A Sporting Chance?

Excuse the dramatic opening, but here’s a story for you: imagine you’re fifteen years of age. You’re looking for your next meal in roadside bins- and you‘ve been doing this regularly since you were seven. Your Mother is a crack addict. She has twelve other kids; all from different fathers. Your own particular father disappeared, and was later found murdered, as was your grandfather. Not all of your family are victims; indeed an uncle redresses the balance somewhat, being, as he is, on death row for murdering his wife. You’ve grown up learning only one lesson, that of how to stay alive.

This kind of abandoned, tragic, feral childhood isn’t something we hear about too often. But it’s a story that has been brought to the consciousness of the American sporting public because it is the story of Michael Oher, one of the hottest properties in American Football, currently sitting pretty dominating college football in Mississippi and waiting for the inevitable NFL draft when he graduates.

It’s dramatic, it’s heart-rending, and it’s inspirational, but only thanks the intervention of a wealthy family of Republican Christians who took him in after his lucky (and initially most likely temporary) entry into a wealthy private school where their own children were educated. It’s a story that is being used worldwide as an example of sport’s ability to save; even this borderline illiterate, almost entirely mute kid from Memphis’ meanest streets.
When he was accepted into the Briarcrest School, Michael Oher’s IQ was rated as 85. By the time he left, after countless hours of hard work and the nurturing influence of his adopted family, his IQ was rated well above 100, enabling him to go to college and further his football career. But the real point here is not that sport saved Michael Oher from a tough, dangerous life in the projects of Memphis. Nor did Christian love or round the clock tutoring save him. It was genetics.

What you should also know about Michael Oher is that, when he was taken in by the Tuohy family as their own, at age fifteen, he was already 6ft5 and weighed over 300 pounds. He could also, it was quickly discovered, run faster over ten yards than any other boy in his team, and he could throw further and harder than the team’s Quarterback. He is a specimen of unparalleled enormity, and it so happens that his incredible size and speed make him fit exactly the profile of an NFL left tackle, one of the highest-paid positions in the game. His job is to protect the blind-side of a right-handed quarterback from the marauding opposition trying, frankly, to mince him.
Good for Michael, of course. We all love a rags-to-riches story, and the riches at stake here could hardly be further from the rags Michael Oher grew up with. Yet if there is one Michael Oher, there must be dozens of others in Memphis. Multiply that by all the cities in the USA and you’ve got thousands of similarly neglected, wild kids roaming free without hope. Out of all these tragic children, Michael Oher is only one; one who happens to be genetically blessed like few others. For us to say that sport can save lives, help the helpless and rescue the lost simply on the back of Michael Oher’s story is to ignore the thousands of other kids like him who will never get the benefit of excruciatingly random coincidence and genetic fortune like he has.

Another story now: you’re seventeen, you’re a talented sportsman, and you’ve been earmarked as being a good enough role model to help in the coaching of the juniors at your club. Only the day before a routine Saturday match, you’re gunned down in the street. This time, forget the convenient distance Memphis is away from us; this happened in London. The sports club in question is Greenhouse Bethwin, a football club run from the same North Peckham estate as where Damilola Taylor bled to death in a stairwell. Many of us have played team sports at some level- imagine, if you can, turning up for a match to find out that one of your key players was shot dead the day before.

This football club was established and nurtured by the knight in shining armour of this story, a man named Abdullah Ben Kmayal (known to all simply as Ben). While millions of pounds of sponsorship and wages may not await the graduates of the Greenhouse Bethwin junior ranks as await Michael Oher when he graduates college to turn professional, this corner of London is an infinitely more appropriate place to look for evidence of sport’s qualities of salvation. Run on the principle that the most committed, hardest-working players will get to play at the expense of even the most talented players should their attitude not come up to scratch, it is a club where the London equivalent of all those feral Memphis kids who are unlucky enough to not be Michael Oher can access sport and all the discipline, hope and positive attributes it can provide.

Sadly, of course, it is unable to lift its players entirely clear of the danger they face every day in the way that Michael Oher was lifted clear of the violent mess that was his homeless, abandoned youth. But at Greenhouse Bethwin, there are nearly twenty football teams that run to offer an outlet for over 400 young people, boys and girls, no matter what their skill or physical attributes. The Greenhouse charity, an umbrella organisation including Bethwen FC, also runs dance, drama, table tennis, basketball and half-term multi-sport courses for the underprivileged of London.

Here in Manchester a similarly positive set-up exists, with John Amaechi’s ABC Basketball Centre in Whalley Range. Once the highest-earning English sportsman of all time, playing centre for the Utah Jazz, Amaechi put £2.5m of his own money into building this centre for Manchester’s youth to explore the sport, encouraging participation from social games to serious team matches. All this taking frustrated bodies off the streets and onto the basketball court, giving them an outlet.

