Can the world handle it? By the time Japan completed their 34-32 win over South Africa at the Rugby World Cup, it had been less than two weeks since Roberta Vinci beat Serena Williams in the US Open semi-final.
Barely had the world recovered from the punch of that first occurrence than it was slapped with this second: Roberta Vinci? Japan? Really?
The common line to take for sporting upsets is to say they are good for the sport. Japan’s triumph could mean something for the prospects of Asian rugby; just as Cameroon’s beating of Argentina at Italia ’90 did for African football; just as Ireland’s cricket triumphs mean something for Associate cricket.
But these victories are often taken glibly as proof by a sport of its underlying competitiveness, and subsequently as an excuse to not do anything more about it – cricket, you are being looked at.
Others are happy to take them as evidence of an operating system not entirely in our comprehension, proof that as much as we try to understand sports – and so, life – as completely as we can, still much of it is beyond us.
We are happy that occasionally, the boundaries of our beliefs can be stretched this far, even if they will quickly recede back. It means that the most endearing upsetters are those who struggle to believe what they themselves have done, or those who genuinely never thought it possible.
When The Guardian’s Matthew Engel previewed Mike Tyson’s 1990 bout against James “Buster” Douglas in Tokyo he wrote: “The crazy thing is that for Tyson defeat would now constitute a good career move.”
In hindsight, he was wrong. But at the time, it could not have been such an outlandish thought to have. Tyson was nearing the peak madness of his career, an unlovable, charmless celebrity brute into whom a loss might imbue some needed humanness.
After the fight, the suspicion that a Douglas win may not be such a good thing had already crept into Engel’s report. Much of it stemmed from the farcical controversy surrounding the immediate aftermath, in which allegations of a long count that allowed Douglas to get up and fight produced legal recriminations.
Ultimately the upset did nobody much good, not Douglas and certainly not Tyson or heavyweight boxing itself.
I had just entered my teens when the fight happened and I was upset when Tyson lost. It shook the order of my world at the time because a Tyson win, like a Steffi Graf triumph, was a way in which the world reaffirmed that everything was hunky-dory.
If Tyson could lose to someone like Douglas, then theoretically, anything could happen. And at that age, the fact that anything could happen was not necessarily an open door to boundless opportunity and excitement; as an older man, on the other hand, the possibilities of anything happening are a reason to live on.
Just over three years before Tyson was knocked out, my world had suffered an even greater upheaval when Ross Norman defeated Jahangir Khan in the final of squash’s World Open in Toulouse.
Norman was the second-ranked player in the world at the time and, logically, the most persistent threat to Jahangir. Threat is probably not the right word though.
Jahangir had gone through the circuit undefeated in five-and-a-half years and 555 matches. He was so far ahead of anyone else it was unreal. He had beaten Norman in 30 matches, 20 of which were finals. Norman beat him in four games.
My mother read the report to me from an Urdu newspaper and I could only have been more disoriented had I been told that gravity was a great big hoax.
Years later, I could swallow the logic that it was probably for the better of the game. Jahangir had become so dominant that, in the wayside of his own glittering rise there had been a little dulling of the rest of the game beneath him: squash needed competition and when the Martin brothers and Jansher Khan emerged, the game probably had its finest mini-era of the last century.
That, ultimately, is part of the endearing truth of such moments. They are rare but necessary counter-balances in sports, which, inherently, is a world out of balance.
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