In Ernest Hemingway's novel, The Sun Also Rises, one character asks another how he went bankrupt. "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly,” comes the response.

In sport, it's easy to forget that it was only in the 90s that officials were signalling substitutions using bits of laminated card and scoreboards were manually operated by retirees in flat caps. Yet here we are in an age where Wimbledon’s human line judges have been ditched for electronic call outs and where goals are ratified on referee wristwatches that look like props from Moonraker.

Sport's technological revolution has happened in two ways, gradually, then suddenly.

But what goes unnoticed is that these giant leaps are the result of small steps made by individuals. Once-in-a-generation scientists and engineers tinkering in the shadows. So start a pub discussion on the most influential people in sport in the 21st century and the focus will begin on the athletes who've rewritten the limits of human performance, sport’s great transcendants: Tiger Woods, Serena Williams, Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt. 

Left-field shouts might lean towards the great thinkers, those who've reimagined how sport is played and forced others to follow suit. Pep Guardiola transforming European football, Dave Brailsford's game-changing theory of marginal gains in cycling, or Billy Beane, baseball's Moneyball pioneer who prompted an analytics revolution.

The cynics might follow the money, and nod to those with the sort of cash that creates permanent structural shifts. Like Roman Abramovich, the Premier League's first foreign oligarch owner. Or the Saudi Public Investment Fund, whose recent investments in boxing, Formula One, golf, and football continues to redefine the sporting landscape. 

But there’s one person that won’t get a mention, despite being someone who’s not only changed the way sport is played but also the way fans consume it. It isn't a player, nor a coach, nor a big money investor. He's a computer scientist who didn't need trophies, the ear of powerful politicians, or a billion dollar bank account to make his mark. Just some nifty cameras and a few lines of code. 

"As a kid, I was mad about sport," says Paul Hawkins, sitting on the bright, white-walled front porch of his home in Vilamoura, in Portugal’s Algarve. "I've chopped and changed, never been dedicated to one individual sport" he adds, wondering if a more singular sporting obsession might have resulted in better success before concluding, "The reality is I wasn't naturally talented enough at any one thing to become a professional."

Hawkins is the man who invented Hawk-Eye and changed sport forever. As the brains behind LBW-tracking in cricket, automated line-calling in tennis, goal-line technology in football, and the tech assistance you now see in dozens of other sports around the world, he’s played a fundamental yet largely hidden role in sport’s digital makeover. Although given that this includes VAR, there will be days when he’s thankful for his Iberian anonymity.

But while criticism of sporting innovation often revolves around those enacting it being faceless suits or boffins with no emotional attachment to sport, the same can't be said of Hawkins. As a kid he played in the same cricket team as his father, his mother scoring from the boundary. When he wasn’t holding leather or willow, a table tennis paddle occupied his busy hands. At Durham University, the chilly magnetism of the River Wear found Hawkins in a rowing boat headed for Henley Regatta. While his talents lay in maths and computer science, his moral compass was moulded by sport. 

"Most of my values of working hard, of confidence, of the mental side of things, of the more you put into something the more you get out, have all been learned through sport," he says. Wearing a grey t-shirt with sunglasses perched on curly brown hair that remains impressively voluminous for a man in his fifties, Hawkins recalls a bitter experience on the water that proved to be a formative moment. 

"I ended up losing at Henley," he says, wincing at the memory of his Durham University boat losing to its own B team. "We should never have lost that. Many years later, I'm still bitter about it, but as a life lesson it taught me an awful lot more than it would have done had we won.

"Certainly how Hawk-Eye came about and how I ran it as a business in the early days, was [about] taking the values and the experience that I had through various sports. I didn’t have any business experience but I felt I could call on all of my sports experience to know how to motivate people, to inspire people, and to bring them on the journey with you."

All the while he was indulging in his sporting passions, Hawkins was putting the hard yards in the classroom. Before long, he began a PhD in something called artificial intelligence. “AI was very different back then to what it is now,” he says, explaining that he worked on developing the tech behind language translation apps now on every smartphone. "It was a difficult task back then, and I learned about AI in the generic sense of how to build architecture to manage uncertainty. You very rarely have one thing which you can rely on to be 100% right all of the time," he adds, hinting at the theme that would occupy his future.

