Mark Chisnell's Blog, page 6
July 29, 2012
Bike Racing and Cooperation...
I've been writing blogs on how the Prisoner's Dilemma can be seen in action in the banking crisis (It's Only Taken Three Years...) and in the housing market (Games Theory and the Estate Agent) - and yesterday we saw Games Theory ideas in action in the Olympic road race.
It's Games Theory that drives the plot of my first novel, The Defector, and in particular a thing called the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD). If you haven't come across it before, I will point you at my own description in the foreword to The Defector, a suspense thriller in which it features as the central plot device. Or you can check out a much more technical take in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (SEP) entry.
If you're going to read on, please get to grips with the Prisoner's Dilemma first!
The peloton is a place where everyone has to decide whether to cooperate or defect. The co-operators take their turn at the front, while the defectors hide in the bunch, freewheeling in the slipstream and hoping to conserve their energy for the sprint at the end.
We can see this in PD terms - all the cooperators give themselves the same chance at winning if they all do even amounts of work at the front. But there's a big benefit to defecting when everyone else cooperates, as the energy conserved would give you a massive advantage in the final sprint.
If it was that simple, it would turn into a slow bike race pretty quickly, as everyone would defect and huddle into the centre like penguins in the Antarctic. What makes it more complex is the fact that you can defect in a different way, by trying for a break-away. If the peloton dawdles then one or more riders have the opportunity to sprint away from the group and build a lead that can't be broken down before the finish.
This is another form of defection. Instead of cooperating and riding together to break the back of the 150+ miles - and then seeing who's the strongest and fastest at the end - let's just see who's strongest by riding hard and trying to break the peloton up the whole way. Until we have a last man standing.
This scenario is made more complex because the riders are working in smaller teams, and those teams have different interests depending on the make-up of their team. The teams with the best sprinters have the biggest interest in the race finishing with everyone in a single bunch. So a race would normally develop with the teams with sprinters cooperating to try to control the peloton and keep them together, taking it in turns at the front of the peloton to haul in any breakaways.
Meanwhile, those teams lacking sprinting power will defect - not take any of the load, and do everything they can to get one of their teammates into a decent breakaway.
What happened yesterday was unusual, in that only one team was interested in the peloton finishing together in a mass-bunch sprint. And that was Team GBR. Everyone in the race knew that Mark Cavendish is the best sprinter in the world, and that he would almost certainly win a bunch sprint to take gold. They all figured that the normal reward for cooperation had evaporated - taking it in turns at the front was pointless, as Cavendish would win the resulting sprint.
And so the normal rules went out the window, they all defected, either tucking into the peloton to conserve energy and see what happened, or constantly trying to engineer a break-away, but... But perhaps this was actually a form of cooperation. The rest of the peloton shared an interest in breaking the normal race strategy - defection became cooperation, and vice versa.
The outcome was pretty inevitable - Cavendish had around him the strongest individual riders in the world. But faced with an entire peloton unwilling to cooperate in engineering a massed bunch sprint at the end, it was too much work. Eventually, one of those breakaways was going to work - and in the end, it did. It was followed by a couple more, and the group splintered until there was only one man in the final breakaway. And that was Alexandr Vinokurov, gold medallist and last man standing.
And that will definitely be it for this blog until September... I'll see you back here in the autumn.
It's Games Theory that drives the plot of my first novel, The Defector, and in particular a thing called the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD). If you haven't come across it before, I will point you at my own description in the foreword to The Defector, a suspense thriller in which it features as the central plot device. Or you can check out a much more technical take in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (SEP) entry.
If you're going to read on, please get to grips with the Prisoner's Dilemma first!
The peloton is a place where everyone has to decide whether to cooperate or defect. The co-operators take their turn at the front, while the defectors hide in the bunch, freewheeling in the slipstream and hoping to conserve their energy for the sprint at the end.
We can see this in PD terms - all the cooperators give themselves the same chance at winning if they all do even amounts of work at the front. But there's a big benefit to defecting when everyone else cooperates, as the energy conserved would give you a massive advantage in the final sprint.
If it was that simple, it would turn into a slow bike race pretty quickly, as everyone would defect and huddle into the centre like penguins in the Antarctic. What makes it more complex is the fact that you can defect in a different way, by trying for a break-away. If the peloton dawdles then one or more riders have the opportunity to sprint away from the group and build a lead that can't be broken down before the finish.
This is another form of defection. Instead of cooperating and riding together to break the back of the 150+ miles - and then seeing who's the strongest and fastest at the end - let's just see who's strongest by riding hard and trying to break the peloton up the whole way. Until we have a last man standing.
This scenario is made more complex because the riders are working in smaller teams, and those teams have different interests depending on the make-up of their team. The teams with the best sprinters have the biggest interest in the race finishing with everyone in a single bunch. So a race would normally develop with the teams with sprinters cooperating to try to control the peloton and keep them together, taking it in turns at the front of the peloton to haul in any breakaways.
Meanwhile, those teams lacking sprinting power will defect - not take any of the load, and do everything they can to get one of their teammates into a decent breakaway.
What happened yesterday was unusual, in that only one team was interested in the peloton finishing together in a mass-bunch sprint. And that was Team GBR. Everyone in the race knew that Mark Cavendish is the best sprinter in the world, and that he would almost certainly win a bunch sprint to take gold. They all figured that the normal reward for cooperation had evaporated - taking it in turns at the front was pointless, as Cavendish would win the resulting sprint.
And so the normal rules went out the window, they all defected, either tucking into the peloton to conserve energy and see what happened, or constantly trying to engineer a break-away, but... But perhaps this was actually a form of cooperation. The rest of the peloton shared an interest in breaking the normal race strategy - defection became cooperation, and vice versa.
The outcome was pretty inevitable - Cavendish had around him the strongest individual riders in the world. But faced with an entire peloton unwilling to cooperate in engineering a massed bunch sprint at the end, it was too much work. Eventually, one of those breakaways was going to work - and in the end, it did. It was followed by a couple more, and the group splintered until there was only one man in the final breakaway. And that was Alexandr Vinokurov, gold medallist and last man standing.
And that will definitely be it for this blog until September... I'll see you back here in the autumn.
July 25, 2012
Games Theory and the Estate Agent
Just before Christmas last year I wrote a blog called 'It's Only Taken Three Years...' about the banking crisis and how the Games Theory ideas that drive the plot of my first novel, The Defector, might be applied to find a solution. The blog was picked up by the crowd-sourced news website, Blottr.com and was featured on their home page.
One of the comments that the article attracted was that the solution I'd suggested was pretty impractical as it required a far more engaged population than we will ever have - something I'd tacitly admitted in the article. But it got me thinking about other ways that Games Theory might be used for social good. And the one that immediately sprung to mind - not least because I've just been buying a house - was the problem of shocking behaviour in property transactions.
