Sportsmanship

In recent days I have spoken to approximately 83 percent of all Seeboard employees, and to a rather greater percentage of those with nasal South London accents. My purpose? To be reunited with my word processor, printer, fax and all other journalistic accoutrements of the modern age. Perhaps, as someone said the other week, we were all better off with Remington portables.

The damnable thing about the aforementioned devices is that each is impotent without electricity. Which is what, following last week's gales, I have also been. Without electricity, I mean.

Still, one mustn't be unreasonable. This is, after all, the back of beyond, a full 30 miles from Marble Arch. And one of the benefits of a black-out, paradoxically, is that it provides impetus for reading.

I reckon ordinarily to work through a fair number of books, newspapers and magazines, but when the awful narcotic of TV is withheld one suddenly realises more time for these things. In an evening, therefore, the soundest policy has been to build up the fire, bring out that butane camping light thing (legacy of October '87), pour a hefty Glenlivet and settle in with an improving book.

After working through the papers, that is. And over the weekend such trifles as famines, wars and the grotesque government-sanctioned Hong Kong ivory sale had been kicked aside by the column feet given over to the return of the missing baby.

Just as I would eagerly subscribe to any journal undertaking not to mention Salman Rushdie the year round, so, by last Sunday, was I far beyond terminal boredom with this latest pocket of obsession for Fleet Street, as was.

Still, after the 'auction' the syrup dried up, which was some mercy. There was the reunited family, with an undeniably good reason to smile, and a whopping (Wapping?) 75,000 further reasons for temporary loss of speech. "We're talking heart here, not money," the lawyer/auctioneer reputedly said, and it is of course well known that for every heart there is a key. Apparently, the one which fitted here was shaped like a thick sealed envelope.

Supreme soaraway journalism, this. Opening question: "How much do you need not to talk to anyone else?" Another exclusive, folks!

This prompted thoughts of what Murdoch's men might do if motor racing - beyond the odd fatality, give or take - should ever be counted significant to the outside world. Imagine the effect it could have on press conferences, I mused to myself. Then came to with a start; is it possible Ayrton Senna and one or two of his colleagues have had a secret deal with the News of the World these two or three years past? No, no, I think not.

What else has been in the papers these recent days? Well, that grand old amateur sportsman Sebastian Coe weighed in with his two penn'orth on how politics was inextricably bound up in sport. What he failed to explain was how this was kosher in 1990, but had not been so in 1980, when he went against Maggie's wishes by competing in the emphatically pre-glasnost Moscow Olympics, at a time when the Russians were getting stuck into Afghanistan.

Sport and politics. Mr Coe is, of course, about to exchange the one for the other, and would seem already to be in training.

A much more edifying experience for me has been the rereading of Farewell to Sport by Paul Gallico. This American, among the greatest of sportswriters, has always been something of a hero to me. He wrote with elegance and ease, without the hint of pretentiousness. And his views on sport - and life - have always seemed precisely totally with my own.

There is in the book a chapter entitled 'One Hero', given over to Bobby Jones, considered by many the greatest golfer the game has known. And Gallico begins like this: The sportswriter has few if any heroes. We create many because it is our business to do so, but we do not believe in them. We know them too well. We are concerned as often, some-times, with keeping them and their weaknesses and peccadilloes out of the paper as we are with putting them in. We see them with their hair down in the locker-rooms, dressing-rooms, or their homes.

Frequently we come quite unawares upon little meannesses. When they fall from grace we are usually the first to know it, and when their patience is tried, it is generally to us that they are rude and ill-tempered. We sing of their muscles, their courage, their gameness, and their skill because it seems to amuse readers and sells papers, but we rarely consider them as people and, strictly speaking, leave their characters alone because that is dangerous ground.

Also, we grow up with them and see them change from pleasant and un-spoiled youngsters into grievous public pets, boors, snobs, and false figures. I am, by nature, a hero-worshipper, as, I guess, most of us are, but in all the years of contact with the famous ones of sport I have found only one that would stand up in every way as a gentleman as well as a celebrity, a fine, decent, human being as well as a newsprint personage, and who never once, since I have known him, has let me down in my estimate of him.

Those sentiments largely mirror, I would guess, the feelings of pretty well anyone who works in my world. But how could they be better expressed?

Later in the piece Gallico talks of Jones's way with the fans, of his astonishing patience, for example, in dealing with autograph hunters: He was the only celebrity I ever knew who was prepared to accept as gracefully as possible every penalty there is to be paid for fame and publicity.

Now what you perhaps need to know is that Gallico's book was written in 1937, and this is oddly reassuring, since it suggests that nothing essentially changes. We may be tempted to think that brattishness is quite a recent sporting phenomenon - and I cannot believe it has not worsened recently - but the fact is that it was always there.

If I had to pick a Bobby Jones figure from my experience of motor racing, it would unhesitatingly be Richard Petty. When first I met him, in 1972, he was indubitably the NASCAR driver, the man around whom stock car racing revolved, and it was a position he held, all in all, for going on two decades.

I have been to Daytona many times since, seen Petty in good times and bad, yet never known him discour-teous or distant with anyone. The great days are long gone now, but the reverence in which he is held understandably remains.

A small point, but there is much to be learned about a man from the way he deals with autograph hunters. You get the arrogant and contemptuous type who, if he signs at all, refuses the fan so much as an accompanying glance. Whether the fan feels the same way about his hero afterwards is a matter of conjecture; I know I never did.

It is, though, a matter of picking your moment. No driver objects to the occasional request for his signature, but there are times when it must be intensely irritating, when he is simply engulfed, and probably in a hurry. There is a technique here, a way of refusing politely, and it calls for noth-ing more than manners. Which explains, of course, why some do it well, others not so.

Last July, after practice one day at Hockenheim, I sat with Alain Prost at a table outside the Marlboro motor home. The conversation was entirely 'off record' - no notes, no tapes, and understandably so, for he was telling me for the first time of the possibility he would go to Ferrari. Had my com-plete attention, in other words.

In the midst of this, someone came up and - ignoring Prost! - asked me to sign one of my books. Now, this doesn't happen every five minutes, and Alain was much amused: "This is the problem you 'ave when you sit in the open with someone famous..."

A few minutes later a rather more orthodox enthusiast approached, one who clearly made ample use of his camera. He had with him 58 postcard-sized colour prints of Prost, and requested an autograph on each.

It would be an untruth to suggest that the quality of Alain's signature did not deteriorate as the time went by, but sign them all he did, and the pen was returned to its owner with a smile. I would guess Prost ascended to the deity in the kid's estimation that day, and will doubtless remain there.

Journalists are not much different from fans, if truth be told. We may be cynical about the political aspects of the sport, weary of the lapsed manners success and riches have triggered in some of its central figures, but still in the end we are there because racing has us snared.

Over the last 15 years or so of covering Formula 1 for this magazine, there has been many a letter accusing me of every kind of prejudice. Politically, readers have had me anywhere between Red Square and the Monday Club; and in my writing of drivers, too, there have been charges of bias here and there. To all such I plead guilty, and without much regret. If I find someone easier to admire than like, it will assuredly come through in my words.

And if, over the years, I've shown a clear preference for such as Andretti, Villeneuvc, Prost, Warwick, Cheever, part of Mr Gallico's closing paragraph on Bobby Jones many offer a clue:

People who are able successfully to laugh at themselves are able to take a great amount more of punishment and abuse than the humourless crew. It takes much more to snap the temper of a man who can read something funny in any and every situation.

The paperback is in print once more, I'm told, and worth seeking out. Once the lights are back on.