The frustrating irony is that, having said Michael Oher’s story isn’t the place to look for sport’s powers of salvation, both Greenhouse Bethwin and the ABC Centre required, and continue to require, similarly improbable gestures of goodwill. Abdullah Ben Kmayal has given countless hours of his time, over sixteen long, frustrating years. John Amaechi gave millions of his own money to set up his centre. Both institutions provide opportunities for anyone, regardless of how genetically normal or freakish they may be; a worthy and humbling attitude. Yet neither could have happened without the vision of a guardian angel. Ben says that, with funding for facilities, his club could cater for at least double the amount it can at present, but the bureaucratic minefield faced by even this most worthy cause make it almost impossible. Amaechi bemoans the “diabolical infrastructure” of basketball in this country, a description seemingly appropriate for all sports funding.

Nelson Mandela said, “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire in a way that little else does.” Yet professional sport, despite the efforts of some, struggles to appear as anything other than a self-serving, money-obsessed industry. It would be fantastic to say that amateur sport was thriving, proving Mandela right, working its magic on the lives of the young; but at present, places like Greenhouse Bethwin and the ABC Centre work despite the government, not because of its help. So, it’s left to stories like Michael Oher’s, one in a million, to reassure us that sport can work for the power of good. Sadly, in context, one in a million isn’t quite convincing enough.

Drugs in Sport

The Government have recently announced plans to implement a harder line on drugs in sport in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics in London. A report by a House of Commons Select Committee accuses UK Sport, which overseas drug-testing in Britain, of “unacceptable complacency” and said more needed to be done to identify and prevent doping scandals; including a suggestion that the responsibility for testing for drugs should be removed from UK Sport, due to a conflict of interests as they are the body that fund athletes’ training and preparation. Sports Minister Richard Caborn has yet to agree, preferring instead to discuss increasing the length of bans handed out to competitors found guilty of drugs offences.

Yet drug abuse in sport has been rife for years, and though lifetime bans from the Olympics are now automatic for any athlete guilty of using performance enhancing drugs, we must surely question whether the present system in any guise can ever truly work.

At the 2001 World Athletics Championships in Edmonton, Canada, the golden girl of British athletics, Paula Radcliffe, caused a stir by holding up a sign saying “EPO Cheats out” while watching a heat for the 5,000m. Her anger was directed mainly at Olga Yegorova, who despite recently testing positive for EPO, a blood-doping agent, was taking part in that 5,000m. Since then some of the biggest names in athletics have been implicated and occasionally banned from competition. Britain’s own Dwain Chambers has served a two-year ban; the USA’s Tim Montgomery has been banned and all his successes (including a world record) have been removed from the history books. Another USA Sprinter, World Champion Justin Gatlin, has been punished similarly. Yet Athletics is still suffering; recently Kostas Kenteris and Katerina Thanou, the two disgraced Greek sprinters who tried to mock the sport and disguise avoiding a third consecutive drugs test by the invention of a spurious motorcycle accident, have said that they hope to return to competition, Kenteris even suggesting he will compete at the 2008 Olympics to regain his 200m gold medal he won in 2000.

An automatic four-year suspension for a serious doping offence is again being looked at by the World Anti-Doping Agency, but it is believed that many professional sports would find it legally unworkable because it could be challenged in the civil courts. Only now that the British Government have decided to investigate how to punish drug cheats in order to avoid potential embarrassment at the London 2012 games has this become an issue worth really debating. Yet every year, countless young athletes around the world are unable to resist the competitive pressure that drives people to taking performance enhancing drugs. A recent documentary about the misuse of steroids in bodybuilding showed, as an aside, the story of a 17-year-old, 6ft1 high school baseball pitcher whose coach had told him he needed to “bulk up” on steroids in order to make the varsity team. Within two months he was dead, having committed suicide after the uncontrollable mood-swings he had suffered from as a side-effect.

Currently Italy is the only nation in the world to have a system in place for bringing criminal charges against drugs cheats in sport. If sports authorities care about the young impressionable athletes endangering their lives by taking performance-enhancing drugs, and not just their own potential embarrassment, it is time more nations followed Italy’s lead. Cases like the baseball pitcher in the documentary must be told, and offenders must be punished as harshly as possible; it’s not simply a matter of making sport cleaner, but about making it safer for all the young men and women whose lives revolve around it.

Heavyweight Heroes

Fatness gets a bad press these days. Not only does our media do everything in its power to advocate skinniness and all that “size zero” marketability as the be-all and end-all, our government has demonised the rotund. Lynch mobs of busybody parents are clubbing together to form a nutritional militia seeking to kill the Colonel, burn down Burger King, and tear down the golden arches of McDonalds.

