CITY LIFE c BENNY GREEN
It was an inspired idea to house the new Football Hall of Fame in that sad Cinder- ella of a thoroughfare,. Newman Street, that utterly pointless continuation of Cleveland Street where nothing much ha., happened for a hundred years and whose sole claim to fame is the fictitious one that Becky Sharp's father at one time had a studio there. rhat Newman Street should finally have ex- changed its old bohemian image for an Asso- ciation Football museum might suggest that the philistines are at the gates, but in its own Way the Football Hall or 'tame too is a work of art of sorts, even if it is not quite the sort that I could ever quite bring myself to ap- prove of.
But before examining the fundamental dis- honesty of .a conception like a museum for any professional sport, let me acknowledge straight away that Newman Street can only be infinitely enhanced by this strange new device. It has always been my hope that be- fore our great city finally slides into the river from sheer disenchantment, every one of the streets within a five mile radius of me ought to maintain some kind of tirnewasting, thought-provoking, dream-inspTing estab- lishment, and it does my poor old heart good to see that Newman Street, through whose mercantile wastes I roamed so often as a child, and, whose only distinguishing charac- teristic so far as I could see was its .weird talent for hiding itself under cardboard boxes, has once more been placed fairly and squarely on the map.
If this ancient backwater had possessed anything so grandiloquent as a Football Hall of Fame in my childhood, we would all have gone mad with joy, haunted its portals day and night, speedily devised a thousand fool- proof ways of bunking in, and goggled at every exhibit so intensely that within a week its outline would have been stamped indeli- bly on our retinas. For every one of us who suffered from the football disease : for Payne who carried a ball with him everywhere, in- cluding bed, so that he would never be caught unprepared for a little game; for Arnold. who once hit the base of a lamp-post seven times out of ten with a tennis ball from ,twenty yards; for Bey, who practised his body- swerve in thoroughfares like Newman Street so assiduously that one afternoon he shook his hips at a passing woman and sold her so convincing a dummy that she changed course at the last moment and walked straight into a stationary horse and cart: for Elliott. who had mastered the art of parting his hair just like Ted Drake; for all of us it would have been the greatest show on earth—which is what is wrong with the whole thing. It has all been conceived on the intellectual level of a reasonably bright, reasonably fair- minded fan of ten years old.
At first glance the Hall of Fame doesn't seem so awful, although the hoarding in the foyer on which Arthur Rowe announces that the game is every British schoolboy's birth- right gave me a laugh which perhaps the sponsors of the exhibition never intended. During Rowe's own playing career that birth- right was worth no more than £8 a week, which was, you understand, an essential mea- sure. After all, if each footballer were allow- ed to negotiate his own terms, no two team- mates would be drawing the same wage, and what would happen to team spirit then? It is interesting that this rule and its justi- fications were dreamed up by. administrators who were able themselves to thrive in professions where there was no wage ceil- ing and still get on famously together. only because they were blessed with remarkable purity of soul.
Still, I told myself, this was supposed to be a pleasure jaunt, so try to think kind thoughts. I then passed into the exhibition and was instantly visited by a burning desire to do its organisers some permanent physi- cal injury. Feebly following the pop music policy of inducing audience approval by per- forating every eardrum within a ten mile rad- ius, those responsible for the Hall of Fame have wired the place. for sound, or rather noise, so that rati matter Where you' hide, the chanting of a cup-tie crowd, interspersed with the occasional choral interpretation of some idiotic club theme song, follows 'you relentlessly. Yet again I made the effort to be charitable—and was brought tip short by a. staggering aberration, a photographic dis- play of football journalists It was at this point that I finally succumbed to 'ribaldry.
There are, of course, • a. few significant ex- hibits to be found, the ancient balance sheet of Aston Villa in a riotously successful sea- son, profit £1,876 18s 3d; the sight on one of the several movie screens of Sir Matt Busby 'striding like a guardsman down the touch- line to embrace Bobby Charlton after the European Cup Final victory, a highly char- ged emotional incident involving two heroic. survivors of the Munich disaster; a priceless photo of the West Bromwich Albion side taking a training walk down a rutted Vic- torian road, all blue serge and watch-chains, as Cardus once said. But 't is what is not on exhibition which is most revealing. No graph showing the compa-ativt. wage-earn- ing parabolas of Alan ilarJaker and Tommy Lawton; no photograph of Jimmy Logie selling newspapers in Piccadilly Cir- cus; no photostat of the letter from Arsenal telling their greatest of all oaptains. Eddie Hapgood, that they were too poor to be able to pay him his £750 accrued benefit; no list of the number of greengroceries or butcher shops it is advisable to acquire if you want to be a power in the game. Still. 1 can think of at least one useful function for the Foot- ball Hall of Fame. Each year the beer- soaked armies descend on the town for that annual religious rite. the FA Cup Final. I lived in Wembley for seven years. and in each of them I was awakened on Cup Final morning by the sound of beer cans on car bonnets. Perhaps from now on the drunken boobies will go to the Football Hall of Fame instead, and let us all 4et some sleep.
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