We've all heard the horror stories, last-minute-gazumping.com and late price rises, people dropping out of sales after the other side have spent hundreds of pounds on surveys and legal fees. In the UK, the last Labour government had a go at fixing this with their woeful and now abandoned housing information packs. But they were going about it the wrong way - it's not the house that we need more information about, it's the people on the other side of the transaction, the buyers or sellers.
If you haven't come across the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) before I will point you at my own description in the foreword to The Defector, a suspense thriller in which it features as the central plot device. Or if you want something a bit more technical and meaty, take a look at the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (SEP) entry.
We can draw a couple of conclusions about the Prisoner's Dilemma; for the individual, rational, self-interested player in a one-off game of PD there’s only one real choice – Defection. However, things change in what's called an iterated version of the game, this is what the SEP entry has to say about it.
"Many of the situations that are alleged to have the structure of the PD, like defense appropriations of military rivals or price setting for duopolistic firms are better modelled by an iterated version of the game in which players play the PD repeatedly, retaining access at each round to the results of all previous rounds. In these iterated PDs (hence forth IPDs) players who defect in one round can be “punished” by defections in subsequent rounds and those who cooperate can be rewarded by cooperation. Thus the appropriate strategy for rationally self-interested players is no longer obvious."
This is where the impulse to cooperation comes from for the rational self-interested player; the knowledge that other players will judge you on your previous behaviour. So what does this mean for buying and selling houses? The problem with a property transaction is that it’s a one-time PD game. It’s very unlikely that you will ever conduct more than one residential property transaction with the same individual. And so you can behave as badly as you like to get the outcome that you want, with no consequences. The only people who will ever know that you gazumped your way to a better deal are the other parties to the contract, the solicitors and the estate agents. So long as you stay within the law, there are no consequences for bad behaviour, outside of your own conscience.
To clean up the housing market we need to turn each housing transaction into an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, where there is a much stronger impulse to cooperation. What’s required is the knowledge that any poor behaviour will carry forward to the next transaction. If all estate agents or solicitors (or both) were compelled to record the behaviour of those involved in each property transaction on a publicly accessible website database, then the next party to a deal with any given individual would have a much better basis for deciding whether or not to proceed.
Imagine you’ve just dropped the asking price on your house, and it’s produced a couple of offers. One is from someone who’s bought three houses, all of them in a perfectly straight-forward manner, and who was regarded as quick, efficient and easy to deal with by the solicitors concerned. The second is from someone who’s been involved in nine house purchases, gazumped the other party on three of them, forced a late price change in four, and dropped out of the other two purchases just before exchange of contracts.
It would be pretty clear which offer to accept wouldn’t it? As I said earlier, what the government needs to provide is not more information on the house, but more information on the other party to the transaction. Once you have that, I suspect there would be a lot less bad behaviour in the housing market.
And that will be it for this blog until September, I'll be blogging for the two weeks of the London Games at the ISAF Olympic website -- and then I'm on holiday. I'll see you back here in the autumn.
One of the comments that the article attracted was that the solution I'd suggested was pretty impractical as it required a far more engaged population than we will ever have - something I'd tacitly admitted in the article. But it got me thinking about other ways that Games Theory might be used for social good. And the one that immediately sprung to mind - not least because I've just been buying a house - was the problem of shocking behaviour in property transactions.
We've all heard the horror stories, last-minute-gazumping.com and late price rises, people dropping out of sales after the other side have spent hundreds of pounds on surveys and legal fees. In the UK, the last Labour government had a go at fixing this with their woeful and now abandoned housing information packs. But they were going about it the wrong way - it's not the house that we need more information about, it's the people on the other side of the transaction, the buyers or sellers.
If you haven't come across the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) before I will point you at my own description in the foreword to The Defector, a suspense thriller in which it features as the central plot device. Or if you want something a bit more technical and meaty, take a look at the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (SEP) entry.
We can draw a couple of conclusions about the Prisoner's Dilemma; for the individual, rational, self-interested player in a one-off game of PD there’s only one real choice – Defection. However, things change in what's called an iterated version of the game, this is what the SEP entry has to say about it.
"Many of the situations that are alleged to have the structure of the PD, like defense appropriations of military rivals or price setting for duopolistic firms are better modelled by an iterated version of the game in which players play the PD repeatedly, retaining access at each round to the results of all previous rounds. In these iterated PDs (hence forth IPDs) players who defect in one round can be “punished” by defections in subsequent rounds and those who cooperate can be rewarded by cooperation. Thus the appropriate strategy for rationally self-interested players is no longer obvious."
This is where the impulse to cooperation comes from for the rational self-interested player; the knowledge that other players will judge you on your previous behaviour. So what does this mean for buying and selling houses? The problem with a property transaction is that it’s a one-time PD game. It’s very unlikely that you will ever conduct more than one residential property transaction with the same individual. And so you can behave as badly as you like to get the outcome that you want, with no consequences. The only people who will ever know that you gazumped your way to a better deal are the other parties to the contract, the solicitors and the estate agents. So long as you stay within the law, there are no consequences for bad behaviour, outside of your own conscience.
To clean up the housing market we need to turn each housing transaction into an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, where there is a much stronger impulse to cooperation. What’s required is the knowledge that any poor behaviour will carry forward to the next transaction. If all estate agents or solicitors (or both) were compelled to record the behaviour of those involved in each property transaction on a publicly accessible website database, then the next party to a deal with any given individual would have a much better basis for deciding whether or not to proceed.
Imagine you’ve just dropped the asking price on your house, and it’s produced a couple of offers. One is from someone who’s bought three houses, all of them in a perfectly straight-forward manner, and who was regarded as quick, efficient and easy to deal with by the solicitors concerned. The second is from someone who’s been involved in nine house purchases, gazumped the other party on three of them, forced a late price change in four, and dropped out of the other two purchases just before exchange of contracts.
It would be pretty clear which offer to accept wouldn’t it? As I said earlier, what the government needs to provide is not more information on the house, but more information on the other party to the transaction. Once you have that, I suspect there would be a lot less bad behaviour in the housing market.
And that will be it for this blog until September, I'll be blogging for the two weeks of the London Games at the ISAF Olympic website -- and then I'm on holiday. I'll see you back here in the autumn.
June 20, 2012
First Impressions, Opening Lines
New York, New York, so great they... well, you know the rest. And whatever might have been said about the place in the 1970s and 80s, the Big Apple is back and close to its pumping, vibrant peak. So I took the opportunity on a recent research trip to spend a couple of extra days in New York, which meant arriving at JFK rather than a little further down the coast, closer to my final destination. Arriving in America is a haphazard affair, you never know quite what to expect. The first time I ever flew anywhere it was to Los Angeles – a place notorious for the queues at the border. But on this occasion despite: a) being so green that I had to ask to find out what check-in was and where you went to do it, and b) a concerted effort by the airline to send my luggage to Tahiti, I was out and on the streets in under an hour. On another occasion I came very close to getting sent back to London, despite holding a resident's and a working permit for the USA (note to self: keep your smart alec thoughts as thoughts).
