SPECTATOR SPORT
Sporting soufflé
Simon Barnes
I HAVE three dishes which I can offer guests. One of them comes from a book called The Italian Football Diet, but that is by the way. The best of the three is a cheese souffle and the secret, should you wish to know, is Emmenthal. I cooked one the other day and the bugger collapsed on me scrambled eggs. It tasted all right, but any- thing that made it special and guest-worthy had gone.
I felt something of the same thing when I heard the thump on the doormat of the Sports Yearbook 1997. This is the omnisport Wisden, filled with numbers, facts, sharp observation and quotes that either hit the tar- get or blow up in the speaker's face. It is an excellent work, filled with the sporting events of 1996. I spent the last year of my life inti- mately connected with practically all of them.
In the name of God, why? Sport is sus- tained by hot air, heated by enthusiasm, anticipation, nostalgia. It exists in all three time-zones simultaneously. It exists in the future, in the wild hope that we can do bet- ter, England can win a cricket match, beat Germany at football or whatever. The best of sport always lies that little bit ahead.
Sport also exists in the distant past. But sport, being real life on fast forward, does not need that much time to pass before nostalgia cuts in. The definition of a golden age is the time when you were young and in your prime. It is a poor child that does not have heroes, a poor grown-up that still does. Thus the best of sport lies that little bit behind us.
Yes, the time when I heard of England's victory over Australia at Headingley in 1981 and flung my copy of the South China Morn- ing Post high in the air on the deck of the Lamma Island ferry. It was my birthday, too . . or 1966, and the World Cup, and the misery of my French echange scolaire eejit, when the linesman (who, you may recall, spoke only Russian and Turkish) ruled that the ball had indeed crossed the line.
But the best of sport is really the present. There are some lines somewhere in C.S. Lewis about the present being all shot through with the light of eternity. Sport's greatest joys exist in that moment when Hurst's goal is scored, when Willis's yorker uproots Bright's stump. Or this year, when I heard that rip of the perfect dive in the Olympic pool, and saw that moment in the weightlifting when the fat man raised some- thing weighing the world above his head. It was a year filled, as never before, with such moments.
Perhaps it is the extraordinary richness of the mixture that has made for the sudden sense of flatness at the serving of the annu- al sporting soufflé. We are too late to enjoy the eternal present of sport, too early for nostalgia, and to anticipate the coming year seems a pedestrian exercise after the last year's excesses.
Excesses? I normally get through a note- book in six months; this summer, I got through one in a bit less than eight weeks. The European football championships, fol- lowed by (actually overlapping with) Wim- bledon fortnight, and then out to Atlanta for three weeks at the Olympics.
The new year is mercifully quiet in com- parison. Perhaps all years will be quiet in comparison. Sport is riding the crest of a wave right now in terms of global populari- ty and the consequent eagerness of politi- cians and money persons to be involved with it. But perhaps we will stand on the high point of the millennium and look back over the shattered landscape of the recent past, and say, 'Look. There is Atlanta, remember that? The bomb, the man with the golden shoes, Redgrave?' That is where the great wave of sport broke. Yes, broke and began to roll back. Ever afterwards, it was hard to eat the glorious soufflé of sport without thinking of scrambled eggs.
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