Breaking Bonds: How Sport Set 007 Apart

James Bond is, first and foremost, a cultural icon.

He is popular and problematic. Straddling the Atlantic, he is truly an emblem of the Special Relationship and the post-war Western World, a misogynist whose atavistic, Atomic Age world view is as cold as his methods of killing (and, in turn, saving). He is an alcoholic, he is tired, he is a sex symbol and arguably among the most successful literary inventions of the modern era, a joke dry as extra brut champagne.

Bond is capable, with just a bit of torturing, of being anything. He is a cruel social cipher, and that is the key to his continued relevance as much as it is the design of his original creator.

Ian Fleming was from a wealthy family—his father's war obituary was penned by Churchill himself—but the Fleming stock had not been the right stock nearly long enough for him to fit comfortably into the English class system. He married up, but detested the social circle that came with a more aristocratic wife; they in turn didn't much care for him. Fleming was an outsider at the top.

So he took to his Jamaican estate (called Goldeneye) to pen his first spy novels. There, Fleming crafted a character who would simultaneously be a projection of waning Imperial Power and an antagonist of the rigid English class system—in other words, a thoroughly modern hero.

The two great markers of a man's social class are his name and his hobbies, and Fleming used both to establish James Bond as a class apart. While "James Bond" is now indelibly associated with sangfroid and sex, when Casino Royale came out in 1953, the name was "anonymous and sleek," Matthew Parker wrote in Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born. It was a name with no connotations. Fleming also endowed his character with a love for what Parker deems "consumer sports" like golfing, gambling, skiing, and skin diving—activities and distractions in which courage and capital and the next luxury are more important than a last name or coat of arms.

Fleming had grown up on novels by writers like John Buchan (a Governor General of Canada!) and Dornford Yates, which tended to focus on the exploits of gentleman-adventurers and spies. "The heroes are distinguished by romantic daring, ardent patriotism and a 'hunting, shooting, and fishing' Edwardian attitude," Parker wrote via email. "They are essentially schoolboy stories dressed up for adults."

In his book, Parker dubs the protagonists of such stories the "Clubland Heroes," after Richard Usborne's study of the form. The "club" in question is the gentleman's clubs of the upper class, bastions of conservatism, jingoism, and the other -isms of the white, male, and rich. Sporting idioms pepper the works. "Tensions and anxieties are handled with 'playing up to win the game,'" Parker wrote, "often expressed in language of the sports ground, cricket pitch, and hunting field"—a far cry from alcohol and a lover, Bond's preferred coping method.

"I think this is a deliberate updating of the genre by Fleming," Parker told me. "He wanted to sex up the Buchan hero, someone who would fit into the much more materialistic age Fleming was writing for."

James Bond was not of Clubland; he was a professional, a salary man whose work happened to be of a very particular variety. His off-hours pursuits similarly avoid the closed-off worlds of the upper class.

"That is a real closed shop," Parker said. "You could become super rich; you could win the lottery or invent something and become super rich, but you would not be accepted at a game of polo, or a country house shooting party."

Instead, the sports beloved by Bond are those that require nothing but money; they were too new, in the grand scheme of things, to have class connotations and could be claimed by anyone with the means to participate in them. To see Bond on the slopes or the baccarat table is to see a man who can see to his own desires; blood and breeding were taken right out of it. The Jet Set hero was born.

"It's aspirational in the sense that it is achievable," Parker said. "If you became rich from whatever background, you could go to Jamaica, and you could go scuba diving, you could go to the Alps and go skiing, in the way that you couldn't go to the country house shooting party." (Fleming wouldn't go to the latter, anyway—his distaste for killing animals was passed on to his creation. Parker points out that anyone in a Bond book acting with cruelty toward a beast above the station of a fish—and birds in particular—is doomed to suffer a gruesome fate themselves. Bond's namesake, after all, was an ornithologist.)

For readers, being rich enough to suck the marrow out of life like Bond was, while unlikely, at least still possible, something worth reaching for. It was a notion that resonated with many—and one that sold well.

"Fleming was really surprised," Parker said. "He wrote books for what he described as 'the A reader,' i.e., people like himself. Big readers who would buy in hardback." The book's massive success as cheaper paperbacks meant his message was more catholic than he perhaps had thought. "And maybe that is because he manages to update the old fashioned, Imperial hero, to make him seem much more modern."

The idea has aged well over the decades, and made the leap from page to screen intact. The disco-ski chase opener of 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me—McDonald's colored ski clothes! A ski pole-cum-rifle! A cartwheeling into the abyss, saved by the Union Jack!—revels in the mountain slopes as a classless land where money, skill, and courage reign supreme. The World Is Not Enough updates the motif to fit in with the extreme sporting culture of the late 1990s and early aughts, adding in paragliding snowmobiles to chase Bond and Elektra King through the Caucasus Mountains of Azerbaijan.

Similarly, the nouveau riche foreigners and characters who gather around the baccarat table in the book Casino Royale, were, in 1953, a considerable democratization of the baize. When it came time for Daniel Craig to bankrupt Le Chiffre in 2006, the modernization was achieved instead by swapping the esoteric game for the more populist poker.

Fleming would no doubt have appreciated the climactic battle that caps 2012's Skyfall. Following a thwarted attempt on her life in London, M and Bond retreat to the Scottish Highlands and 007's boyhood home. There, with the help of the family gamekeeper Kincade, they prepare a series of wily traps in anticipation of Javier Bardem's villainous Raoul Silva.

Silva bursts onto the Highlands with superior accouterments—including a small strike force and a goddamn gunship—and proceeds to be defeated by a combination of Bond and company's resourcefulness and knowledge of the environment; it would not be a stretch to take the entire finale as a subversive reversal of the traditional Scottish Hunting Lodge scene which Fleming found so distasteful, the rich, powerful, and better equipped hunter being bested by his prey.

No sport is more indicative of the bleeding edge of sporting cool that is Bond than skin (scuba) diving. Fleming was quite enraptured by the reef behind his estate, and was an early adapter of Jacques Cousteau's aqualung, even diving with Cousteau himself.

"In my opinion, Fleming is best as a thriller writer on the reef," Parker said, and one would be hard pressed to argue. The combination of natural beauty, danger, sex, and bleeding-edge technology which skin diving represented in the 1950s and 1960s made it the ultimate sport for both Fleming and Bond.

1961's Thunderball is perhaps the greatest scuba adventure ever written, sexier and more literary than the works of Cussler and Creighton, the stakes higher and action more brutal than Sea Hunt. Fleming is unmatched in his depiction of the underwater world; a section wherein Bond enters the fuselage of a sunken plane, only to find every surface a writhing mass of octopods drawn by the corpses therein, is a favorite of Parker's, and one of the most unnerving passages to be found anywhere. The scuba diving sections are loving, lavish, literary, the very soul of the book and, taken in the abstract, the very soul of Bond. That even today the ocean's depths represent the most mysterious, exotic, and dangerous environment on earth means they are the provenance of the bold and financed, a place for people with the desire to explore and to leave on land the stuffiness of the upper class sporting life.

Bond is, in many regards, the Ultimate Tourist, the working man enjoying the pleasures of the rich and the famous even if he himself is not one of them. His is a character that may very well never die, continually updated with new pursuits and new locations, going recklessly wherever lucre is and strictures are not.