Who are our sporting heroes?
After finishing writing ‘The Player from Ponty’, my book about my father, Glamorgan cricketer Bernard Hedges, I dutifully set about acquiring what most publishers must regard as the shop window of every book, the testimonials. These are those brief, heartfelt words, often from someone of note, that sit inside or occasionally on the front cover, either praising the book or its subject. For sporting books, they are frequently from fellow players, outlining the qualities of an ex colleague. For my Dad, one such testimonial came from the politician Neil Kinnock. Towards the end of the words he sent me was this statement about my Dad:
‘He was a hero who lived up to my expectations on and off the field.’
Neil Kinnock. Praised my father for his behaviour on and off the field of play.
It provoked the thought in me. What is it that we want from our sporting heroes? Who do we want them to be? There is a myth, I believe, that there was an age of sporting heroism that existed in British sport. A time when players were courageous, brave and honest in their approach to the sport they played but also to the way in which they approached their lives. This time coincided with the time my father was a first-class cricketer. Post war if you want to be vague; the 1950’s if you like your history in decade-sized chunks; 1950 to 1967 if want to know the period in which my father played his professional sport. It was the time of one club man Tom Finney, the time of Irish legend Jackie Kyle, the rugby man who became a missionary and time of the recently deceased Jimmy Armfield, loved in his later years by radio listeners for his down-to-earth manner, his soothing voice, and his transparently warm and gentlemanly nature. Here was an imposing list of qualities; loyalty, commitment, selflessness, kindness and to top it all off that most ill defined and spurious of all English qualities, gentlemanliness.
In writing the book, I was fortunate enough to meet or correspond with a number of ex- first-class cricketers who, in my eyes, were heroes before I ever got the opportunity to meet them. Their exploits on the cricket field were enough for me. They fulfilled the one and only side of Neil Kinnock’s equation that mattered. There were two captains of the England team, MJK Smith and Tony Lewis. There were England players Peter Richardson, Geoff Pullar and Alan Oakman, there were stellar first-class cricketers Alan Jones, Don Shepherd, Ron Headley, Peter Walker and Jimmy Gray and Glamorgan’s finest championship winners Ossie Wheatley, Roger Davies and Lawrence Williams.
Alan Jones and Peter Richardson. Fabulous players and good men. But was their era a heroic one?
What was strange about interviewing them and reading about the period in which they played was that they, as people, and those that they played with were sometimes a million miles away from that list of qualities that we identify with our sporting heroes. I heard tales of rule breaking, heavy drinking, philandering and profanity, much of which I could not reproduce in the book. Some stories would have had today’s sports reporters scurrying to their editors demanding space on the front page for the dirt they had just dug up. The past is, perhaps, not such a different country after all. They didn’t do things that differently there. They just didn’t have them delivered to a voracious and scandal seeking public that uses social media to spread a half truth and turn it into a truth carved in synthetic stone.
So is the problem one of nostalgia versus commentary. The difference between remembering the game when the floodlights have been turned off compared to watching it with them full on. We turn most things in the past into the most positive version of itself we can think because we’ve forgotten what it looks like whereas the present we declaim, warts and all. This, it seems to me, is a much-repeated theme in writing about cricket. The past is often seen as the place where cricket was better or purer and the present pales into insignificance by comparison. MJK Smith’s opening remarks to me as we sat in the foyer at Edgbaston before a 20 twenty fixture was that cricket was better than working for a living. His warm smile suggested this was not to be taken too seriously. Nevertheless, it was precisely the notion of those gentlemen amateurs he played with all that time ago. The game was a past time to be enjoyed. Now it is an entertainment industry that has, perhaps become, all too serious and more difficult to enjoy.
Sports historian Richard Holt once said that the lives of sports stars are ‘woven into stories we tell ourselves about ourselves’. In that sense, we expect too much from our sporting heroes because we want them to be a perfect version of ourselves, exhibiting greatness and humility, star quality and personal responsibility. We want them to break all the rules on the pitch but adhere to a strict moral code off it. Is it any wonder that the ordinary men and women who play sport do not more consistently fall short of this standard?
MJK Smith with the Gillette Cup. 'Cricket was much better than working for a living.'
My father loved playing professional cricket and did, I believe, carry with him a responsibility that went with that role. Neil Kinnock’s words were not just mere nostalgia, but a recognition of the power sport and sports people have in inspiring those that will come after them. And not just to be sportsmen and women but to be politicians, teachers, doctors, cleaners or, indeed, to be just good citizens. Each time a sporting superstar gets caught up in a fight outside a bar or takes a taxi for a spin around a foreign city, a thousand tiny flames of ambition might get extinguished. Encouraging our sports stars to be better people is not an act of forgiveness, it is an act of solidarity with a better future for those of us who still have expectations of life, on and off the field.