11 APRIL 1987, Page 37

Too much fame, not enough delight

Byron Rogers

SPORTING LITERATURE: AN ANTHOLOGY edited by Vernon Scannell OUP, £12.50 My notes on this anthology read like one of Francois Villon's ballades. Where is Nimrod on John Mytton? Where is Denzil Batchelor on Larwood, and Leslie Norris's fine poem on the old fairground fighter (who did not have the class')? Where are J.L. Carr and A. J. Leibling? Where, in Short, is the delight? It should have been such a lovely book, this new Oxford anthology. When people write well about sport it is because they have managed to communicate their own joY; when that is missing, it doesn't much matter what else is present. I hoped to meet old friends again, old heroes; I hoped to see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Instead this book is like one of those edgy metropolitan parties, where the guests have been invited not because the host likes their company but because they are famous. Thus Shakespeare gets in- cluded because he once used a fishing metaphor, Burns because the song 'My heart's in the Highlands' includes the phrase 'a-chasing the deer', and Words- worth because he wrote a dire poem about an old huntsman 'In the sweet shire of Cardigan/Not far from pleasant Ivor hall/ An old man dwells, a little man/'Tis said he once was tall.' In parts this is a very boring book.

You come on some stupefyingly bad verse, as this on Park Tennis:

The women concern themselves with being feminine, walking like models and tossing back their loose hair. Their play resembles beach jokari, that muddle of elastic, and When they run skirts and crucifixes become wild.

Or this, on Sunday cricket: • . . in the pavilion

Denis shunts forward in my vacant seat and on the flip side of my pencilled poem like swansdown on a stagnant pond doodles in a beautiful italic script.

What's sport to either of these poets? Scannell seems to have felt obliged to include anything with white margins around it, when most modern poetry is not about anything much except poetry. But then he started off on the wrong premise, perhaps because this was an Oxford anthology; as long as it could be classed as Literature, and mentioned some sporting activity, it got in.

There is such a thing as sporting litera- ture, and Scannell includes Alan Ross's good poem on Stanley Matthews. 'Head of a Perugino, with faint flare/Of the nostrils, as though, Lipizzaner-like/He sniffed at the air. . .'. Matthews would be completely bewildered to read such a description of himself, just as Hornby and Barlow would have stoutly denied that they had ever flickered anywhere, certainly not between wickets.

But then sporting literature has little to do with the dramatis personae. It has to do with the shadow they cast for the writer, and, beyond him, on myth. There is thus an element of play about it as a muddied footballer is suddenly seen moving among the white pillars of a classical world.

This gives it a tension as in a metaphysic- al poem, because the writer is not writing about something acceptable like love but about something which many of his readers might find trivial. It has to do with life passing, and with man's capacity to find heroism in the figures of his youth, who no one else remembers.

There is the passage in Lavengro when the young Borrow sees the old men grow suddenly silent as a terribly aged horse is led past them. This is the champion pacer Marshland Shales and only they remem- ber. It is a wonderful bit of writing, 'Tis pity, he's so old', sport being a reminder of your own mortality, for other champions come. There is a note of defiance about the best sporting literature.

It is a shame that Scannell did not cast his net wider to take in sporting journal- ism. The best thing I have ever read on boxing was A. J. Leibling's account of the fight between Archie Moore and Mar- ciano. Moore is getting old but is still the incomparable stylist, Marciano the bull. And then Moore manages to hit him with the perfect punch, something rare even in his repertoire. Marciano goes down, but he begins to rise. To Leibling the incredulous, doomed Moore becomes Ahab watching the great white whale burst from the depths. I shall never forget that image. It is the intensity of his vision throwing the shadows of the two men onto heroic myth.

Again, the build-up in the great Denzil Batchelor's first sight of Harold Larwood: He came, as I remember, in that first Sydney Test, bowling with the press box behind him . . . He bowled faster than I have ever seen anyone else bowl; faster than Lindwall, far faster than McCarthy. He bowled, according to my memory, many fewer bumpers than Voce, but he rose at terrific and dangerous pace to threaten the short-ribs; to threaten the heart. That should have been in, if only for the punctuation.

I missed in this anthology the sense of obsessive fun that you get in Wisden and in J. L. Carr's tiny classic, Dictionary of Extraordinary Cricketers. 'Horace, c.1890, a horse of such exquisite sensibility that when Fred Morley, the invariable Notts. last man, left the Trent Bridge pavilion, it sidled unobtrusively towards the rol- ler . .

It is churlish to quote so much that was not in the book, but then there is very little that I want to which is. Exceptions include Elizabeth Bishop's fine poem, 'The Fish,' and three sonnets by a Victorian poet I had never even heard of, Edward Cracroft Lefroy, dead in his thirties.

But there was one thing which stopped me in my tracks, an excerpt from an article by Arnold Lunn on mountaineering which appeared in Lilliput Magazine under the title 'What It Feels Like To Fall'. It is an account of the sensations experienced by various mountaineers falling from rocks, and these range from incredulity to some- thing approaching a sense of well-being. Some even recommend it as a means of death.

This is probably the one thing I shall remember in detail about the book. How very odd, especially when that book was an anthology of sporting literature.