It was when Hawkins began delving into vision processing that a dream scenario, combining his academic expertise with his sporting urges, began to form in his mind. And it was what he was witnessing in cricket that lit that first light bulb.

"I'd had the idea of Hawkeye while still at university. Channel Four had taken over the cricket production from the BBC and had brought in some new innovations,” he says, citing use of the snickometer - where soundwaves are used to detect whether the ball grazed the bat - as a sign that cricket was a sport ready for tech “I realised that they were open to innovation and open to change. So I had the idea as I was leaving university, and the company I went to work for was a perception development company that I knew had the expertise to develop it."

Established in 1956, Roke Manor Research is a renowned British technology and engineering company with a rich and sometimes secretive history in innovation, particularly in the areas of defence, security, and communications. But it seemed their new graduate had little interest in radar systems, cyber security, or covert surveillance. Instead, the new kid on the block wanted to track cricket balls. It was a tough sell.

"I pitched the idea in the first couple of months. This is a relatively large company, 550 staff, and it was like, ‘What's this graduate engineer telling us what we should be investing our money in?’ The general management team thought I was far too young and inexperienced."

But the managing director saw something in Hawkins, and figured that even if nothing came of the idea, the personal development benefits for their new employee would prove beneficial. He was given £5,000 to explore his idea. "This is all the capital investment Hawk-Eye has ever had," says Hawkins. Most of it went to the company’s marketing department. "We just painted the vision of what was possible using some VHS tapes and a brochure to gauge the interest. That was how it all started."

While he attracted plenty of intrigue and interest, nobody would commit without seeing the product first. Hawkins was told to come back once he’d built it. But without the funding to do so, he spent the last of his budget on some PR, securing a radio slot that would become the first of three sliding door moments that led to the rise of Hawk-Eye. 

There’s nothing more quintessentially British than rain interrupting play at the cricket, and Hawkins credits a downpour at Nottingham's Trent Bridge during the Test match between England and Zimbabwe in 2000 as the day that opened the floodgates on his Hawk-Eye idea. "My bit of luck came with the last bit of my £5,000, I managed to get on Test Match Special."

TMS is a British sporting institution that, for almost 70 years, has been broadcasting live commentary from England Test matches from all over the world. Its hosts become household names and retired players yearn to become pundits. Such is the stop-start nature of cricket that the skill comes in being able to avoid dead air when the ball is not in-play. And so never is there a more acute need for conversation than when the heavens have opened. 

"I went up to Trent Bridge and was the lunchtime guest with Jonathan Agnew. Ironically, Jonathan hasn’t always been the biggest fan of Hawk-Eye, but if it wasn't for him it probably never would have happened," says Hawkins, accompanied by a cheeky grin. "The series had seen a few controversial leg before wicket (LBW) decisions, so it was topical. And then my good fortune came as it started to rain during the lunchtime break, so play didn't resume after lunch."

Needing to fill airtime, Hawkins remained on air for well over an hour fielding questions from listeners about cricket’s potential new toys. "At this stage it was no more than a vision in my head, no software had been developed. But the press picked up on it the following day, because there hadn't been any cricket to write about."

All of a sudden, Hawkins was at the centre of a tussle between two broadcasting titans. "Channel Four and Sky shared the production in those days, and both realised from the publicity that if they didn't commit to doing it, then the other one would." Hawkins chose Channel Four, with production company Sunset and Vine offering to fund the development. 

In 2001, during the first Test at Lord’s between England and Pakistan, Hawk-Eye made its debut on Channel Four as a broadcast tool that could track the ball's path during LBW appeals. It would prove the ideal moment for Hawkins to iron out any kinks in the system before the Ashes series later that summer.

