SPECTATOR SPORT
Stuck up stylites
Frank Keating
IT WAS with astonished delight on Sunday that I spied a Wisden on the bookshelves which were background to the pinstriped portrait of Auberon Waugh in the Indepen- dent on Sunday. I never imagined the great man might be a cricket chap — certainly have never seen him languidly promenad- ing the perimeter in his panama at Taunton when Somerset were at home, nor supping Just-the-one outside the Blackthorn tent at backward square leg, wire specs glinting with content during those golden summers of gusto and grandeur before Botham and Richards left.
I suppose, alas, cricket's annual prim- rose doorstep was on his shelves just for show, or to help the photographer's colour scheme. For unlike US journalism, where the top men regularly and with relish dive into sports, in Britain most of our very best columnists down the years are either obli- vious to, or positively sneering about, games and games' players. A pity, espe- cially as one of their founding fathers, old Hazlitt, was a devoted sporting nut. But England's present honoured prophets who perch loftily on top of their daily or weekly columns regard sport as almost invisible below them.
If you've got this far here, well, wouldn't You love to read Waugh on, say, cricket's Waugh brothers for a start — or even on his, doubtless, distant relative and near neighbour, Bristol City's gloved custodian of the rigging a couple of years back, one Keith Waugh, who always insisted you pronounced it 'Wolf? Or how about Ber- nard Levin on form, riding his dashing high-horse to examine, say, the Ring cycle of Ali-Frazier, or Sugar Ray-Duran? Or the onliest Keith Waterhouse on the de- mise of the leg-spinning donkey-drop? Or Craig Brown on Pete Rose, or Jimmy White, or even Dennis Viollet? Or how about my lustrous (dread word!) ground- floor flatmate, Wallace, turning his atten- tion to the coach-driver of the England cricket team, Mr Michael 'The Mouse' Stewart? Bliss.
For all Hannen Swaffer's spiritualism he never once so much as wrote a forecast of next week's pools results. The only time I remember the century's acknowledged best William Connor, 'Cassandra' of the Mirror — giving sport a mention was when he had to contrive a line on a Spanish bull-fighting crowd to get in his joke about 'too many Basques in one exit'. James Cameron, at the very last anyway, did rheumily keep an eye on the latest Test score, especially if India were beating England; and the late, and very much missed John Harriott — unsung generally, but the 'columnists' columnist' as weekly superstar of The Tablet — was truly beguil- ing on cricket whenever he got the chance.
Good old Miles Kington, too, is another exception to prove the rule. So, obviously, is Alan Watkins, whose Friday column on rugby for the Indy is marvellously tetchy. But Peter Simple would wearily disdain the point of ball games — not realising the nice point about them is that there isn't any.
Come to think of it, Patrick Campbell was a weekly man who gave over his column a few times to sports, most often — and hilariously — to golf. And once, memorably, to the morning promenade to the ground when the Irish rugby team were playing at home — via the Hibernian's Buttery, Davy Byrne's, Bailey's Bar, and Jammett's backroom; 'but not simply a vulgar drunken route, much more a mar- vellous excitement at feeling the whole city en fete for "the Match" '.
We're off to Dublin for the rugby next week. As festivals go, it knocks the Wex- ford opera, the Kinsale culinary, and even the Galway oyster, into a Waterford crys- tal. I'd love to read B. Levin on the Dublin rugger. Or the Wisden-reading Mr Waugh.
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