SPECTATOR SPORT
From a standing tart
Frank Keating
IT was with a joyous quiver of nostalgia that I read and then re-read last week's exquisite misprint in the middle of this reg- ular little doodle — 'David Gower of (not Hampshire but) 'Hampstead'. Anyone who knows cricket's delightfully percipient Goldilocks is aware that any Hampstead XI should have been his team all along. They would have understood him.
The satisfying double-take at actually seeing an olde tyme misprint comes, I sup- pose, with having been reared on the sports desk of the Guardian, the nation's once beloved Grauniad. With modern technolo- gy, where robots are programmed to spot spelling errors, even the darling Grindian has been able to clean up its famous act.
In my day, we drunken subs were proba- bly far more guilty, if truth were told, than even our mischievous printers or overtired proof-readers. In those days, of course, almost every story from outside the office was telephoned through to copytakers who, muffed in headphones, would take down the reams of daily rubbish which seemed so Important on the night. They had to change their paper every three or four paragraphs, and each time re-type and number the story's 'catchline' on every succeeding sheet.
One evening, David Gray, our esteemed but extremely verbose lawn tennis writer, dictated page after page of guff from Wim- bledon. The catchline was 'lawn tennis'. When the drooping copytaker finally fin-
ished David's marathon, her phone imme- diately rang again. This time another two- thousander from Terry Coleman with some wordy feature on poet laureates. Every time his name was mentioned in the piece, which was often, one of the greatest of our royal scribblers came out each time as 'Alfred Lawn Tennison'. It wasn't spotted by anyone, and ran through all editions.
Off the top of my head, even from this distance, I can remember a few, and all doubtless down to me and too many sprint- ed evening trips across the road and back from the Blue Lion. How about 'A rash of no-balls by Willis had umpire Fagg regular- ly gestating throughout the day'? Or 'Banks saved a certain goal when he died despair- ingly at Davies's feet'. I suppose even next morning I had to be quite pleased with, 'The last batsman, Albeit Carefully, sur- vived to lunch'. Hooray for Albeit.
And on and on. . . 'Compared with Leeds's all-white strip, Chelsea took the eye with their irresistible passes and royal-blue skirts'. . `Uttley can play anywhere in the scrum — a typically English futility play- er'. . . 'A stony-faced Barrington last night accused Griffith of chuckling' . . . 'Some- how Bedi regained his crease after being strangled halfway down the wicket'. Even mixed doubles... The tall, blind, goalkeep- er, Bailey, was discomfitted in keeping out a rocket of a shit from Jones'.
My favourite remains in a piece of my own, some waffle about the cricketer, CB Fry, who was also at one time the world's long-jump record holder. 'In his Oxford rooms', I wrote, 'one of Fry's party tricks was to jump backwards from carpet to mantlepiece from a standing start'.
Late into the evening, I drifted back to the sports desk from the Blue Lion, saw the first edition, which had long 'gone', and read of CB's ability to jump on to the mantlepiece 'from a standing tart'. I changed it hastily for all further editions and staggered home. Next morning I was to learn, of course, that Fry's party piece was engineered by 'a standing fart'.I was reminded, however, of the all-time champi- on literal when watching that deserved and warm tribute on BBC2 to the onliest Jim Swanton (though why call in that wobbly- jowled grouchpot, Don Mosey, to try and wreck it?). They mentioned the autocratic EWS's autobiography Sort of a Cricket Per- son — but not what the Jamaica Gleaner called it: Sort of a Cricket Peron.
On second thoughts methinks that might not have been a misprint.
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