This time around, we had just reached the front of the queue when the computers packed up. And so we stood and waited for them to reboot America, or something. The Customs and Border agent's indifference to our plight (my body thought it was 5am on Saturday morning) was total but then, he was reading Nietzsche.
It started me thinking about first impressions though, what if someone had offered me an immediate return ride – America? You can keep it... But not really, I was never going to turn around and go home. I was going to be patient and wait, and spend my sterling pounds in the US, regardless of a bad first impression.
The same thing cannot be said about books, how often does your gaze flick across the first lines of a novel and you think.... nah. Not for me. Those crucial first sentences will either draw the reader in, or spit them out. And if they don't work, the book is back in the pile or back on the shelf, or deleted off the eReader in a heartbeat.
It’s so easy to get spit out too, here’s a blog by a writing-contest judge on the ways you can foul-out early. But identifying the winning move, the things that draw the reader in, now that's much harder. The American Book Review did a great survey to come up with the Best100 First Lines from Novels, with a slightly more contemporary version put together by Stylist magazine, while for those short of time, the Guardian chose to focus on just the top ten, but did it with pictures and explanations.
When you look at these, the only consistent theme is the obvious one - they all make you want to read on, and they do it in as many different ways as is possible. If I had to choose just one, it would probably be Douglas Adam’s opener for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun."
It makes me smile and it makes me want to read on, I’m immediately transported to a place where the earth finds itself in an unfashionable and unregarded neighbourhood – and you just want to know more about that place.
A second and more serious choice would be, ‘You better not never tell nobody but God.” from Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple. Again, it makes you read on, because you just have to know what’s so awful that it must never be spoken of again.
First lines, first impressions – they all count, except at border crossings... so what’s your favourite opening line?
May 24, 2012
Plotting After Powder Burn – Part 2
In
Plotting Part 1 I talked about the search for a plot for my fifth novel,
which would be the second in a series starring American wannabe-journo, Sam
Blackett. I’d always had a particular story in mind for this second book, but
now I’m starting to wonder... are there any rules for the second book in a
thriller series?
My
original plot would find Sam in Fiji, trying to warm up after the Himalayan Powder Burn adventure. She’s been cruising around the islands for a
few months after the success of her Powder Burn story, published in Adventure, and her career is starting to
roll.
Then she
bumps into an old friend from the States, he’s skippering a boat on a search
for the perfect wave. A rich investor has hired him to do up the boat, and
skipper it on a voyage through the Pacific Islands. They are looking for a
place to build a hotel, a hotel with five star service and access to a
completely empty, and perfectly ride-able wave for well-heeled amateur surfers.
Scenting a story, Sam agrees to join him as a deck-hand and off they go...
What she
doesn’t know is that the boat was bought very cheaply from the Singapore
authorities, after they had confiscated it from a local criminal. He was using
it to run drugs and girls out to the frustrated crewmen stuck on merchant ships,
and awaiting their turn in Singapore’s massive container terminal. And what no
one knows is that there’s still a huge stash of drugs hidden aboard the boat. Inevitably
(this is a thriller), the drugs come to light at the worst possible moment...
And that’s
the set-up – originally I thought the drugs would be found after they were
wrecked on an island. The story would then go the way of a descent into madness
and survival, a la Lord of the Flies, or Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. But now I’m
thinking there’s also potential for a more conventional suspense thriller – a chase
story, as the drug dealer comes after his boat and his stash.
Problems...
first up, this is territory I’ve mined
before. The Defector is all about a boat chase and a struggle for survival. And
in Powder Burn I take a step away from boats, which will either:
a) Open
my books up to a wider readership.
b) Kill my
career stone dead.
Assuming it's the former (and if it's the latter I won't be too worried about book five anyway), perhaps
I’d be better off looking for a more conventional plot idea, something urban,
something to complete the transition away from seaborne adventure in exotic
places.
The model for this series is Lee Child’s Jack Reacher stories, in which
(in case you’ve been locked in a cupboard these past few years) a hero wanders alone
across America, having random adventures. Child shifts from out-and-out
action/suspense, to a more investigative-style of plot - he even shifts from
first to third person.
I see
Sam in the same way – so perhaps the second story should establish that MO
right at the outset. Urban, and more of an investigation than an action
thriller. And with that thought, I’m off to find out what Lee Child did with
Jack Reacher in books one and two... back shortly. Or longly, depending on how
busy I get...
May 17, 2012
Covers and Blurbs...
Anyone who’s ever chosen a book will be aware of the
importance of the cover design and the sales text – otherwise known as blurb.
In the indie-book-world where the author takes responsibility for the entire
publishing process, the blurb is unlikely to raise the stress level. After all,
it’s just words, innit? I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s thought they could do a
better job of the blurb on the back of their traditionally published books... Well,
now I get to try... but the covers? That’s a whole other ball game.
The Original Cover
The cover of a book is its first and most important sales
tool – it doesn’t matter whether it’s in a shop or on an Amazon webpage, a book
has to have an eye-catching cover to draw people to ALL of the rest of the sales
tools – blurb, reviews, chart position... I don’t want to state the blindingly
obvious, but covers don’t have much to do with words, they are visual beasts, with
graphics, pictures and logos – and many writers are not comfortable in this
environment.
So what to do when it comes time to create a cover for your
first indie-publication?
In time-honoured (and game-show) fashion I called a friend, figuring
that at least I would benefit from ‘mate’s rates’ ... and I did. Unfortunately,
although my mate was a great designer, he didn’t know much about books. Initially,
I loved the two covers he designed, as they did at least reflect my notion of
the books. I had a sense that they weren’t quite right, but as I was only
paying mate’s rates I felt uncomfortable about asking for too many changes.
The New Cover
Those covers lasted about a year, and it was only a bad review (for the covers, I should add, not the book) that finally tipped me over into
doing something about it... but what? I’d seen many recommendations for cover
designers while reading other writer’s blogs, but I was conscious that the
choice of designer was crucial. It was all very well agreeing a fixed fee for a
cover design, but what if I didn’t like any of those offered?
The answer came from in the shape of 99designs.com, where it’s
possible to get almost anything designed. The process is simple; write a brief,
a description of what you want designed and then post it on the website (book
covers now have their own section).
Part of the process is choosing a ‘prize’ amount in dollars, this is effectively
the fee that you will pay the winning designer for the right to use the design
that you eventually choose.
