The blackout in New York and Ohio last week came as a timely reminder about the dangers of not pressing ‘save” on one’s PC every now and again. The groan that rose from Manhattan as a billion memos, spreadsheets and final drafts disappeared into the ether was matched only by the gasp from the suburbs as a million televisions went dark during a coma scene in Days of Our Lives.
A less well-fed citizenry possessed of more vivid imaginations would have panicked and stampeded, flinging themselves into the Hudson like Armani-clad lemmings. New Yorkers went to sleep in the streets.
Far under Wall Street the supercomputer that randomly separates the rich from the poor hiccoughed and said, ‘I’m — afraid — Dave” and then slowly began singing ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do”. And across at Yankee stadium pitchers squinted into the gloom, trying in vain to see the signals of the catcher who had slowly inched away into the dugout, reasoning that he’d rather have a chocolate than face a 90mph pitch coming out of the dark at his nose.
In the United States sport is a 24-hour affair. Baseball season features at least two games a night, and, come winter, the interminable, strangely satisfying ritual that is gridiron football is equally ubiquitous: NFL, AFL, college football, football for dogs — it’s all on offer, all the time.
Electricity is the lifeblood of American sports, of the lights, the constant interstate TV link-ups, the huge digital scoreboards that reveal to a fascinated nation that pitcher Duane DuFrayne enjoys huntin’ and fishin’ and the thing he hates most in life is a blunt bait knife. (Duane is currently under investigation for huntin’ Florida’s savage manatees with dynamite, but the scoreboard in its wisdom does not reveal this.)
Golf, once a sport that embodied humanity’s independence of movement, its ability to obsess over the little things while ignoring the world around it, is also a slave to electricity in the US, with an aerial armada of blimps shadowing every ball, computer renderings of every tuft of grass to provide wandering experts — themselves wired up like a band of avuncular, slightly gouty FBI agents — the best possible chance of predicting the roll of that most inconsequential little ball.
By early this week an Ohio power plant was being accused of causing the blackout, lowering international tensions after Canada was initially blamed. A misplaced word could have led to the expulsion of Canada from the World Series (leaving only countries like Michigan and Arkansas involved), and from there it would only be a matter of time before nukes were rolled up on either side of the Niagara Falls.
Twenty years ago East German sprinters and Soviet gymnasts would have been blamed for the outage, but mercifully the Cold War is over and Ohio can take a few hits for the global good.
It could have been worse: for all the flashing lights and tri-tonal organ jingles, baseball is veritably Stone Age next to its more violent and protracted winter rival. Had the blackout come during an NFL smash-up, we might have seen Americans panic for the first time since Dan Quayle spelled ‘potato”. Sans juice, coaches would have found their laptops strangely unresponsive and unwilling to surrender the plays constructed at a million dollars an hour (do you think it’s easy to figure out how to run past people?).
Assistant coaches, desperately poking at their silent earpieces, would be shown up for the huckster middle-men they are; and the quarterbacks, deaf and blind without the gadgetry in their helmet, would have had to use their own initiative, a prospect more terrifying than Quayle once being a heartbeat away from the presidency.
It made one proud to live in a developing country, with everything that euphemism implies: the eternal galvanising threat of power failures, technicians sleeping peacefully in vans, entrepreneurs vaulting over fences clutching their bodyweight in copper wire. Our sport is played in sunlight, and when we tempt the gods and light up the night, we know that Dr Ali or Riaan or Danny will pay us back our shekels when it all goes pfft. Or they might not, but that’s the way the mop flops. We can take it. In any case we’re only there for the Mexican wave.
Meanwhile, back in the dingy stadiums of the US, nervy cheerleaders are blowing each other’s blonde boufs, lifeless hair-dryers dangling at their sides—