If you’re wondering if I am still hyped after Michigan won the college football national championship on Monday, the answer is yes, I am in outer space, I will be living up here for some time. In fact I am turning this into a sports blog. Come on down to Lyta’s List for insights into coach Jim Harbaugh’s maximally midwest parents or his belief that athletes shouldn’t eat chicken because it’s a nervous bird. (If you like chicken don’t worry, Harbaugh reversed his stance a few months ago on the grounds that chickens are “productive,” which apparently outweighs their nervousness.)
Anyway I am mostly joking, I will return to our regularly scheduled programming of complaining about TV shows etc. But football is another thing I watch on TV (in fact, something that most Americans watch on TV; the NFL is more popular than basically all other television programs.) And I’m often struck, as I watch football and I listen to recap podcasts during the week, how very similar and different sports are from the main subjects I spend my time writing and obsessing about. Sports are much more objective than art and writing, in that sports are ultimately a matter of numbers—a team scores more points than another team, or they don’t, and that’s it. And yet football podcasts and barroom discussions are usually about which teams or players are really good, and who’s overrated; and does it matter if one team is objectively better—meaning more athletically gifted, more impressive numbers coming into a game—if they lose to another team because of intangible factors like weather or weird vibes or bad refereeing or maybe one player lining up just an inch over an invisible line?
It’s actually wild that even in sports we don’t always have objective answers to good, better, best; that it’s reasonable and appropriate (if annoying) to argue ad nauseam about which team or player is better or worse than another. When these arguments extend into even less objective fields like the arts they get even sillier. I didn’t watch the Golden Globes last Sunday because I was too anxious about the upcoming Michigan game (incidentally I’d also eaten chicken for dinner that night: a nervous bird…..) I also just don’t care about award shows. In fact, I would go so far as to say that they are stupid and pointless. I do love the outfits, and I love watching the fashion slideshows the next day and making judgments. But I think it’s impossible for one movie or TV show to be meaningfully labeled “the best.” They can only be chosen as such by a heavily-politicked group of individuals who make arbitrary judgments that only sometimes match the ones I personally agree with (which is obviously the only way they’re correct.) This year’s Golden Globes included a new, even dumber category: box office achievement, in which the judges pick the “best” movie out of a number of box office successes, and they just so happened to pick Barbie, the highest-grossing film of the year. The new award is openly an attempt to shore up falling ratings by showcasing movies that most people actually watch, and also to make the award system feel a bit fairer and less bullshit. Ticket sales are numbers and numbers are objective; you can’t really get mad at Barbie for winning this award, even if you thought the movie itself was kinda dumb. But even then, so what: box office numbers just tell us which movies a lot of people happened to see, not which movie slots into the categories of “better” or “best” in any way that matters.
The answer to the question of “better” or “best” may simply not be knowable; the best movie in any given year may just be the one that you think is best, yes you, the girl reading this. I think we can sort of accept this, that art is more or less a question of personal truth. It’s harder to accept, however, that even sports may not fairly sort the winners from the losers. The winning team is just, tautologically, the team that wins, not the team that’s objectively the best or would play best if the teams faced each other 10 times in a row under precisely controlled conditions. There were moments during the third quarter of the Michigan game, in which Washington was keeping it close and methodically (if not brilliantly) passing the ball, where it felt exactly like the kind of game that Washington had won all season; if they had just completed two or three crazy big plays and scored, I think Michigan wouldn’t have been able to make up the deficit. But instead Michigan won, and our heroes thanked God on camera; the Washington players thanked God too, with the classic “well he must have some kind of inscrutable plan” air of theological befuddlement. Even the athletes themselves don’t necessarily know why they win or lose, and who is really responsible. Winning is itself a kind of holy mystery.
Sometimes, in both sports and artistic criticism, the most interesting categories aren’t better or best, winner or loser, but what and how: what does something mean, how was something accomplished? As my friend B once pointed out to me, the cliche “it’s easy to criticize” is often misunderstood; yes, it’s easy to come up with criticisms of something, but the real point being made is that criticizing something is much easier than actually doing it. Doing things is hard. Being really good at doing something is extremely hard. This is always clearer and funnier in sports criticism (and the best sportswriters, especially the non-athletes, are aware of this): you might complain that your NFL team’s starting quarterback sucks, but he’s always going to be much better at throwing a ball than you are, Mr. Sportsfan, in fact he’s one of the 32 best people in the world at his job, it’s just that his job is extremely difficult. Arts reviewers often miss this point, especially literary critics, probably because they’re using the same medium to critique the art as the art itself. Often enough, literary critics fail to separate their feeling that they could have written a better novel from the fact that they haven’t actually done so yet. It’s easy to criticize someone else’s bad writing, but very hard to write beautifully yourself,1 just as it’s easy to toss a ball in the abstract but extremely difficult to complete a pass in the NFL while enormous defensive linemen are running at your face.
I actually don’t think talent is as rare as we think it is; or rather, I think talent is largely secondary to considerations like hard work, time, compensation, and proper support. Most artists have some inclination for a medium to begin with; most singers (though not all!) start by being able to carry a tune. But after the initial inclination, it’s hard to calculate what factors will make someone good, let alone better or the best—and what does good even mean, that an artist is good in the eyes of a huge number of people, or of a small devoted fanbase, or of a group of respected and knowledgeable critics, or only to themselves? Much of what we consider “good” is really a question of material success, and success is up to God—or, if you like, forces larger than oneself.
Again, this is where sports can be comforting, where the players might lean on mystical explanations but the fans can mostly fall back on the safety of stats and numbers. Tom Brady is simply, objectively not the world’s most naturally gifted athlete, but he won seven Super Bowls, and therefore most people—though not everyone!—will agree he’s the greatest quarterback of all time. Even in sports, “most people agree” is sometimes just about the best you can do in terms of determining what “the best” actually means. Most people agree that Michigan is indeed the best, because we won; and also our fight song says it, and who can argue with any of that? (Georgia fans, apparently.) But really, if better or best were truly objective, numerical qualities, then they would be knowable in advance; and if games were entirely predictable, then betting markets would be a lot simpler. But they aren’t, and nobody has any idea what it means to be good, let alone who’s going to win. That’s why they’re fun to watch. And that’s also why they’re a lot more fun to watch than say, award shows, which are never as exciting and interesting as the art itself, which already exists and can’t actually be measured.
You could argue that, just as there are a group of 32 men who throw the football very well, there must be a group of novelists who are objectively better than other novelists, and the same would be true for other artistic professions, etc. This may be the case, but it would be very hard to determine who fits in these groups by any objective standard. Some critics think Sally Rooney is an actively bad novelist; some think she’s great. She’s definitely better than some rando on Amazon churning out 40 paranormal romances a year, but that may be the only objectivity we can reach on this score.
this reminded me of that goofy ben shapiro tweet where he tried to provide a definitive list of GOATs in sports. the desire to find and rank "the best" things may not be inherently reactionary but it sure does appeal to people who love hiearchies!