Maybe you saw the BBC documentary about the great Formula One driver Graham Hill on television last weekend. In these days of frenetic jump cuts and similar tricks to catch the interest of those with the nano-second attention span of the genuine idiot, it was a slower moving hour, and all the better for it, letting his story unfold with good humour, a helping of uncomfortable truth and some real warmth.
But for our purposes, I draw your attention to a clip within, from the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year show, 1971, itself a relic of a former age, from a time when it was enough to get a load of great sportsman together and celebrate their achievements rather than staging an overblown ceremony at some huge arena, an event which you – yes you member of the public – can truly affect with your text votes! As if we were voting for something as utterly pointless as which celebrity can dance or which slack jawed youth can murder a tune slightly less grievously than another.
We digress. The piece opens with Hill and the ineffably majestic Jackie Stewart engaged in what we are forced to term these days, “doing the banter”. It’s banter of an altogether superior nature, Hill playing the raffish cad to the full. “You’ve won six Grands Prix this year Jackie, which is hogging it slightly. Seven is the record. Where do you think you could have done it and it didn’t happen?” Stewart looks at him in exasperation, and with immaculate timing, returns with, “I don’t think that’s a fair question”, the pair as good as Morecambe & Wise. It’s much better in the flesh than on paper...
But amid the crowd of sportsmen and women behind them are a catalogue of giants. Geoffrey Boycott, Raymond Illingworth, George Best, Barry John, Henry Cooper, Mary Peters, even Her Royal Horseness, Princess Anne, who won the gong that year. Now we can all debate whether or not those people would cut it today, whether they could handle the changes in their sports or whether they would be even greater than they were. These are insoluble questions.
But what is not in question is that as charismatic characters, the men and women on that stage stand head and shoulders above the contemporary crowd. Whether you agreed with them or not, Boycott and Illingworth always had something interesting to say. Long distance hippy Bedford could attract controversy at will, and then there was George Best, who looked as if he’d come from rehearsing for “Jesus Christ Superstar”. To that litany, you could add the likes of Gareth Edwards, Peter Osgood, James Hunt, and umpteen others, sports stars who looked like what they were – the luckiest people on earth. Fit, young, healthy, doing the greatest job in the world and being adored for it.
Look now at the footballers, cricketers, racing drivers of today, too many of whom looked bowed down by the pressures, as if they carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. A dreary bunch to be honest. But is it their fault? No. It’s us.
First of all, the pressures are unquestionably greater than 40 years ago, far, far greater. Defeats back then, even for national teams, were disappointing. Now they resemble great national humiliations, a bit like Suez or Isandhlwana. If your team loses on Saturday, even to a lucky last minute goal, prepare for the players, management and board of directors to be castigated on phone ins and message boards within moments of the final whistle. How do you handle victory and defeat in a pressure cooker like that, a world where you simply cannot treat those two imposters just the same?
More than that though, the world of media and PR has changed beyond all recognition in 40 years. Veteran journos will tell you that back then, they travelled with the teams they were assigned to, drank with them, saw all the stories and kept quiet because the players were their mates, and they were involved in it as well. Nowadays journalists and sportsmen are not friends. It’s the hunter and the quarry. It’s not entirely the fault of the journalist – the sports journalist that is – for while many are still fixated on the game, newspaper proprietors are not and they send the newshounds to dig up stories of what goes on off the field so that we can all click our hypocritical tongues in disgust. When George Best said that he spent all his money on “Women and booze. The rest I just squandered”, we laughed. If Wayne Rooney were to say the same, we’d want him strung up.
Then there is PR schooling. No top club would allow Best to talk to the media without being surrounded by media advisers. He’d be coached in how to fill the maximum amount of time in saying as little as possible, not because sportsmen are as dumb as popular lore has it – not all of them anyway – but because as soon as they say anything, literally anything, it will be twisted into something sensational. Given the current hysteria that comes from the apparent conclusion that nobody is grow up enough to have a sense of humour and be able to recognise a daft joke when they hear one any more – Top Gear and Glenn Hoddle apologies anyone? – banter is now off the menu. What we have in its place is a sporting environment that is ever more colourless, increasingly dour, ever more robotic.
Sport is an incredibly serious business for the participants because their lives, their families’ security depends upon it. For us, it’s what we do to enjoy ourselves in our spare time. The sooner we lighten up, grow up and remember it’s just for fun, the sooner we will have another Graham Hill to make movies about.