"In those days there were lots of things that didn't work," he admits. "We needed a period of time as a broadcast enhancement before it could ever be used officially for the umpire, because as a broadcast enhancement you don't have to be 100% reliable." Some of those early lessons were more practical than technical. "Our process still involves going out to the square to calibrate the system, and in those days that took quite a long time. If it had been raining and the covers had been on the wicket, you'd have the umpires saying, 'Sorry, can you move out of the way? We're starting in 15 minutes.'"

Historic sports like cricket haven't always been the easiest for daring newcomers to break into. Its gatekeepers, fans, commentators, players, and coaches are rarely warm to ideas that threaten centuries of tradition, but challenging convention is one of Hawkins’ guiding mantras. He believes that the mindset of "That's how we've always done it" is one of the greatest inhibitors to progress, and he resolved to break through even the most stubborn forward defences in the commentary boxes and press rooms.

"It's cognitive dissonance. If someone forms an idea in their mind, it's difficult for them to change it, whether that's flat-earthers or whatever it might be," he says, recalling how commentators would deliver a verdict on an LBW shout from 70 yards away, then judge the technology by whether it agreed with them. "If Hawk-Eye agreed with what they'd said, great. If it disagreed, it must have been Hawk-Eye that was wrong, rather than their own perception."

Hawkins knew that arguing in the press would be ugly and futile. Instead, his young company would ignore the noise and exercise a discipline that seems almost quaint alongside today's move-fast-and-break-things Silicon Valley mantra: if the system wasn't sure, it stayed silent. "We didn't always put it to air. We knew that bringing wrong things to air would really hurt our credibility, and credibility takes a long time to build up and a short amount of time to lose."

That's not to say his patience wasn't tested. He still bristles now at some of the snap judgements from the commentary box. "I remember Richard Hadlee saying, 'When I bowled a ball, I never knew how it was going to deviate off the wicket. So if I don't know, there's no way a technology can know either.' That's just fundamentally not how it works," says Hawkins, the hairs on the back of his neck standing up in anger two decades on. "You just have to play the long game. Deliver accurate, reliable technology, and over a period of time it will win people round."

Soon after its introduction into cricket, tennis broadcasters showed some interest in bringing Hawk-Eye onto the court. They wanted a tool that would show if a ball had been correctly called in or out. The problem was that, as Hawkins remembers, the sport had already had its fingers burned by promises of a technological utopia. An Australian system called TEL, which embedded sensors in the lines, had ended in failure. "There was still a little bit of backlash of 'We can't trust technology'," Hawkins recalls. "Even though ours was completely different."

The economics, though, were compelling. "Line calling is incredibly difficult, but equally the cost of all the line judges is very material. You've got a lot of courts, you need replacements, you're paying for hotels and travel. At a tennis tournament you've got a lot more officials than you have players."

Then Hawkins became the beneficiary of yet another crucial moment in sporting history, and this time it had nothing to do with the weather. In the quarter-finals of the 2004 US Open, Serena Williams faced Jennifer Capriati in a prime-time blockbuster that was decided, in the eyes of most watching, by a series of shocking line calls against Williams. The most egregious saw the chair umpire overrule a line judge, even as TV replays showed the ball was clearly in.

"When the umpire was shown the video afterwards she was in tears, devastated. She didn't do any more officiating that tournament," remembers Hawkins. "She'd basically looked at the wrong mark on the court, which was why she'd overruled. Capriati won in three sets, and Serena Williams was the classy woman she's always been in not blaming line calls for her defeat. But the press coverage was overshadowed by the line calling. It was a white middle-class woman versus a black woman from a less privileged background, and the sport was perceived as racist. That was the story of the match.”

The uncomfortable subtext prompted a renewed desire from within tennis to improve its officiating. After seeing off competition from a rival during a thorough testing process, Hawkins and Hawk-Eye got the nod. 

If that was the night that Hawk-Eye's arrival in tennis became inevitable, then it was in a match four years later that showed it had become indispensable. The 2008 Wimbledon final between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal is routinely called the greatest tennis match ever played: a five-set epic finished in near darkness, with Nadal lifting his first Wimbledon title. But few recall a pivotal moment in the third-set tiebreak, with the Spaniard two sets up and closing in on a straight-sets victory, when Federer challenged a call that his forehand had landed long. Hawk-Eye showed the ball had clipped the line. Federer won the point, took the tiebreak, and dragged the match into folklore.

