Live sporting moments differ from theater because they cannot be repeated

Evidence

Cricket is the most ephemeral of arts. Blink, and you have missed some unique moment. Even a great actor can hope to reproduce his effects, because at least he will arrive again at the same place in his script, with the same line to say. But a batsman plays his stroke only once before it becomes history. A catch is in the air only long enough for you to see it (or not) before the moment of contact (or not) with the palm. — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 1053

Categorization

• XREF: The ephemerality comparison parallels how live sketching captures a unique moment that cannot be recreated, relevant to Mantel’s own craft of capturing a person in prose. — connects to: Sports broadcasts uniquely resist the audience decay that hits all other programming — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1103; Theater and real life are structurally indistinguishable rather than opposed — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 725
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 1053