The Fulcrum Files
After you’ve done that, nothing much will happen for a day,
or maybe two. And then you’ll get your first design. This is a crucial moment –
I think that a lot of the designers working on the contests on 99designs are
young, and looking to learn how to deal with clients and work to a brief. The
money is secondary; if you provide them with good feedback on their work, they
will keep at it for you. So when you get that first design, love it or hate it,
try and find something intelligent to say about it. A lot of other designers
will be watching the contest and if they see good quality feedback they will be
a lot more inclined to jump in and have a go. This is the contest that I held
for the design of my most recent book, The Fulcrum Files.
There were 136 designs from 26 different designers – the
quality of the work and the ideas was fabulous, and it was a nightmare trying
to pick a winner. Even now, I’m not sure I got the right one!
There are a few more things you need to know – the contest
runs in two stages, at the end of the first stage you pick a maximum of six
‘Finalists’ and work with them towards a finished design. It’s possible to
create a Poll so you can invite friends and readers to participate in the
process – this is the one that I ran on my final set of choices.
It may or may not help you pick a winner.
The Wrecking Crew
The contest runs for a week under the standard rules, and
you have plenty of time once it’s ended to choose a winner. The support and
documentation on the website is great, so you should have no trouble with any
of this, or the handover process - paying the cash and getting the full rights
to use the design. If you need further variations (for a print edition
perhaps), the designers will probably do it for free, but the website also
allows you to commission and pay for extra work for a pre-arranged fee.
I’ve now run two contests, and chosen the covers for all
three of my indie-fiction books. Not only does it produce great covers at a
very fair price, it can also be a lot of fun as you work with the designers to
try and get exactly what you’re looking for... And just when you’ve done it,
another designer will enter the fray with an idea out of left-field that that
you’d never even thought about – and quite likely blow your socks off with the
possibilities...!
April 12, 2012
Plotting After Powder Burn – Part 1
If you're a regular reader of this blog, or a follower on twitter or Facebook, then you can't fail to have noticed that I've just published a new book. It's called The Fulcrum Files and the writing of it was the subject of my last blog. But I wouldn't be a real writer if I didn't already have the next one on the go. I've already added a page to my website for Powder Burn, which I'm hoping to finish for January next year.And so it's time, believe it or not, to start thinking about ideas for novel number five. I've decided to go for a series this time, kicking off with a sequel to Powder Burn. The main reason for this is that I just love the main character in this book, an American girl called Sam Blackett; here's a little bit of Powder Burn that will give you a feel for her character:
She looked back down to the screen and the single email in her inbox. She'd sent out twenty-five more query letters to different newspaper and magazine editors just after she'd arrived in the city. All with ideas for travel stories. Score to date: zip for fourteen - all rejections. And the single email that glared back at her this morning? From her mother. Two months in India, nearly a month now in the Himalayas and only one story sold: to the Vermont Gazette, where her mother job-shared as office manager with Penelope-from-across-the-road. And she'd told this guy and his two mates that if they let her come with them, she would write up their expedition for Adventure magazine. She hadn't thought they were serious. She had about as much chance of placing a story with Adventure as she did of winning a Pulitzer. Still, he wasn't to know that. She glanced up, and caught Pete's gaze for a moment...
In Powder Burn, Sam starts out as a spectacularly unsuccessful freelance journalist, gets herself into a whole world of trouble, somehow gets out of it intact - and with a helluva story to tell. It's the break she needs for her writing career, and the idea of the series is that we follow her through various adventures and scrapes in pursuit of the next story.
The $64 million dollar question is... what story is next?
Like many writers I keep an ideas folder on my computer, and unlike most writers mine's stuffed full of badly written paragraphs about a news item, or the thesis of a book, or just a couple of lines from a non-fiction account of something that interested me. This is where stories come from, or at least, it's where my stories come from.
So I thought I'd spend the next few blogs working through some of those ideas, testing them out as stories and seeing where they might go. I've got a few months, probably seven or eight before I get Powder Burn finished, so there's no rush. If I do one a month, by the time I get around to starting writing I should have plenty of ideas, and with a bit of luck some idea of what potential readers think of them. First up... and I'll be back in a month!
March 20, 2012
Writing the Fulcrum Files
I was in New Zealand
to do interviews for the publication of The Wrecking Crew and one question kept
coming up – since you've sailed in it, why don't you write a novel about the America's Cup? I tried to
explain that while the Kiwis had a minor obsession with the world's premier
sailboat race, most of the rest of the world didn't even realise that they
didn't care.
Larry Ellison, Russell
Coutts and the other characters that inhabit the contemporary Cup-world are interesting enough, but they aren't quite in the same league as the
likes of T.O.M. Sopwith and Harold Vanderbilt. In the midst of the Great
Depression and the rise to power of Hitler; Sopwith and Vanderbilt still managed
to find the time and money to build and race the extraordinary J Class yachts.
Not to mention changing the course of
history...
Hold on.
It suddenly occurred
to me... what about a story set in the milieu of that most dramatic, romantic
and tumultuous era, the 1930s? I didn't begin it for quite a while as I was
already half-way into another book, and although I knew the core historical story
that I wanted to tell, it took a long time to figure out how I wanted to tell
it.
Eventually, I decided
to make the book's principal characters fictional, and set them amongst a
handful of real – but peripheral – people, whose actions did not have to be
much altered or invented to make my historical fiction mesh with reality. And I
decided to make it a thriller – believe it or not, The Fulcrum Files started out closer to
the romance genre.
First and foremost of
the real characters is the aforementioned Sir Thomas Sopwith, as famous for the
Sopwith Camel and Hurricane fighters as for his two challenges for the
America's Cup. Chairman of the Hawker Siddeley Aircraft Company – a vast
military aviation and engineering conglomerate - Sopwith was one of a handful
of people that could afford the tens of thousands of pounds required to mount a
Cup Challenge in the 1930s.
In those days, the America's
Cup was not so much a yacht race (it still isn't) as a financial and
technological battle of will between the elite of British and American society.
The Cup was first won by the yacht America in 1851,
after a race around the Isle of Wight. By
1935, fifteen successive 'Challengers' (mostly British, but the Canadians had
also tried) had failed to wrest the Cup back from the New York Yacht Club's
nominated 'Defender', in the one-on-one 'match race' format used.
It was Sir Thomas
Sopwith's Endeavour that was defeated
in 1934 in a highly controversial match against Harold S. Vanderbilt's Rainbow ('Britannia rules the waves, but
America
waives the rules,' had thundered one paper, and an American one at that). Sir
Thomas was not settling for that result and by early-1936 - when the story of The
Fulcrum Files opens - he already has a new boat in construction in Gosport,
England.