What could have been remembered as a Nadal procession soured by a bad line call instead became a historic Wimbledon contest, without a single mention of the officials. For Hawkins, this was Hawk-Eye's defining glory: proof that a technological tool could be swift and decisive without leaving a trace on the story of the game

But if Hawkins had broken down the barriers of resistance in cricket and tennis, there'd been no inroads into the world's biggest sport, where the beautiful game insisted it had no need for robots. FIFA President Sepp Blatter was determined that any innovation that couldn’t be implemented in Sunday leagues around the world had no place at the highest level of football

Then the third moment in Hawk-Eye’s tipping point trilogy came at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, during a match between England and Germany. With England 2-1 down in a last-16 tie, Frank Lampard's shot cannoned down off the crossbar and bounced a good yard over the goal-line before spinning back into the goalkeeper Manuel Neuer’s grateful arms. Neither the referee nor his assistant saw it. A scintillating Germany side went on to win 4-1, but the post-match focus was consumed by an astonishing officiating oversight, visible within seconds to hundreds of millions of television viewers and to one squirming spectator in the VIP seats.

"We'd already been tested and shown to be accurate for goal-line technology a year prior to the 2010 World Cup," says Hawkins. "But Blatter and (UEFA President) Michel Platini were quite against it and in 2009 said they didn’t want technology to assist officiating.

"But the incident at the 2010 World Cup changed their mind. Blatter was at that game, sat in the box going, 'Oops'."

It was the moment that finally persuaded Blatter to accept that football needed help, and the game's belated embrace of technology could begin. The toothpaste was out of the tube, and it wasn't going back in. "If it wasn't for Frank's goal, then maybe football would still be without technology," says Hawkins.

The implementation of goal-line tech was a resounding success - a rare example of swift and objective officiating in football - and these days there's barely a sport in existence that doesn't feature some sort of Hawk-Eye technology. 

"I'm not sure I'll be able to name them all,” admits Hawkins, before rattling through cricket, tennis, football, rugby, baseball, NFL, ice hockey, NASCAR, Aussie rules, badminton, volleyball, and field hockey. “We've even done something in Cornish jousting," he adds, saving his most effusive response for his involvement in Gaelic sports. "The hurling final at Croke Park was probably the best sporting event I've ever been to. A ridiculously good sport."

The business, Hawkins explains, now has two strands. While it was the tracking technology that built the company's name, it now incorporates a second arm based on replay technology. The former is largely automated and run by computers, the latter requires trained humans to interpret what they're seeing. One attracts more strife than the other.

"The nice thing about tracking is the believability side of things. It's a computer system providing the answer, and so long as you're accurate and reliable, you're making definitive decisions," says Hawkins, steeling himself for the topic coming over the hill. "The replay technologies are generally things where there's a subjective element and it's not immediate. The sports with a tracking component, where the computer makes the decisions, are probably the ones where there's been greater fan acceptance. Let's put it that way."

And so, there's only so long the conversation can skirt around the V word. The topic that has resulted in the bursting of blood vessels in the dugout, that prompts armchair supporters to throw drinks at their TV, and that inspires vitriolic chants from the stands. VAR. With semi-automated offsides recently implemented in the Premier League, might there ever be a day when this is as swift and sophisticated as goal-line technology?

The system, Hawkins explains, uses dedicated stadium cameras to track the ball and 29 points on the body of every player on the pitch, 50 times per second. Because it knows the moment of every kick and the position of every limb, it can flag an offside automatically; an official then simply confirms the technology has tracked correctly. "It's a safety net," says Hawkins. "From a fan's perspective, it just means that part of the decision-making is much quicker. Being fully automatic is probably technically possible, but there's a part of offside - such as whether a player's interfering with play, blocking the view of the keeper - which has a subjective component. So having someone confirm it makes sense."

