder with a reputation as a fierce boxer, campaigning for his eventual release; South Africa after apartheid reappearing in Rugby World Cups and cricket Tests and Olympic Games. Dopers, match-fixers and other cheats are their own genre, as their failings are personal but take place within the sport. Former match-fixers can come back to win without suspicion but never lose. Drug cheats who win are assumed to be still on the gear and when losing are derided as nothing without it. Any Australian bowler generating reverse swing will equally generate suspicion as long as Steve Smith or David Warner is in the side.

The academic Alex Parrish parses the redemption cycle into six stages: loss, shame, punishment, repentance, triumph, and forgiveness. The first three are largely enacted through media coverage, while parts four and six can be engineered through the same. There’s the newspaper double-spread with photos of domestic relatability, or the montage of sobs and synthesisers on a TV profile. Wholesome influences take the spotlight: childhood hockey coaches with wisdom carved into faces like Treebeard, family priests whose urging brought on a Damascene moment of prayer, mothers or fathers or their surrogates before whom our subject is at last humbled into gratitude. Babies and marriages become catalysts for a moral before-and-after picture. 

Any of these can apply to athletes current or retired. The retired need bigger arcs, like the autobiography addressing mental health, personal flaws, or addiction. These are marketable where struggle contrasts with sporting success. The stories need an upbeat end though – the subjects can go through Hell itself but must come out the other side. Resolution ideally comes through a change of context like meeting the right partner or changing career, an external reflection of internal change. It’s frustrating for people who live with ongoing mental health conditions, who know that these are only ever managed rather than cured. Those stories are harder to write and harder to sell.

Thomas Patrick Oates writes in similar terms on a subset of documentaries about athletes who didn’t make it. Despite that premise, each subject ‘ultimately overcomes his athletic failures in some significant way. Given the conventions of the documentary profile, it is perhaps unsurprising that these stories would be framed in terms that emphasize redemption. Because profiles so often involve the subject as the central participant, narratives documenting their failure usually end on a positive note, or at least allow the central subject to share some important insight on the human condition.’

Those are a few of the ways through the cycle. But for part five – triumph – current athletes have a direct option that the retired do not. They can get out and play. New success is an adrenaline syringe to the redemption veins. On a post-football Monday in 2010, Lynn Zinser wrote for the New York Times. ‘Having absorbed a day full of stories of redemption, the N.F.L. has officially taken over the word. There was so much redeeming going on, it’s amazing anyone remembered to play football… Vick became King of the Redeemed, while also redeeming Coach Andy Reid for making him the starter. In sports, this is how you re-write your reputation. Similarly, [Braylon] Edwards patched over that pesky little arrest for drunken driving and redeemed the Jets’ decision to wallop him with that whole quarter-long suspension with a touchdown catch that helped beat the Dolphins... The redemption of the Cowboys and the Vikings, two over-hyped teams avoiding 0-3 starts, saved them from being overtaken by waves of panic... Still awaiting his redemption opportunity is the suspended Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger.’

This concept of redemption is lightweight, painted polystyrene. It doesn’t expunge the failing, it just means that the most recent public memory is no longer the most embarrassing. Your profile photo is now a cheery thumbs-up instead of you stapling your foreskin to a table. It gives minor actions a disproportionate emotional heft, like that especially British practice where a footballer observes some basic piece of civility online and an infantry of accounts with club logos line up with the single-word reply: 'Class.' Media expediency drives this, but it still only works with an audience. 'There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored,' wrote the novelist Mary Flannery O’Connor, whose protagonist in Wise Blood forever sought the same. 

Foundational to storytelling is progress. The cinema’s three-act structure needs a character to be confronted with change and emerge from it. Greek myth has the twin concepts of miasma and catharsis: a shadow overhead or a stain on the soul, then the cleansing that only an act of courage can bring on. The same impulse echoes through our monotheistic religions; our visits to confessionals, our knees bruised on flagstones, our prayers made with lips or with strands of knotted rope. The secular versions are in gym sessions, self-help sections, therapy couches. This is our inexhaustible need: the idea that we can be forgiven, that we may mimic divine example by transcending our form and existing anew. 