During this time,
Sopwith made some momentous decisions. I'm not going to tell you what they were
here - you'll have to read the book – but suffice to say that they were more
than enough to hang a thriller on.
Spoiler Alert...
While I'm not going to
spoil the main plot of The Fulcrum Files for you, I know that part of my fascination with historical
fiction is working out what's real and what's made up – so I thought I'd give
you a couple of teaser points from all the research that I did to write the
book. But even these could spoil your enjoyment of the story if you haven't read
it – you have been warned.
The close association
of the aero-industry to the world of yachting in the Solent
area during the 1930s was genuine. Apart from Sopwith; Supermarine – builders
of the Spitfire – had their offices and plant in Woolston on the Itchen in
Southampton, and management kept a boat anchored on the river. The plane was
tested at nearby Eastleigh airport.
Richard Fairey also
built aeroplanes and owned and raced a J-class yacht. He did tentatively
challenge for the America's Cup in the K Class, but the New York Yacht Club
turned him down. He had an aircraft factory in Hamble and post-war it did much to
raise the popularity of sailing as a mass participation sport thanks to the Firefly
dinghy, which is still around today.
Sopwith might well
have won the Cup in 1934 if it wasn't for a strike by many of his professional
crew. They wanted a little more pay to make up for the late date of the Cup
match, which meant that they would miss the beginning of the fishing season, losing
their places on the boats. Sopwith refused to negotiate and took a largely
amateur crew in their place – which many observers at the time believed to have
made the difference in the 1934 Cup match.
There was also a
female MI5 agent who worked undercover amongst the right-leaning elements of
the British establishment. Joan Miller was partly responsible for the rounding
up of a spy ring centred on the Russian Tea Rooms in Kensington. Her boss was
Maxwell Knight, head of the anti-political subversion unit and possibly Ian
Fleming's inspiration for 'M'.
I hadn't realised
before I started The Fulcrum Files quite how much research was involved in
historical fiction – everything has to be checked, nothing can be taken for
granted. The research, like the writing, took a long time – one of these days I'm
going to try and get a research/reading list together, but just the idea of
typing it all out makes me feel tired.
If you are interested
in the background events that provided the starting point for this book, then
you might like to read Pure Luck ,
Alam Bramson's biography of TOM Sopwith, and Joan Millers autobiography, One Girl's War . As for me, I think I've
read enough history for a while, the next one will definitely be set in the
present day, even if it's not set in contemporary culture...
Mark Chisnell ©
November 4, 2011
It's Only Taken Three Years...
The 2008 Lehman Brothers bankruptcy was the watershed moment of the current financial crisis. And three years later, we've finally got around to protesting the right people for the tsunami of subsequent consequences. The Occupy movement quite properly began in Wall Street, but it has rapidly spread around the world, as the public have latched onto the opportunity to put the culprits in the stocks. Sure, the regulators and politicians were asleep at the wheel / complicit / paid off (delete as applicable, but watch Inside Job first), but this debacle started and finished with the avarice of some (not all) of our banks.
This is what happens if you put Defectors in charge of the money.
Defectors and their converse, Cooperators are central to a Games Theory puzzle called The Prisoner's Dilemma. Read my own description in the foreword to The Defector, a suspense thriller in which it features as a central plot device. Or take a look at the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (SEP) entry. The interpretations described by the SEP have a common theme: this is about self- versus group-interest; about getting rational, selfish agents to cooperate for the common good; about altruism versus selfishness.
In the on-going debacle that led up to the crisis of 2008, key players in some of the major banks found ever more imaginative ways to take ever greater risks with other people's money, so they could pay themselves massive bonuses and salaries, knowing full well that when the music stopped and the money ran out, they ran no personal risk at all – but that others would lose everything.
Their behaviour was selfish to a degree that you might find difficult to imagine. But we have to imagine it, and we have to imagine it happening again. Right now, three years after the crisis boiled over, and as global protest belatedly kicks off, the selfish are still way ahead of the game. Anyone see the rules change? Anyone see those bankers handing the money back? Nope? So, what to do?
The only way for Governments to make the debt go away is to inflate it out of existence. So don't put any cash under the bed to keep it out of the hands of the financial services industry. Buy the kind of stuff that has real long-term value in any kind of economic system - land perhaps, at least you'll be able to feed yourself when the apocalypse comes. Although you'll probably need a machine gun and barbed wire to keep it out of the hands of the starving, marauding hordes.
Ok, that's a pretty dark view - let's hope it doesn't come to that, but there are few signs of anything changing. A couple more of these financial shocks and the whole house of cards really could come tumbling down. And even if there was the political will to regulate the financial sector properly then it will fail again, for the same reasons. The bankers will always have the money to lobby and cajole the regulators and their political masters into changing the rules in their favour.
So perhaps we need to use the power of Games Theory to persuade the bankers that a more Cooperative approach is in their interest. Here's one idea, it may be a little impractical, but I think it starts us in the right direction.
Fundamentally, the banking system works on what is - in Prisoner's Dilemma-terms - a group-interest, Cooperative notion: that we don't all want to get our money back at the same time. If we did, the banks would collapse – they just don't have the cash to pay everyone all of their deposits back simultaneously.
A run on a bank happens when this Cooperation breaks down – and we all become Defectors. If enough people suddenly believe that a bank is short on money (and remember, compared to what's been deposited, banks are always short on actual, cash-money reserves), and then come to believe that the bank is going to crash, they will rush to get their money out - to hell with everyone else ... And lo and behold – even if the bank wasn't previously in trouble, it is now.
So, the next time a bunch of self-satisfied bankers award themselves huge salaries and/or bonuses, the depositors organise to take the bank to the brink of bankruptcy. And you do it by removing just enough cash. Take enough of a bank's capital reserves out as cash, and I think you'll find that you will scare its executives and shareholders witless. Then offer to give the money back, so long as they pay themselves reasonably.
This is not a game for the faint-hearted, and it's not a game for Defectors – it requires serious Cooperation, real belief in the project, in the collective group interest to get the right amount of money out. If too few people are prepared to do it then it doesn't work, no one gets scared, and those who did remove their cash just lose the interest on their savings. Or, if too many people take all their money out, because they're frightened it might all go wrong and the bank might crash - then the bank will go under. And you don't need me to tell you that that would be bad for everyone...
Does our new, connected, social-media-powered world have the capacity to organise a bank's depositors to take that bank right up to the limits of its reserves ... but not over? Where are the limits of the power of an internet advocacy organisation like Avaaz? We don't know yet, but some people are all ready trying something like this – check out Bank Transfer Day – be afraid, be very afraid? We'll see...
This is what happens if you put Defectors in charge of the money.
