S o what was Nick Faldo blubbing about a week ago
when he was talking to the media about his European Ryder Cup team’s meeting with Muhammad Ali on the Valhalla course at Louisville, Kentucky? He doesn’t strike one as the weeping kind, though he has form. I seem to remember him reaching for the man-size after tapping in to win the Open at Muirfield in 1992. And we’re used to sportsmen cracking up during the event (remember Darren Clarke red-eyed and tender at the K Club two years ago, only a few weeks after his wife had died). But before, a whole day before? All very peculiar, especially in contrast to Faldo’s general carry-on on Sunday after leading Europe to their biggest defeat for more than 25 years, when he was gambolling around like a teenager on a promise. I have a theory.
They arouse mixed feelings, do weeping sportsmen. Sometimes you want to slap them, but most of the time you can’t stop yourself joining in. France’s mighty flanker Sébastien Chabal, huge and hairy, strong and graceful as a lion, crouched on the mud in Paris weeping uncontrollably in the pouring rain after his side had been beaten by England in the semi-finals of the World Cup last year: now that’s a sight you won’t forget. And what’s a more potent symbol of the all-encompassing glory of sport: Chabal in tears or Jonny’s metronomic kicking? I know which means more to me.
Footballers are always weeping: Becks interminably; Gazza famously after being booked in the World Cup semis in 1990, knowing he would miss the final if England got through (he needn’t have worried, of course); Maradona too.
But you couldn’t help being moved by the scarily tough John Terry cracking up at the end of the Champions’ League final in Moscow in May. Terry’s hopelessly scuffed penalty gifted the game to Manchester United, and his anguished breakdown was a fitting climax to the almost four hours of utterly compelling drama, passion and intensity that had gone before.
Michael Vaughan, tough and doughty on the cricket field, needed hankies at the ready when he announced he was standing down as England captain. With his clean-cut good looks, Vaughan is agreeably metrosexual in appearance, so perhaps we could forgive him. Mark you, it’s hard to imagine Ricky Ponting and Matthew Hayden sobbing in each other’s arms should the same thing arise at the SCG.
Lawrence Dallaglio, ramrod-straight, was in floods of tears from the first chord of ‘God Save the Queen’ to the end at the opening of the Rugby World Cup final in Sydney in 2003. The thought of the Colonel full of uncontrollable emotion probably had the intimidating potency of the haka on his opponents. Tears of incomprehending joy, though, from Jana Novotna after winning Wimbledon, and she had to be comforted by the Duchess of Kent. Noblesse always obliges.
But none of that seems to help us with Faldo. Maybe it was this: he’d just met Ali, a sportsman of such incomparable nobility and achievement, a man universally loved and admired. And maybe Faldo realised that, whatever his own massive achievements, he would never, ever be anything like Ali, he’ll never be a hero, he’ll never be loved. And that really is something to cry about.
Back to John Terry for a moment. The decision to rescind the red card he’d been given, rightly, by referee Mark Halsey for bringing Manchester City’s Jo down with a shameless tackle was an act of supine cowardice that deserved a firing squad at dawn. Still let’s hope City’s trillionaires put one over on Chelsea in just revenge before the end of the season.
Roger Alton is editor of the Independent.
Previous page