The Jesus myth uses a different version: suffering without a preceding wrong, for the good of those who remain. 'In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace,' says the Book of Ephesians. Antecedents have used the same structure for millennia, a sacrifice of some sacred figure for harvest or protection or appeasement. The sacrifices deemed most potent tend to involve human youth, innocent and blameless. Likewise the Greek miasma does not always follow wrongdoing, but accident or misfortune – it is not so much a moral judgement as a burden imposed by fate. Heracles is made to slay his family while possessed by a god, but once recovered he still has to perform his Twelve Labours to atone. 

Those conventions remain with us: if an apocalypse movie plays in the forest but no one dies to save the world, does it make a surround sound? Bruce Willis is Jesus on an asteroid, nailed by a nuke; a true muscular American Christianity. Other action movies with more localised scopes of damage still need the emotional ballast of a character saving the others, the ‘Go on without me' moment: think Gorman and Vasquez in the air duct in Aliens, think Miles Dyson’s ragged final breaths as he holds up a detonator long enough for John and Sarah Connor to escape Cyberdyne Systems. 

It’s tempting to peg this modern prevalence as a substitute, interpreting like religious scholar Joseph Price that 'contemporary secular rituals manifest fundamental religious proclivities of human beings and reflect the sacred rites and myths of previous, religiously oriented cultures.' This can be a chicken-and-egg argument, but the length of its history suggests that redemption symbolism had a power that attracted religious thought, rather than vice versa. The contemporary pair can share aspects and reinforce one another, developing side by side rather than one depending on or raiding the other. Secular redemption stories are as marketable under religious regimes as in the cliche of the godless modern city. 

One crossover area is repentance. Any athlete banned for a time can show dedication to make amends by their training. Ideally this gets reported on: details of their program, liberal use of the word ‘gruelling’, quotes from teammates about training the house down, numbers on how much muscle was added to become a beast or weight was dropped to become a lean machine. Sweat is an offering. In religious tradition, an ascetic was a holy person who refused comfort and luxury, leaving society to live as a hermit and concentrate on God. The word came via Latin from the Ancient Greek áskēsis, meaning an athlete’s training or exercise. Physical improvement was made parallel to the rigour of religious devotion. There turns out to be a short thread between John the Baptist chowing locusts and a Rocky montage. Smith hitting a million balls in his garage was his version of heading to the wilderness to commune, atone, and eventually return for the better. 

These options aren’t available to many of us. For a person of humble abilities the only currency is time and effort, suffering and expiation. Normal wrongs are met with exclusion, prison, fines, public shame, public contrition. We need to hurt and be seen to have hurt. After the Freedom Summer murders in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr said that ‘Somehow I still believe that American suffering is redemptive.’ Pain is a path to something better. For an individual to win back social standing after a crime, the route lies through charity, doing notable acts for others the way Jesus hopped up on the woodwork. This might still take years. To be seen as reformed without major good deeds, just by living a quiet and honourable life, one would need to be able to point at decades.

But as mentioned, the athlete has the fastest path to absolution. Loss, shame, punishment, repentance, triumph, forgiveness – and the triumph part can be had in the arena even if the other five have nothing to do with it. Zinser put her finger on the obvious but usually ignored contradiction. ‘By scoring touchdowns, did any of these guys actually make amends for what put them on people’s Don’t Like List (or in Vick’s case, Despised List) to start with? Uh, not really... [It] was definitely a warped off-field message, but football success erases all doubts.’ 

Make that any success. The boxer Floyd Mayweather has made hundreds of millions of dollars despite years of battering women, with the plea deals and convictions and testimony from his own children to prove it. Mike Tyson served less than half of a prison sentence for rape and was back fighting within five months of release, in a bout billed as ‘He’s Back’ that grossed US$96million of mid-1990s money. These days he does cuddly fun cameos in ads and comedy movies and did an acclaimed theatre tour. The Irish Times wrote about Conor McGregor’s relationship with the USA, as a professional fighter who too often took his work outside hours: ‘luckily for him sports fans there have short memories. Most don’t care about his appearances in the courthouse dock or the newspaper allegations; all they are interested in is what he will do next in the boxing ring or the octagon, and it takes a lot for an athlete of his stature and with his ability to generate revenue to become persona non grata in the sports and entertainment worlds here.’ 

