There’d better be a Mirrorball
Mirrorball is Moneyball in reverse: sport as our model of “real life”
If mirrorballs are anything, they’re many things masquerading as one thing. And if all goes to plan, this Mirrorball will be no different.
Practically, this Mirrorball is a new name for the Blog formerly known as The 1001.
Spiritually, this Mirrorball is Alex Turner’s wish as my command.
Memetically, this Mirrorball is Moneyball in reverse.
We need models of the past to understand the present, and models of the present to predict the future. Moneyball is the story of sporting decision makers making better decisions after they got religion and let themselves learn from analytical models of their games, models often born far afield in finance and suchlike before being given new life by blogosphere passion projects.
According to me, sport actually is the most important of the least important things because it’s itself a model of “real life”. Being right is not enough. Everything’s a tradeoff. Success is a mess.
We can have all sorts of fun picking apart sport’s rigour and its glorious randomness. Its competitions and complex collaborations. Its regulations and unwritten rules. Its ingenious and idiotic strategies. And while we’re at it, we can increase our chances of improving the outcomes that matter most.
Auctioning off a month (or three) of naming rights to the Blog earned £1001 for GiveWell’s top charities. That’s the best part of seven years of an infant’s life to you and me, at £150 a pop. That would have been worth me living a lot longer with a given name a lot worse than The 1001. That name, though, for all that I became very attached to it, and despite my best efforts retrofitting its origin story, had the fatal flaw of not telling anybody anything about what the Blog’s about.
The renaming process was art and science. Art: writing down as many sporting terms as one man’s mind can conjure and free associating from there, producing a list more than 230 names long. Science: developing a scoring rubric and assigning points for legibility, territory, tone, thesis, and, of course, layers, producing a top tier of half a dozen. Philosophy: staring at the top tier long enough that name by name each reveals itself to be intolerable, all bar one, and that’s a bingo.
Come for a swift half or two in the new clubhouse (www.mirrorball.blog), stay after hours for the same old yarns about how, if you look at it right, sport really is a matter of life and death.
And the dancing. Stay for the dancing.
Training data
🎵Mirrorball (2008). “You make the moon our mirrorball / The street’s an empty stage / The city’s sirens, violins / Everything has changed.” Elbow released this into my teenage brain not long after I fell in love for the first time with somebody in “real life” who wasn’t Mika Häkkinen, Kelly Holmes or Thierry Henry. The morning after the right night, the right words in the right place at the right time, the world is different and so are we.
🎵mirrorball (2020). “Hush, I know they said the end is near / But I’m still on my tallest tiptoes / Spinning in my highest heels, love / Shining just for you.” Existential angst is all the rage. The kids are not alright. Large swathes of the planet are on fire. Artificial intelligences are swarming out of control. As long as we’re still up on the tightrope, though, Swifties and non-Swifties alike, it’s too soon to stop trying.
🎵There’d Better Be A Mirrorball (2022). “So if you wanna walk me to the car / You oughta know I’ll have a heavy heart / So can we please be absolutely sure / That there’s a mirrorball?” And finally, our Arctic Monkeys and their Alex Turner, the greatest lyricist of his generation, contemplating the importance of there being lightness in dark times, of putting on a show, to stave off our despair and to help us see things clearly. Even, or especially, if that means breaking them down and putting the shards back together again.