Defectors and their converse, Cooperators are central to a Games Theory puzzle called The Prisoner's Dilemma. Read my own description in the foreword to The Defector, a suspense thriller in which it features as a central plot device. Or take a look at the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (SEP) entry. The interpretations described by the SEP have a common theme: this is about self- versus group-interest; about getting rational, selfish agents to cooperate for the common good; about altruism versus selfishness.
In the on-going debacle that led up to the crisis of 2008, key players in some of the major banks found ever more imaginative ways to take ever greater risks with other people's money, so they could pay themselves massive bonuses and salaries, knowing full well that when the music stopped and the money ran out, they ran no personal risk at all – but that others would lose everything.
Their behaviour was selfish to a degree that you might find difficult to imagine. But we have to imagine it, and we have to imagine it happening again. Right now, three years after the crisis boiled over, and as global protest belatedly kicks off, the selfish are still way ahead of the game. Anyone see the rules change? Anyone see those bankers handing the money back? Nope? So, what to do?
The only way for Governments to make the debt go away is to inflate it out of existence. So don't put any cash under the bed to keep it out of the hands of the financial services industry. Buy the kind of stuff that has real long-term value in any kind of economic system - land perhaps, at least you'll be able to feed yourself when the apocalypse comes. Although you'll probably need a machine gun and barbed wire to keep it out of the hands of the starving, marauding hordes.
Ok, that's a pretty dark view - let's hope it doesn't come to that, but there are few signs of anything changing. A couple more of these financial shocks and the whole house of cards really could come tumbling down. And even if there was the political will to regulate the financial sector properly then it will fail again, for the same reasons. The bankers will always have the money to lobby and cajole the regulators and their political masters into changing the rules in their favour.
So perhaps we need to use the power of Games Theory to persuade the bankers that a more Cooperative approach is in their interest. Here's one idea, it may be a little impractical, but I think it starts us in the right direction.
Fundamentally, the banking system works on what is - in Prisoner's Dilemma-terms - a group-interest, Cooperative notion: that we don't all want to get our money back at the same time. If we did, the banks would collapse – they just don't have the cash to pay everyone all of their deposits back simultaneously.
A run on a bank happens when this Cooperation breaks down – and we all become Defectors. If enough people suddenly believe that a bank is short on money (and remember, compared to what's been deposited, banks are always short on actual, cash-money reserves), and then come to believe that the bank is going to crash, they will rush to get their money out - to hell with everyone else ... And lo and behold – even if the bank wasn't previously in trouble, it is now.
So, the next time a bunch of self-satisfied bankers award themselves huge salaries and/or bonuses, the depositors organise to take the bank to the brink of bankruptcy. And you do it by removing just enough cash. Take enough of a bank's capital reserves out as cash, and I think you'll find that you will scare its executives and shareholders witless. Then offer to give the money back, so long as they pay themselves reasonably.
This is not a game for the faint-hearted, and it's not a game for Defectors – it requires serious Cooperation, real belief in the project, in the collective group interest to get the right amount of money out. If too few people are prepared to do it then it doesn't work, no one gets scared, and those who did remove their cash just lose the interest on their savings. Or, if too many people take all their money out, because they're frightened it might all go wrong and the bank might crash - then the bank will go under. And you don't need me to tell you that that would be bad for everyone...
Does our new, connected, social-media-powered world have the capacity to organise a bank's depositors to take that bank right up to the limits of its reserves ... but not over? Where are the limits of the power of an internet advocacy organisation like Avaaz? We don't know yet, but some people are all ready trying something like this – check out Bank Transfer Day – be afraid, be very afraid? We'll see...
It’s Only Taken Three Years...
The 2008 Lehman Brothers bankruptcy was the watershed moment of the current financial crisis. And three years later, we’ve finally got around to protesting the right people for the tsunami of subsequent consequences. The Occupy movement quite properly began in Wall Street, but it has rapidly spread around the world, as the public have latched onto the opportunity to put the culprits in the stocks. Sure, the regulators and politicians were asleep at the wheel / complicit / paid off (delete as applicable, but watch Inside Job first), but this debacle started and finished with the avarice of some (not all) of our banks.
This is what happens if you put Defectors in charge of the money.
Defectors and their converse, Cooperators are central to a Games Theory puzzle called The Prisoner’s Dilemma. Read my own description in the foreword to The Defector, a suspense thriller in which it features as a central plot device. Or take a look at the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (SEP) entry. The interpretations described by the SEP have a common theme: this is about self- versus group-interest; about getting rational, selfish agents to cooperate for the common good; about altruism versus selfishness.
In the on-going debacle that led up to the crisis of 2008, key players in some of the major banks found ever more imaginative ways to take ever greater risks with other people’s money, so they could pay themselves massive bonuses and salaries, knowing full well that when the music stopped and the money ran out, they ran no personal risk at all – but that others would lose everything.
Their behaviour was selfish to a degree that you might find difficult to imagine. But we have to imagine it, and we have to imagine it happening again. Right now, three years after the crisis boiled over, and as global protest belatedly kicks off, the selfish are still way ahead of the game. Anyone see the rules change? Anyone see those bankers handing the money back? Nope? So, what to do?
The only way for Governments to make the debt go away is to inflate it out of existence. So don’t put any cash under the bed to keep it out of the hands of the financial services industry. Buy the kind of stuff that has real long-term value in any kind of economic system - land perhaps, at least you’ll be able to feed yourself when the apocalypse comes. Although you’ll probably need a machine gun and barbed wire to keep it out of the hands of the starving, marauding hordes.
Ok, that’s a pretty dark view - let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, but there are few signs of anything changing. A couple more of these financial shocks and the whole house of cards really could come tumbling down. And even if there was the political will to regulate the financial sector properly then it will fail again, for the same reasons. The bankers will always have the money to lobby and cajole the regulators and their political masters into changing the rules in their favour.
So perhaps we need to use the power of Games Theory to persuade the bankers that a more Cooperative approach is in their interest. Here’s one idea, it may be a little impractical, but I think it starts us in the right direction.
Fundamentally, the banking system works on what is - in Prisoner’s Dilemma-terms - a group-interest, Cooperative notion: that we don’t all want to get our money back at the same time. If we did, the banks would collapse – they just don’t have the cash to pay everyone all of their deposits back simultaneously.
A run on a bank happens when this Cooperation breaks down – and we all become Defectors. If enough people suddenly believe that a bank is short on money (and remember, compared to what’s been deposited, banks are always short on actual, cash-money reserves), and then come to believe that the bank is going to crash, they will rush to get their money out - to hell with everyone else ... And lo and behold – even if the bank wasn’t previously in trouble, it is now.
So, the next time a bunch of self-satisfied bankers award themselves huge salaries and/or bonuses, the depositors organise to take the bank to the brink of bankruptcy. And you do it by removing just enough cash. Take enough of a bank’s capital reserves out as cash, and I think you’ll find that you will scare its executives and shareholders witless. Then offer to give the money back, so long as they pay themselves reasonably.