NFL player Ray Rice and NRL player Ben Barba ended their careers after beating their partners, but CCTV footage was the common factor. Rice was due to miss two games before the video leaked, while Barba had been allowed to play on after beating the same woman seven years earlier. Any rate, those are rare exceptions. The same NRL backed Matthew Lodge after he followed a woman home in New York City, threatened to kill her, broke into her apartment building, bashed a man who came to help, then tried to punch holes through the door of the bathroom where the man’s wife and son were hiding. He played the card that everyone deserves a second chance, at which point his former partner reported that he had also beaten her. At the time of writing he’s still on the field. Mass protests made half a dozen English football clubs back out of signing Ched Evans in 2014 and 2015 after his release from a rape sentence, but he was back by 2016. 

Sexual assaults come up all the time in sport coverage, not surprisingly in intensely macho environments with a drinking culture. Society-wide only a fraction of assaults are reported, of which only a fraction are charged, of which only a fraction are convicted, purely because the nature of the offence makes it hard to deliver a high enough standard of proof to send someone to prison. It’s often one word against another. But false reports are rare: the defendant is the one who always has a reason to lie. Statistically a large majority of these cases must be true, but fans will claim a not-guilty verdict as complete moral exoneration. This happens even when the trial has revealed without question that their player’s behaviour in the episode was awful. Only a criminal conviction is held to mean anything. Twisting these situations into comeback stories is repulsive, but people do it anyway.

Obviously violent crimes have no moral equivalence with a rookie spending too much time at Revolver and not enough at the training track. They’re loosely grouped rather than sitting on a spectrum of seriousness. But whatever the cause of disgrace, any contest important enough or athlete marketable enough can get a pass. 'A key component to redemption narratives is continued talent,' writes Parrish. Which is accurate while making no sense at all: that a person good at a sport can compensate for some non-sport behaviour by continuing to be good at that sport. As though that performance was a moral decision made by the player, recompense made to the assembled judgement of the people. 

In the English summer of 2019, after Stokes won the Ashes Test at Leeds, the newspaper that had published his punching spree lurched so far the other way they left their stomachs behind. 'The Sun couldn’t back the call for Ben Stokes to be knighted any more enthusiastically. Nobody is perfect. Stokes certainly hasn’t been — but then, who is? Since that night in Bristol he’s not just delivered on his potential as a world-class cricketer but as a role model for a generation. His grace in ­victory is a lesson for all of us. Make no mistake, this is cricket’s summer. From the World Cup to Headingley, it’s been remarkable drama. Now there are two tests to go to bring the urn home. Come on England — and Sir Ben.'

There it came like a freight train: triumph and forgiveness, even without much in the way of repentance or loss. The readership would already be loving Our Ben, and the paper was nimble enough to get in ahead of the sentiment. Smith too was seen as redeemed. Neither had really nailed the repentance part, but their heroics were heroic enough to obviate it. Warner would flourish before and after the Ashes, but his failure in that series would leave him more tenuously placed. Bancroft would not receive a pass at all, his brief failure in two Test matches leaving him still bearing his moral burden. 

In the end, forgiveness is a convenient way to let audiences go back to enjoying the athletes we enjoyed before. In his essay Oates writes that there are always ‘discrepancies in the path of redemption and the erasures they require’. Perhaps rather than some religiously inspired idea of salvation, there is something more pragmatic and primal to a pardon: wanting to reintegrate someone into our affections who still has potential value to us. A person seen as weak and broken gives us no incentive. When someone carries out deeds that we marvel at, it’s different. Stokes and Smith reached heights that made onlookers dizzy. They provided thrills, a pure buzz of exhilaration, that those watching couldn’t and didn’t want to deny. The concept of separating the art from the artist tends to depend on how much you love the art.

Which means we’ll keep hearing redemption stories, regardless of how attentively the six stages are observed. We’ll keep finding ways to absolve others of their wrongs, even as we keep walking into those confessionals, hoping to find some way to make ourselves pure. Redemption and the impulse that creates it can’t be eradicated. You could call it resurrection, but it never dies.