You Cannot Be Serious!: The 101 Most Frustrating Things in Sport. Matthew Norman
TV and the latter did, allowing us (me) to watch the peerlessly melodramatic dénouement to that year’s Ryder Cup.
Almost two decades later, the deranged love for sport remains unabated by the ravages of middle age. I can, and do, spend untold unbroken hours not only watching sport – any sport, other perhaps than dressage, rowing and ten-pin bowling – on television, but also taking comfort from studying cricket averages, the sequence of winners in golfing majors, and the results from the early rounds of 1970s tennis Grand Slam events. When I confess that one of my more thrilling experiences in recent years was chancing upon a website that included the scores from the qualifying competitions for World Snooker Championships, which I duly attempted to memorise, you may understand why I have come to know the condition as spautism. I regard myself as a little less far along the spectrum than those who have not missed an away fixture played by their football team in forty years, or have visited all ninety-two league grounds; but not by much, and more thanks to indolence than anything else.
Hand in hand with any all-consuming, sanity-threatening love, there inevitably travels a portion of its opposite. I resent sport as a whole for its imperious hold over me, as the stalker perhaps does the stalkee, or a heroin addict the weakness of which the drug use is manifestation rather than cause. And I resent those involved in playing, describing and administering it, both as agents of that time-sucking dominion, and in many cases for themselves.
The frustrations, distastes, rages and loathings acquired over forty years have made the writing of this book a painful task. How does one whittle down so many thousands of irritants, dullards, hypocrites, narcissists and plain horrors to a mere 101? On what possible grounds can no space be found for Cristiano Ronaldo or Vinnie Jones, Iron Mike Tyson or Sam Allardyce? What brand of imbecile would put his name to a list devoid of such titans of administrative cluelessness as cricket’s Giles Clark, or Sir Dave Richards, who somehow vaults the towering conflictof-interest hurdle to remain a power at both the Football Association and the Premier League? Whence the sheer gall to include Colin Montgomerie, yet not Nick Faldo? How in the name of all the saints did Chas and Dave avoid an appearance for ‘Snooker Loopy’?
You will each have your own fierce criticisms, as much for the inclusion of those you admire (Peter Alliss’s popularity with many sound judges must, however bemusing, be acknowledged) as for the omissions of those you detest. The ranking of the 101 will also inevitably displease.
In my defence, it is among sport’s sovereign duties to provoke every emotion, and rage at the incompetence, arrogance and indeed pretension of armchair know-all writers like myself (see also Simon Barnes, no. 98) is undeniably one of those. If you believe you could do it better, you are almost certainly right. All I can say is that every word of what follows comes from the heart – not from one of that organ’s more gentle or engaging ventrical chambers, perhaps, but from the heart nonetheless.
Matthew Norman
September 2010
101
Roger Federer
Setting aside the bleeding obvious (genius beyond compare, blah blah), it must be admitted, with reluctance and sadness, that the Fed has become something of a wanker.
It isn’t easy to say, and people continue to shy away from saying it, for such is the reverence for the indecent beauty of his tennis and so capacious is the storehouse of glorious memories the Swiss has deposited in those, like me, who have followed his career obsessively for almost a decade. I can’t think of a sportsman who has given me half as much televisual joy as Federer. I’ve barely missed a match he’s played since he announced himself as a generational talent at Wimbledon in 2001 with a thrilling five-set win over the seemingly unbeatable apeman Pete Sampras (see no. 17). Even now, with his decline apparently established and picking up pace, there is no one you’d rather watch.
So it is with far more regret than relish that the masturbatorial quality he increasingly exhibits must, in the interests of the rigorous honesty that defines this book, be noted.
First of all, there are the gleaming white blazers – vaguely nautical, with hints of both seventies disco and something worn on the bridge of the USS Enterprise, invariably with some boastful statistic (fifteen major titles, for instance) stitched into them – he has taken to wearing. With the notable exception of the Green Jacket presented to winners of the US Masters, there are no naffer garments known to world sport.
More disturbing, meanwhile, is the self-pity. The infantile crying fit that followed his defeat to Rafael Nadal in the Australian Open final of 2009, when he had to abandon his loser’s speech, although not the first of its kind, was an embarrassment to behold. For a while after that, it seemed that the birth of his twin girls and his maiden French Open win in the summer of that year had matured him. Admittedly his victory speech at Wimbledon, after edging out a heroic Andy Roddick 16–14 in the fifth, was not impressive. A man with fifteen major titles informing another with just the one, and that years ago, that he knew the agony of narrow defeat, lacked sensitivity. The relief was that Roddick was too traumatised by his loss to take in the clumpingly misplaced condescension.
Worse by far would come after the following year’s shock quarter-final defeat to Tomáš Berdych, when Federer blamed everything – a back injury, a sore leg, bad bounces, Denis Compton and the alignment of Uranus in Mars’s seventh house – other than himself, and offered the faintest and most grudging of praise for the Czech. ‘I definitely gave away this match,’ he said. But he hadn’t. He’d simply been on the wrong end of the sort of hiding he has dished out a thousand times, and lacked not only the humility to accept it, but the will to simulate that humility. No one sane expects epochal titans like Roger Federer to be genuinely humble. You don’t dominate a sport for years without a rapacious ego. All we ask is that they have the wit to give the appearance of modesty on the rare occasions it’s demanded, and this now seems beyond Federer’s grasp.
The emperors of Rome had slaves positioned behind them at all times with the sole purpose of reminding them of their humanity by whispering the mantra, ‘You too shall die, Lord.’ Federer could do with one of those as his career comes to what one hopes will, for all the irritation he can generate, be a very slow and gentle close. That, and a style counsellor on the lines of Reginald Jeeves, who always found a way to prevent Bertie Wooster from wearing one of those white smoking jackets he’d bought in Monte Carlo that were capable of cauterising the retina at twenty paces.
100
Neville Neville
Excuse the self-indulgent lurch into personal philosophising, but I have two iron rules of human existence, and two alone.
The first is that anyone who imagines that something as infinitely complex and perplexing as human existence is susceptible to an iron rule is, axiomatically, an imbecile.
The second is this. Never trust anyone who has the same name twice. Humbert Humbert was Lolita’s paedo-stepfather, and Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy. Like so many iron rules, this has its one exception (Lord Chief Justice Igor Judge, or Judge Judge, seems a good judicial egg). Neville Neville, on the other hand, serves only to confirm it.
Can you honestly blame a man, you might ask, for his parents’ startling lack of imagination? Of course not. What you can and must blame him for is not availing himself of the cheap and simple remedy that is deed poll. What the advantages of hanging on to both names could be, apart perhaps from halving the time required in adolescence to practise the signature, I can’t imagine.
But it’s not the wilful refusal to jettison at least one of those Nevilles that earns this double namer – a football agent with just the two clients (can you guess? Go on, have a crack) – his berth in this book. That refusal did, after all, inspire what may be the second-best football chant of the last twenty years. The first is the Chelsea ditty about Gianfranco Zola, sung to the tune of the Kinks’ ‘Lola’, that went thus:
If you think we’re taking the piss
Just ask that cunt Julian Dicks
About Zola
Who-oo-oo-o Zola …
The