This is not a game for the faint-hearted, and it’s not a game for Defectors – it requires serious Cooperation, real belief in the project, in the collective group interest to get the right amount of money out. If too few people are prepared to do it then it doesn’t work, no one gets scared, and those who did remove their cash just lose the interest on their savings. Or, if too many people take all their money out, because they’re frightened it might all go wrong and the bank might crash - then the bank will go under. And you don’t need me to tell you that that would be bad for everyone...
Does our new, connected, social-media-powered world have the capacity to organise a bank’s depositors to take that bank right up to the limits of its reserves ... but not over? Where are the limits of the power of an internet advocacy organisation like Avaaz? We don’t know yet, but some people are all ready trying something like this – check out Bank Transfer Day – be afraid, be very afraid? We’ll see...
This is what happens if you put Defectors in charge of the money.
Defectors and their converse, Cooperators are central to a Games Theory puzzle called The Prisoner’s Dilemma. Read my own description in the foreword to The Defector, a suspense thriller in which it features as a central plot device. Or take a look at the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (SEP) entry. The interpretations described by the SEP have a common theme: this is about self- versus group-interest; about getting rational, selfish agents to cooperate for the common good; about altruism versus selfishness.
In the on-going debacle that led up to the crisis of 2008, key players in some of the major banks found ever more imaginative ways to take ever greater risks with other people’s money, so they could pay themselves massive bonuses and salaries, knowing full well that when the music stopped and the money ran out, they ran no personal risk at all – but that others would lose everything.
Their behaviour was selfish to a degree that you might find difficult to imagine. But we have to imagine it, and we have to imagine it happening again. Right now, three years after the crisis boiled over, and as global protest belatedly kicks off, the selfish are still way ahead of the game. Anyone see the rules change? Anyone see those bankers handing the money back? Nope? So, what to do?
The only way for Governments to make the debt go away is to inflate it out of existence. So don’t put any cash under the bed to keep it out of the hands of the financial services industry. Buy the kind of stuff that has real long-term value in any kind of economic system - land perhaps, at least you’ll be able to feed yourself when the apocalypse comes. Although you’ll probably need a machine gun and barbed wire to keep it out of the hands of the starving, marauding hordes.
Ok, that’s a pretty dark view - let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, but there are few signs of anything changing. A couple more of these financial shocks and the whole house of cards really could come tumbling down. And even if there was the political will to regulate the financial sector properly then it will fail again, for the same reasons. The bankers will always have the money to lobby and cajole the regulators and their political masters into changing the rules in their favour.
So perhaps we need to use the power of Games Theory to persuade the bankers that a more Cooperative approach is in their interest. Here’s one idea, it may be a little impractical, but I think it starts us in the right direction.
Fundamentally, the banking system works on what is - in Prisoner’s Dilemma-terms - a group-interest, Cooperative notion: that we don’t all want to get our money back at the same time. If we did, the banks would collapse – they just don’t have the cash to pay everyone all of their deposits back simultaneously.
A run on a bank happens when this Cooperation breaks down – and we all become Defectors. If enough people suddenly believe that a bank is short on money (and remember, compared to what’s been deposited, banks are always short on actual, cash-money reserves), and then come to believe that the bank is going to crash, they will rush to get their money out - to hell with everyone else ... And lo and behold – even if the bank wasn’t previously in trouble, it is now.
So, the next time a bunch of self-satisfied bankers award themselves huge salaries and/or bonuses, the depositors organise to take the bank to the brink of bankruptcy. And you do it by removing just enough cash. Take enough of a bank’s capital reserves out as cash, and I think you’ll find that you will scare its executives and shareholders witless. Then offer to give the money back, so long as they pay themselves reasonably.
This is not a game for the faint-hearted, and it’s not a game for Defectors – it requires serious Cooperation, real belief in the project, in the collective group interest to get the right amount of money out. If too few people are prepared to do it then it doesn’t work, no one gets scared, and those who did remove their cash just lose the interest on their savings. Or, if too many people take all their money out, because they’re frightened it might all go wrong and the bank might crash - then the bank will go under. And you don’t need me to tell you that that would be bad for everyone...
Does our new, connected, social-media-powered world have the capacity to organise a bank’s depositors to take that bank right up to the limits of its reserves ... but not over? Where are the limits of the power of an internet advocacy organisation like Avaaz? We don’t know yet, but some people are all ready trying something like this – check out Bank Transfer Day – be afraid, be very afraid? We’ll see...
September 7, 2011
What Price Glory?
It's the afternoon of November 23rd 1984 and I'm sitting in a room in the Fort Worth Hilton. I'll come back to how I came to be there at that particular moment, but for now let's keep our attention on the television in the corner, because there's a big college football game on – the University of Miami is playing Boston College and two spectacular quarterbacks are putting on one hell of a show.
Anyone with even the most limited knowledge of American football knows where I'm going next – Doug Flutie's Hail Mary. It has a spot on any worthwhile 'top sporting moments' list – but it just so happened that this was more or less the first gridiron game I ever watched. The basics were being explained as it unfolded (ok, ten yards in four throws, got that... but what's a down?) and then Flutie threw his bomb. Obviously, it was all downhill from there. I was never going to see anything quite so cool again, and sure enough nothing from a gridiron field has embedded itself into my memory as strongly as that 63 yard pass almost 27 years ago.
Plays like that are to be treasured, but what drove me to the keyboard was not the value of such moments to the spectator, but the cost to the players. The thought was provoked by a story about the fate of the Chicago Bears Dave Duerson - dead at his own hand at the age of 50, apparently unable to live with the damage done by all the concussive injuries from football. But I didn't really need Duerson to start thinking about the price that athletes pay for those moments of glory - a couple of the guys that were sat beside me watching Flutie's Hail Mary went on to become professional bullriders.
I'd flown into LA with $400, and after two and a half days on a Trailways bus I had arrived in Muskogee, Oklahoma. I had the surname of a relative of a school friend of my mother's and not much else - not least because Trailways had mislaid my rucksack. The banks were shut and they were about to close the bus station. I had $6.50 in my pocket and there were four people with the right name in the phone book. I got lucky on the third (and last) go - down to my final fifty cents of change before I was thankfully swept up by some incredible southern hospitality.
I was a suburban Brit, brought up in a commercial fishing town that was nestled beside a series of inland lakes. And there I was in rural Oklahoma, hanging with a family that owned a rodeo ranch - supplying the bulls and other livestock to the event promoters. I travelled with them to the National Youth Rodeo in Fort Worth, and we were killing some time before that night's contest when Doug Flutie did his thing. Here's the link to the injuries page on the Professional Bull Riders website: http://pbrnow.com/riders/injury/. Let's be honest, it's pretty terrifying – and this is today, with vests and helmets – these guys are tough, but they can pay a heavy price for what's been dubbed the most dangerous eight seconds in sport.
