SPECTATOR SPORT
The last of the line
Frank Keating
DESMOND HACKETT surely died happy — sipping a favourite Black Velvet at home in Wimbledon, three weeks away from his 80th birthday, and the very morning after the England soccer team had beaten France at Wembley last Wednesday. Hack- ett did not approve of much south of Calais. Certainly not its sport. To be sure, what a satisfactory week for Desmond to doff his brown bowler for the last time, with the soccer victory over France dancing hap- pily on the heels of similar routs by Eng- land at the two rugbies, union and league. As John Rodda wrote in an evocative obit- uary in the Guardian on Saturday, 'Hackett never failed to champion a potential British sporting hero, and stretched writing licence to the utmost in the cause of the Union flag... He daubed the Daily Express with vivid colours, particularly in those drab post-war days when British sportsmen found it difficult to win.'
Hackett was the last of his line. With the likes of Peter Wilson and Geoffrey Green, he would meander round the globe for his backpage splashes before satellite televi- sion took its grip. They would disembark at Southampton and porters would gather round excitedly to ask what had happened in Madison Square Garden the week before; now you lag into Heathrow the morning after, and baggage-men tell you what actually happened in full close-up and slo-mo.
Hackett left the Express in 1973. It was time to go, but he was pretty disillusioned to be told so. Editors wanted no more his bombastic bucketfuls of baloney. They wanted a more technical dissection of what the armchair loungers had seen already. Most of all, they wanted 'quotes' taken down in shorthand from the players them- selves. (When Bobby Locke won the Open at St Andrews in 1957 and was uniquely brought into the press tent to 'talk them through it', the Telegraph's doyen, Leonard Crawley, walked out in a blazing huff — `My readers want to know what 1 think of his winning round, not what Locke thinks!') When Henry Rose was killed in the Munich air crash in 1957, Hackett was the obvious man to replace him as main man for the Express. The hell-said-the-duchess technique for Beaverbrook sportswriting had already been famously established by the likes of his predecessors, Trevor Wig- nall and John Macadam. Not only 'Brits never really lose, it's just that foreigners accidentally get more points', but, as the splendid Macadam once defined, 'You must go in slap-bang and give out pic- turesquely on the time you strolled up to
the nets at Lord's, picked up a loose ball and took Denis Compton's leg stump; or maybe some big fellow in a bar was throw- ing his weight about and you clipped him a short one on the whiskers and, as you picked him off the sawdust, out of his pock- et dropped a card bearing the name Jack Dempsey.'
One night in Mexico in 1970 — prior. to both Hackett and Green once again drink- ing young Keating under the hacienda — they told me the vital knack of travelling by air across the United States in the 1940s and '50s: by Stratocruiser, with cabins and bunk beds, via Shannon and Gander.
At the Shannon stopover, they would each buy the biggest toy fire-engine ('for the bairns back home') they could find. This would be carried as hand luggage. For they knew that once they began the long flight across America, many of the states were 'dry', and however many thousands of feet they were above land, once the border of a prohibitive state was crossed the stew- ardesses stopped serving from the bar till a more relaxed state was 'entered'.
Oh yes, they had also filled their chil- dren's fire-engine presents to the brim with whisky. So whenever they passed over a dry state, you would see these two giants of their game, devoted fathers, lovingly clutch- ing their child's new toy to their laps — and, for some reason, contentedly sucking non-stop at the plastic fireman's hosepipe of the little plaything.
Hackett: the last of the line.
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