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Sports poetry
Jeffrey Bernard
Watching and listening to Tom Stoppard's play, Professional Foul, the dialogue about and between the intellectual bore and the footballers and about football itself got me thinking that the intellectual sports fan is far more-wretched than the real life yob. It's as easy to accept Manchester United hooligans, or any other club hooligans come to that, as it is to accept and recognise sewage as part and parcel of everyday existence. What really sticks in my throat is the garbage uttered by the show business, intellectual, arty and 'with it' sports buffs.
No, I'm far more repelled by 'thinking' sports aficionados than I am by the violent slobs who give it a bad name. It was the posh Sunday newspapers that started all the nonsense about twenty years ago. The likes of Alan Ross got hold of games like football and they tried to wring poetry out of it. I would see a first division game on a Saturday afternoon and then have to read in the Observer the next day that The Chelsea forward line moved with a rhythmic plasticity reminiscent of a Mozart quintet.
Perhaps people started taking sport too seriously when they realised how futile it was and is to take their own lives too seriously. Certainly it was something that afflicted us all of a sudden in the late fifties. Now we're all experts, though in spite of the unabashed expertise spouted in pubs and all over the land, in fact I could count on my fingers and toes the people who can really 'read' a fight, race or match.
As far as boxing goes I'm convinced that it really helps to have done a mite of it to understand what's really happening in the ring. Incidentally, of all sports fans I should say that • boxing fans are probably the biggest and most ignorant pigs of all. The shouts and screams of 'kill him', 'Use your right', 'Cut him', and 'Go on. Finish him',
are a mere scratch on the surface of psychopaths who, themselves, couldn't punch pussy. They look at swings, hooks and sustained bombardments but they so often don't see that the punches aren't landing correctly, are ineffectual or that most of them are being caught on elbows, arms and gloves. They see what they want to see.
It's a bit like the impatient man in the crowd at the cricket match. The spin bowler, from the safety of the stands looks so ineffectual and harmless that he begins to yell for the batsman to lash out. He should try a net with a Lock or Laker and then he'd find out just how waspishly that ball fizzes, nips and turns at twice the speed it looks to.
Of course, thanks to television, everyone knows how to read a race. Or so they say. In fact they don't know the difference between a clever jockey giving a horse a breather and a tired horse giving a jockey the bum's rush. They mistake the too big, deliberate and slow jump as being the stag's leap and they find it hard to discern between lack of guts and lack of finishing speed. But we're all experts aren't we? Just like the man who worked for the Mirror years ago. I remember him well. They got the idea fixed in their heads that this man was going to be the greatest boxing writer of all time — A.J. Leibling must have shaken with fear — and the poor sod knew nothing. They had to take the old hack to Jack Solomons gym in Windmill Street and actually point out to him just what a straight left was. He didn't know the difference between a boxer and a fighter and he never did grasp the essential fact that some fighters can box extremely well. Like most boxing fans, his judgement was founded utterly on his emotional bias and so his tipping suffered. Of course, tipping in fights is an extremely unrewarding game and I wouldn't mind betting that a wager on the favourite in every world championship bout since the days of John L. Sullivan would show a loss.
But we all know more than our neighbours do about games. We fans know more than the Fleet Street boys and the new boys in Fleet Street know more than the old boys and the poets, philosophers and actors know more than the lot of us put together. A case in point is the man who's supposedly England's top sports writer. Originally a soccer hooligan he's just fallen in love with racing and he's now treating us to a load of blank verse on such subjects as Lester Piggott's diet. You must know how it comes about don't you. Piggott in fact doesn't starve. He doesn't eat like a pig, but he doesn't have that hard a time. No, what happens is some sports editor needs some space filled and when he can't think of anything, and that's often, he says, 'Better give us a piece on what a hard time Lester has being a millionaire.' Our cerebral sports writer whizzes off into the world of metaphysics and we then get the prize-winning bit on Lester. I suppose they take sport so seriously because they take themselves so bloody seriously. Funny, I thought it was all meant to be fun.
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