US National Youth Rodeo 1984
Now, I write suspense thrillers that have some sort of moral dilemma for the main character and I'm usually pretty clear where I fall on the issue (even if the hero isn't) - but I must confess that it isn't easy to see my way through this one. Is it possible to separate the joy of moments like Flutie's Hail Mary from the consequences for some of those that play the game? Is the price of glory too high – can we watch all this and still feel comfortable?
At first glance, it isn't going to make any difference whether we watch or not – people will do stuff that's reckless, violent and potentially injurious regardless of whether dangerous professional sport exists or not. But there are still moral consequences from the decision to watch. Like it or not, you are both complicit in the action and helping to facilitate it; by paying for tickets, merchandise, cable tv or whatever other paraphernalia the sports marketing juggernaut throws at us.
So, what does it take to settle comfortably into the armchair quarterback position, without your conscience sticking a huge moral spike up your ass?
I think there is an important distinction to be made between sports like professional boxing, where violent injury is the intent, and sports like bull-riding and gridiron, where violent injury is an unfortunate or even tragic side effect. While I loved watching heavyweight boxing back in the days of Ali, Frasier and Foreman, what's happened subsequently (to Ali in particular) makes me a little uneasy about watching it now. And I will certainly not go north of that line, towards cage fighting, with its echoes of the Roman Coliseum.
I can feel more comfortable watching sports where violence and injury are an unfortunate side effect, but with a couple of provisos. I love the Tour de France, but this Versus commercial for their 2011 TdF race coverage made me seriously queasy – don't glorify the violence and the danger, it might come back to haunt you.
However, for me, the straightest route to a moral comfort zone is the care and attention that's taken by the sport for the participants. The extraordinary recent documentary about Ayton Senna showed us how far Formula One has come since that dreadful weekend at Imola in 1994 – Senna was the last man to die at the wheel of a Formula One car. Boys will be boys but they often need to be saved from themselves. Health and safety legislation may be as out of control as the legal reprisals for negligence, but nevertheless, these days, I need to feel that the organisers are doing the right thing, even if it's against their will.
It was said that the NFL lockout was as much about health as it was about money - and if that was the case, then the result should be something that we can feel a little bit happier about when we settle down to watch those early season games. Let's hope for no more Dave Duerson's...
Anyone with even the most limited knowledge of American football knows where I'm going next – Doug Flutie's Hail Mary. It has a spot on any worthwhile 'top sporting moments' list – but it just so happened that this was more or less the first gridiron game I ever watched. The basics were being explained as it unfolded (ok, ten yards in four throws, got that... but what's a down?) and then Flutie threw his bomb. Obviously, it was all downhill from there. I was never going to see anything quite so cool again, and sure enough nothing from a gridiron field has embedded itself into my memory as strongly as that 63 yard pass almost 27 years ago.
Plays like that are to be treasured, but what drove me to the keyboard was not the value of such moments to the spectator, but the cost to the players. The thought was provoked by a story about the fate of the Chicago Bears Dave Duerson - dead at his own hand at the age of 50, apparently unable to live with the damage done by all the concussive injuries from football. But I didn't really need Duerson to start thinking about the price that athletes pay for those moments of glory - a couple of the guys that were sat beside me watching Flutie's Hail Mary went on to become professional bullriders.
I'd flown into LA with $400, and after two and a half days on a Trailways bus I had arrived in Muskogee, Oklahoma. I had the surname of a relative of a school friend of my mother's and not much else - not least because Trailways had mislaid my rucksack. The banks were shut and they were about to close the bus station. I had $6.50 in my pocket and there were four people with the right name in the phone book. I got lucky on the third (and last) go - down to my final fifty cents of change before I was thankfully swept up by some incredible southern hospitality.
I was a suburban Brit, brought up in a commercial fishing town that was nestled beside a series of inland lakes. And there I was in rural Oklahoma, hanging with a family that owned a rodeo ranch - supplying the bulls and other livestock to the event promoters. I travelled with them to the National Youth Rodeo in Fort Worth, and we were killing some time before that night's contest when Doug Flutie did his thing. Here's the link to the injuries page on the Professional Bull Riders website: http://pbrnow.com/riders/injury/. Let's be honest, it's pretty terrifying – and this is today, with vests and helmets – these guys are tough, but they can pay a heavy price for what's been dubbed the most dangerous eight seconds in sport.
US National Youth Rodeo 1984
Now, I write suspense thrillers that have some sort of moral dilemma for the main character and I'm usually pretty clear where I fall on the issue (even if the hero isn't) - but I must confess that it isn't easy to see my way through this one. Is it possible to separate the joy of moments like Flutie's Hail Mary from the consequences for some of those that play the game? Is the price of glory too high – can we watch all this and still feel comfortable?
At first glance, it isn't going to make any difference whether we watch or not – people will do stuff that's reckless, violent and potentially injurious regardless of whether dangerous professional sport exists or not. But there are still moral consequences from the decision to watch. Like it or not, you are both complicit in the action and helping to facilitate it; by paying for tickets, merchandise, cable tv or whatever other paraphernalia the sports marketing juggernaut throws at us.
So, what does it take to settle comfortably into the armchair quarterback position, without your conscience sticking a huge moral spike up your ass?
I think there is an important distinction to be made between sports like professional boxing, where violent injury is the intent, and sports like bull-riding and gridiron, where violent injury is an unfortunate or even tragic side effect. While I loved watching heavyweight boxing back in the days of Ali, Frasier and Foreman, what's happened subsequently (to Ali in particular) makes me a little uneasy about watching it now. And I will certainly not go north of that line, towards cage fighting, with its echoes of the Roman Coliseum.
I can feel more comfortable watching sports where violence and injury are an unfortunate side effect, but with a couple of provisos. I love the Tour de France, but this Versus commercial for their 2011 TdF race coverage made me seriously queasy – don't glorify the violence and the danger, it might come back to haunt you.
However, for me, the straightest route to a moral comfort zone is the care and attention that's taken by the sport for the participants. The extraordinary recent documentary about Ayton Senna showed us how far Formula One has come since that dreadful weekend at Imola in 1994 – Senna was the last man to die at the wheel of a Formula One car. Boys will be boys but they often need to be saved from themselves. Health and safety legislation may be as out of control as the legal reprisals for negligence, but nevertheless, these days, I need to feel that the organisers are doing the right thing, even if it's against their will.
It was said that the NFL lockout was as much about health as it was about money - and if that was the case, then the result should be something that we can feel a little bit happier about when we settle down to watch those early season games. Let's hope for no more Dave Duerson's...