Hawkins is understandably keen to add a bit more clarity to the process, especially when it comes to those optically deceptive on-screen lines and the tension that has defined Hawkins' career: believability versus accuracy. So if you're an assistant ref who for years has relied on freshly mown strips to make your offside calls, you might want to look away now.

"Pitches aren't flat, so when we draw our lines on the screen, they aren't straight lines as you've got to account for the contours of the pitch,” explains Hawkins. “And the offside law uses a line parallel to the goal line. Ground staff are pretty good, but you can't guarantee the cut lines on the pitch are exactly parallel with the goal line. So there are times when our line is right but it looks wrong. It would be far more believable if we just made the line parallel to the mown strip. More believable, but actually wrong."

Wherever you stand on VAR or the wider topic of technology in sport, it's fair to say Hawkins has likely heard it all. But given that he's the man who made the one small step that quickly became one giant leap, he's admirably open to discussing those criticisms. In fact, he's on record as saying that VAR is the contribution to sport he's least proud of. But he's a scientist, so he's always thinking of ways to improve it.

"Everyone involved desperately wants VAR to work," he says, before floating his favoured fix: a challenge system in which teams rather than officials trigger reviews. "I think it works really well in cricket. If football wants to maintain this idea of only overturning clear and obvious mistakes, then whether the defending team feels there was an officiating mistake is a pretty good definition of clear and obvious. And it means all the goals which haven't been challenged, fans can immediately celebrate."

Will some mistakes go unchallenged and stand? Absolutely. But cricket has shown that when they do, they don't end up being the story of the game because the responsibility has shifted from the beleaguered official onto the players. If a referee is making errors so obvious that players feel the need to scream in his face, use a review. And if you've none left because you were frivolous with them earlier? That's on you.

This exact scenario played out in the unforgettable third Ashes Test at Headingley in 2019, when Ben Stokes's miraculous unbeaten century snatched a one-wicket victory from the jaws of defeat. Stokes was only there to hit the winning runs because the umpire had missed a plumb LBW moments earlier, ruling not out when ball-tracking showed the delivery crashing into middle stump. Australia couldn't send it upstairs because captain Tim Paine had burned his side's final review an over before, on an appeal so delusionally hopeful it prompted laughs in the commentary box.

The aftermath proved Hawkins' point. In the UK, the story was all about Stokes's heroics. In Australia, it was all about Paine's profligacy. The umpire who’d actually got the decision wrong was largely erased from the narrative. And so football referees might warm to the idea of telling players to put their reviews where their mouths are.

Hawkins would even calibrate the system to the occasion. "There's a compromise between the game moving on quickly and getting the decisions right, and maybe that compromise is slightly different in a World Cup final to a Premier League match, where over the course of a season it averages itself out. Maybe in the Premier League you have one review per match, but in a World Cup final you have two or three. I'd love to at least see that as an experiment.

"In my mind, the best technology doesn't get noticed. Ultimately, whether it’s the referees, VAR, or the technology, the key performance indicator is how little the officiating gets talked about. The fact that VAR is still talked about a lot at the moment is the yardstick of there being room for improvement."

These days, Hawkins has taken a step back from the company he founded. Hence the Algarve sunshine, and a rekindling of his university passion. One that has allowed him to finally make amends for a bitter loss all those years ago. In 2025, Hawkins and his 18-year-old son Josh completed the World’s Toughest Row, a 3,000-mile transatlantic crossing. Raising money for the Twinning Project - a charity that helps young offenders back onto the right path through sport - the duo won the pairs race after more than 40 days at sea. Henley, you suspect, has finally been laid to rest.

As for what comes next for Hawkins? He may no longer be involved full time with Hawk-Eye, which was bought by Sony in 2011, but his rowing challenge suggests he's motivated by unfinished business. He'll always be grateful to the Hawk-Eye hat trick of rain in Nottingham, iffy line calls in New York, and a ghost goal in South Africa. But if his true measure of success is making sporting tech so seamless as to go unnoticed, then - as any football fan will tell him, at length, unprompted - there remains work to be done.

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‍This article is adapted from S02E07 of the Unsung podcast. Listen to our audio documentaries here.