So… New Year, New You and all that. Happy 2025, everyone!
When I’m not spending my spare time writing, I’m a keen member of our village skittles team. Now I’m not going to waste valuable space describing the full, arcane set of rules that govern the sport of skittles in this particular corner of Somerset, but if you’re not familiar with it, you can imagine it as being a bit like ten pin bowling, except that we only have nine pins, arranged in a diamond formation, and it’s usually played in a draughty alley at the back of a pub. The balls are made out of a variety of materials and if they are made out of wood, it’s quite likely that they will have the odd chunk gouged out of them. Sometimes the alley is cambered, sometimes it’s completely flat and sometimes it’s full of potholes. It’s a game of chance as much as anything else.
Anyway (work with me here), this week we had a friendly match against a team that we have usually beaten in the past. It turned out to be quite an epic. Here’s a brief match report.
We are missing some of our top skittlers, but we get off to an excellent start, with the first member of our team scoring a “flopper” – all nine pins down with one ball. The pins are set up again and he knocks them all down with his second and third ball, scoring 18. I follow him and knock all but one down with my first ball, and then completely miss the sole remaining pin with my second ball. I hit it with my third ball, scoring a respectable, but slightly disappointing, 9.
For the rest of the game, we stay roughly ahead of the opposition and go into the final hand – known as the “beer hand” because you have to buy your opponent a beer if you lose to them – 16 pins up. Things start to go badly when my opponent hits a 16 spare (all 9 pins down in two balls, so the third ball is literally spare and can have a go at another 9) and I only manage 7, reducing our lead to 7. The scores stay roughly even from there on, helped by the fact that the opposition score two more spares but, incredibly, entirely fail to hit anything with the third ball on either occasion.
So we get to the final two players still leading, but only by the wafer thin margin of 4 pins. The man from the opposition team goes first and somehow clocks up a 14 spare. We are 10 down now, and our guy needs to get a spare at the very least to tie the game. He’s a decent skittler but can be a little bit wild on occasion. He throws his first ball and somehow every single ball apart from the one in the middle goes down. The entire match now hinges on his second ball. All he needs to do is hit the single central pin and he can surely get at least two pins with his spare third ball?
Bear in mind that this is exactly what I did with my very first ball of the match, and I missed that single central pin with my second ball by a mile. Also, remember those two guys from the opposition who missed with their spare balls altogether? Like I said, village skittles is as a game of chance: absolutely anything can happen.
So what was that all about? Well, I’m fascinated by the relationship of writing to sport. Like a lot of writer types, I’m not that much of a regular fan of any sport, although I am prone to developing an obsessive fascination with the minutiae of the rules of any obscure olympic discipline that happens to match my attention. Freestyle mixed Graeco-Roman underwater tag weightlifting? Yes please!
But I had a revelation a while back which changed my view on a lot of this. It’s that sport is all about narrative. Watch any discussion about sport and it’s all about dramatic last-minute scores, heroic battles against injury, cheaters, underdogs, winners and losers. Everything you need for a great story is there. Some of the most exciting writing that you’ll come across in a newspaper is on the sports pages, and some of the sports writers who break out of their allotted milieu are truly exceptional. Have a listen to the work of Mark Horgan on the Who is George Gibney? and Stakeknife BBC podcasts, for example.
Like I said, I’m not a regular fan, but so many sporting stories are etched on my mind like no others. The 1975 Wimbledon final where Arthur Ashe dismantled Jimmy Connors, for example. That time when we all came back to our hotel after our friend Andrew’s wedding to find the 1980 final between Borg and McEnroe still on, just starting that fourth set tie-break. That final goal in the 1966 world cup, sealed by Kenneth Wolstenholme’s glorious commentary.
And this one, which I would argue is one of the greatest short stories ever written:
It’s a perfect three-act drama. Act One: we are introduced to the protagonists. Dave Wottle barely gets a mention; he’s just the eccentric guy in the golf cap. Act Two: Wottle trails horrendously in the first lap. Surely there must be something wrong with him? Act Three: Wottle makes his move, but has he left it too late? Tragedy or triumph?
Narrative is all around us. It’s up to us as writers to absorb it and get to know how it works. Oh, and by the way, our man did indeed hit the central pin with his second ball and knocked down a further five with his third, giving us a victory by 4 pins. It’s where the narrative was leading, after all.