Low life
Star bores
Jeffrey Bernard
I worked like a dog all over Easter trying to find four winners that combined in a yankee would set me up with the beach bar in the West Indies that I yearn to run. Sweet nothing. What made it worse was watching Steve Davis win the World Professional Snooker Championship. Did you know that the lad has three of his very own space invader machines at home? Well, he has. And when he's not potting balls, it appears he spends his time knocking out enemY spaceships. That information actually got me rooting for a Welshman for the first time ever. Neither does young Mr Davis permit himself to smile, although he did cry after he'd beaten Doug Mountjoy. But then he'd been playing all week in Sheffield and was probably missing his space invaders. Yes. they're a funny lot are sportsmen. And the next person who tells me that it's tough at the top is going to get punched on the nose, if not by me then by my minder Ginger. When Bernard Levin drew up his lists of super-star composers in The Times last Tuesday, plus his list of fourth divisiorl composers, it got me thinking of who were my sporting stars and sporting bores. First the bores. Steve Davis, Geoffrey Boycott, Tony Jacklin, Ilie Nastase, Charlie George, Joe Bugner, Willie Carson and James Hurd are eight who spring to mind. A friend of mine used occasionally to put up Boycott when he came to London to play at Lord s or the Oval. One Sunday afternoon, after the beef and two veg, Boycott was per' suaded to have a game of cricket on the lawn with the 12-year-old son of the house. Boycott elected to bat and was still there prodding forward defensively at tea time, the poor boy having bowled something like a hundred overs without respite. Mind you, Boycott's affection for his mum is not only renowned but surpassed only by the Greek lad who went in first wicket down 3,000 years ago. Boycott is also nervous of the sun and, they say, stays in his hotel bedroom on rest days when it's shining because he reckons the sun saps one's strength. This is as cock-eyed a notion as the one boxers have that sex weakens you. Harry Greb used to have the leg over in his dressing room before a fight and since he was the only man ever to have beaten Gene Tunney, I should have thought it a must on any training agenda.
Tony Jacklin I regard as a flash in an almost forgotten pan. I really think he ought to hang up his clubs or whatever it is they do to old clubs and get a job as a steward in a golf club where he could reminisce endlessly over the gins and tonic. As for Nastase, the unfunniest clown since Danny Kaye, he should be banned for continually going over the top. Charlie George belongs on the terraces with the rest of the hooligans, and I think he'd feel more at home there than on the pitch. Joe Bugner Was simply a continual source of embarrassment. Built like the proverbial Greek god, he was about as inept and violent as a sucking pig. I include Willie Carson from lily favourite sport because of his almost unbelievable arrogance. Ali had the modesty of a nun compared to Willie. James Hunt wears his hair down to his shoulders and spends a lot of time in discos, and both are unseemly for a man over 30. 1 was going to include Bjorn Borg but I haven't since I believe his body is uninhabited.
Now, the question is, what's the team to Play these people? The selectors could Ponder this one for months, but on my short list are Alex Higgins, Dennis Compton, Lester Piggott, Rocky Graziano, Arnold Palmer, Billie Jean King, Dennis Law and Fred Winter. It's a pretty unbalanced team since, with the exception of Fred Winter, they're all strikers. The brave and utterly reliable Fred has to be in goal. Higgins is Pure magic from his trembling, nicotine stained, bitten fingers to his toes. A past master at the low life, Billie Jean King has never been forgiven by the dreadfully soppy English for being a winner and, I suspect, for being a woman in the true sense. Compton enjoyed cricket. A cliché perhaps but he did swashbuckle to effect. There's nothing left to say about Lester but Rocky Graziano is about as far from Malcolm Muggeridge as it's possible to be and that's Where I'd like to be. Dennis Law was a Charming nutter and possibly the Only soccer player ever able to read and write. Like Palmer, bags of style.
I'm afraid the result's a foregone conclusion. A little one-sided. A walkover, in fact, for my lot.
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