Sports overload. Three cheers
A boy-meets-girl novel about video gaming. Essays on why sport matters
This Week, Those Books links the big international story to the world of books and has a few thousand followers on every continent except Antarctica. We aim to provide, in roughly five minutes, crucial context – from fiction and non-fiction – to the shouty, doomscroll news cycle.
The Big Story:
This high summer of global sport has the usual – tennis, cricket, cycling, football – but also the first international edition of the Esports World Cup.
Sports overload? Or a welcome chance to ponder why football and esports co-exist?
Matthew Syed, a former English table tennis number one, writes in his book The Greatest:
“…sport, while superficially frivolous, is underpinned by themes which are basic to the human condition: heroism, drama, competition, hierarchy, psychology, morality and, perhaps most important of all, the quest for greatness. How do we become the best that we can be, as individuals, teams, and organisations?”
More context, fewer walls
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This Week’s Books:
A charming story about two friends in a creative clinch around gaming.
Why the whole world is mad about all sport.
A free-to-read post from the archives about Gamescom, one of the world’s largest video games expos:
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
By: Gabrielle Zevin
Publisher: Vintage Books
Year: 2022
The rise of esports or competitive video gaming pushes this novel to the top of the reading pile this summer. But it could be there in any season.
This tender story, which takes its title from the Macbeth soliloquy, is about video gamers Sadie Green and Sam Masur.
They first met as children and later joined up again as students at MIT and Harvard respectively.
Their original meeting was in unusual circumstances, in the games room of a hospital. Sadie was visiting her cancer-stricken older sister; Sam had survived a horrific car crash that broke his foot in 27 places and killed his mother.
Sadie didn’t know all of that when they met and Sam never said. They had simply bonded while playing Super Mario Bros and Duck Hunt. When he met Sadie, Sam had not said more than two words to anyone in the six weeks since the accident. But the miracle of playing worked wonders, the act of trusting another person enough to play a game together.
Sadie and Sam go on to a creative partnership developing video games. A boy-meets-girl story, this is about love but not romance.
Best of all, even non-gamers like me can follow along!
Choice quotes:
…the thing about games is, if you get good at one game, you can be good at any game. That’s what I think. They’re all hand-eye coordination and observing patterns.
To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back – I know you won’t hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love. Many years later, as Sam would controversially say in an interview with the gaming website Kotaku, “There is no more intimate act than play, even sex.” The internet responded: no one who had had good sex would ever say that, and there must be something seriously wrong with Sam.
Lovers are common…True collaborators in this life are rare.
The Greatest: What Sport Teaches us About Achieving Success
By: Matthew Syed
Publisher: John Murray
Year: 2017
This collection of Matthew Syed’s writings is the perfect companion to Gabrielle Zevin’s novel about video gaming.
While the spirit of play is essential to sport, all play is not sport. Syed, who went from competitive sport to journalism, nails the essential spirit and uses of sport: “a never-ending upward spiral”; “as a metaphor, it helps us to delve deeper into the nature and construction of greatness”.
He explains why sport gripped the imagination of the ancient world, just as it grips the modern. Syed quotes Lucian, the historian enamoured of the Ancient Games: “…the incredible pleasure of standing in that cheering crowd, admiring the athletes’ courage and good looks, their amazing physical conditioning, their unbeatable determination, and their unstoppable passion for victory”.
Syed, now a columnist for The Times, London, notes the role of community in nurturing sportsmanship and creating stars. Parents, coaches, supporters, lay members of the public, can all affect the outcome.
His own story is proof of sorts. Growing up the suburbs of Reading, a town in southern England, he says that it was the “ping-pong Mecca”. Roughly half of the top players in the country at that time came from the same town, indeed the same street. This was no coincidence. “The top coach in the country taught at the school adjacent to the road. He gave us access to superb training and mentoring. We also had the advantage of each other, this small group of players, vying for supremacy. Perhaps the crucial advantage, however, was that we all had access to the only purpose-built table-tennis club in the south of England.” That club had been physically constructed by community volunteers!
The Back Story:
The seven-week-long Esports World Cup in Paris runs until August 23 and brings together more than 2,000 players and 200 clubs from over 100 countries.
The FIFA World Cup ends on July 19, having set a record as the biggest football tournament, with more matches between teams from more countries than ever before.
Tour de France, cycling’s biggest competition, ends on July 26.
Wimbledon 2026 came to a close with lots of sunshine, show-stopping outfits and some superb tennis, not least by Jannik Sinner, the No. 1 men’s player in the world and Linda Nosková.
The Women’s T20 Cricket World Cup ended July 5.
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