JOE CULLEYreviews It's Not the Winning that Counts: the Most Inspiring Moments of Sporting ChivalryBy Max Davidson Little, Brown 276 pp, £12.99
JUMP JOCKEYS are a special breed, but in 1982 John Francome gave a fresh inflection to the word.
“I just felt sorry for Peter Scudamore,” he explained.
That year, Francome could have won a fourth Jockeys Championship. He had won the previous year, but largely because his younger rival Scudamore had broken a leg in a fall while leading the championship table. In 1982 a similar pattern developed: Scudamore, who had ridden about 20 more winners than Francome, came crashing down, this time breaking an arm. So the title was there for Francome to claim.
Instead, he rang Scudamore’s father to say that, when he had reached young Scu’s total of winners, 120, he would stop riding for the season and they would share the title.
As Francome said 26 years after the event, “Some things are just right”.
Max Davidson has a picture on his kitchen wall (and on the cover of his book) of English cricketer Freddie Flintoff stooping low to commiserate with Australia’s Brett Lee, hunkered down in his pads and leaning on his bat, at the moment England captured the Ashes by just two runs in a truly thrilling 2005 series. There is no condescension in Flintoff’s gesture, just generosity.
“We had thought we were living in a debased age,” writes Davidson, a novelist and journalist, “condemned to a life of regret for the days when good manners graced the sports field, when nobody swore at anyone and none of the players wore sponsors’ logos. Flintoff, in an instant, hit that lazy nostalgia for six. Sportsmanship was not dead. It had been there all along, below the surface, waiting to flower.”
That image has inspired It's Not the Winning, in which Davidson recounts moments which encapsulate "that elusive combination of grace, modesty and good humour which we call sportsmanship".
Some are already iconic, such as Jack Nicklaus conceding a putt on the last to Tony Jacklin to halve the 1969 Ryder Cup, while many more are obscure in the extreme and one or two stretch his ambition too far and don’t belong in the book.
“This is not a tale of winning and losing,” he writes, “of plucky underdogs and gallant comebacks; of hat-tricks, holes-in-one and record-breaking times . . . It is a tale of magnanimity: sportsmen and women, on a great public stage, acting with an unforced, unrehearsed decency that seemed to embody the essence of sport.”
Ronaldo, of Manchester United, does not feature.
But two Roman gladiators do, Priscus and Verus. During the reign of Titus, the pair had entered the Colosseum for what should have been a fight to the death. But the men fought so evenly and for so long that they eventually conceded defeat to the other at the same time. Titus could have ordered them to finish the job; instead, he awarded victory to both and freed them. Davidson refers to this, nicely, as the first score draw.
Davidson also writes of Max Schmeling and Lutz Long, who stood up to Hitler, and Vera Caslavska, a Czech gymnast who suffered during the Soviet era.
This is a book best dipped into. Davidson does at times labour his point and there is some inevitable repetition. And! Too! Many! Exclamation! Marks!
Irish readers will delight in the tale of Judy Guinness, and will be surprised to see Tana Umaga makes the cut. Also here are John Landy, Ricky Ponting, and Paolo di Canio – The Fascist Saint.
Joe Culley is an
Irish Times
journalist