As fans, what are we looking for from sport?

I’m going to guess that not too many of you were watching the final stages last night of the Valspar Championship on the PGA Tour?

This is Peter Malnati, who won the tournament, celebrating with one of his young sons.

This was just Malnati’s second win in 259 PGA Tour events (the first was in 2015 – golf is hard). He is the archetypal journeyman pro, and this win clearly meant a lot to him and his family. It secures his playing status for the next couple of years and gets him into all the big events, along with $1.5 million. Properly life-changing stuff.

Stars vs. stories?

It got me thinking a bit about storytelling in sport, and what we look for as fans.

There seems to be an assumption among the people who run sport that everyone only wants to see the biggest names (or the biggest teams) slugging it out among themselves, repeatedly. It’s the mindset that leads to things like LIV Golf and European Super League ideas.

Of course there’s a place for that. We all want to see the best players doing their thing and competing against each other regularly.

But you can have too much of a good thing, and I think there’s still plenty of space in sport for these stories of redemption, comebacks, against-the-odds victories, life-changing moments. These stories create genuine emotion and engagement with the audience, even if the protagonist is someone 95% of people watching have never previously heard of.

After all, if sport is meant to be entertainment, how many Hollywood storylines read “World-famous, dominant player or team that was expected to win, wins”?