Sport is an unlikely place to look for a beacon of hope for those oppressed by these fascist body images imposed by our media and our government. Yet as recently shown by the 21-stone Bermudan cricketing policeman, Dwayne Leverock, who terrorised the England middle order in their World Cup warm-up match, there is still hope for the fuller figured sports fan.
The recently-retired German cyclist, Jan Ullrich, was a perfect example of off-season bloating just to remind us that cyclists aren’t necessarily naturally whippet thin. Fatty foods, amphetamines and ecstasy were all vices he indulged in away from the cycling season, bringing ridicule throughout his career, while the drugs brought suspension, sacking, and notoriety; but essentially Ullrich was always a fair-weather fatty. Our real icons are those who competed at their peak while at their weightiest.

Golfer John Daly has never pandered to those who argue that sportsmen must be at the pinnacle of physical fitness. If he had, he probably wouldn’t find it so easy to regularly drive 350 yards off the tee; the usual quota of Jack Daniels swirling around inside his sizeable waist clearly adds useful momentum during his swing. He had one memorable round where his swing almost never materialised because of the alcohol shakes he was suffering from, and gloriously he is also sponsored by Hooters. A full life for a fuller-figured male.

Andy “the Viking” Fordham deserves a special mention for services to the stereotype of darts players. While his ludicrous rival Phil “the Power” Taylor was sharing training sessions with ex-England rugby hooker Phil Greening to work on his “throwing dynamics”, the Viking was, almost without exception, in the pub. His own pub, no less. Regularly imbibing 25 bottles of lager as his pre-game preparation, he brought joy to many through his 30-stone efforts of Celebrity Fit Club. However, Fordham’s recent stroke, and Daly’s time in rehab perhaps mean we should look elsewhere for our porky poster-boy.

Snooker in the 1980s was blessed with the presence of Canadian Bill Werbenuik, the first player to split a pair of trousers live on television. Sadly the affable 20-stoner was advised to take the drug Inderal to limit prodigious alcohol intake, which was on snooker’s banned substances list. Curtains for him, but a trouser-splitting honourable mention is well deserved.

Athletics of course has the shot putt; but that would be too easy. Track and field’s overweight icon must be Trevor “the Tortoise” Misapeka, the 21-stone “sprinter” from American Samoa who ran the 100m in an eye-wateringly slow 14.28seconds in the 2001 World Championship heats. He afterwards said it was his personal best, as he’d never run that far before.
American football, meanwhile, is well stocked with stocky players, but one springing instantly to mind is William “the Refrigerator” Perry. Playing at a peak of 25 stone for the Chicago Bears in the 1980s, he was described by one columnist as “the best use of fat since the invention of bacon”. His views on dieting were instructive. “You drink beer, it fills you up, so you don’t need to eat. Then you sweat it out the next day at training.”

Dieting is an interesting topic when dealing with these pioneers of sporting girth. Almost without exception, it is seen as entirely negative to their performance. Golfer Craig Stadler once lost two stones to try and shed the nickname “the Walrus”. His skills deserted him, so gained ten or twelve pounds to test his theory; his game returned, and so he regained the whole lot, becoming the Walrus once again. A similar tale involves Pakistan’s Inzamam ul-Haq, who was once incensed by a spectator calling him a “fat potato”. He in fact gave in to pressure and lost two and a half stones before the 2003 World Cup; after scoring only 19 runs in the tournament, he vowed never to diet again. Australia’s Shane Warne, prone to being slightly roly-poly himself, once described Sri Lankan captain Arjuna Ranatunga as looking as though he had swallowed a sheep whole.

With most of our heroes- the Refrigerator, the Walrus, the Tortoise, the Viking, and the rest- eating a sheep whole wouldn’t be so far out of the question. Hats off to each and every one of them for resisting the body fascism oppressing us all.

World Wide Waffle

Professional athletes are, to generalise, not the most rapier-witted individuals in the world. So it is always a dubious affair when they are approached to produce a sporting blog- ghost-written columns and books are bad enough, but with the added assurance that far fewer people will ever read the blog in question, the quality of “insight” on offer can suffer an horrendous demise.

Witness, if you will, the unfortunate collection of scribblings from the online pen of Durham and England cricketer Liam Plunkett. It is unlucky for all concerned- Liam Plunkett, BBC Online, and the poor, defenceless reader- that the man himself was injured at the beginning of the Ashes tour, and then spent the entire tour trying to regain fitness. This, needless to say, doesn’t make for riveting reading; typical was this entry of January 19th: “A lot of you out there might be wondering what I’ve been up to since my last entry. Some of you might even be asking whether I’m still out here in Australia.” It had, in fact, been a month and twelve days since his previous entry. So, in breaking a six-week silence, surely Liam had something groundbreaking to tell us? He came up with the goods, of course. He‘s used to performing on the biggest stage. “Away from the cricket, we’ve had a bit of time with our families, and Christmas was nice.”

Liam, poor Liam, has obviously thought this “Christmas was nice” revelation infinitely newsworthy. He was, amusingly, slated on the “Comments” section of his blog by angry onlookers using his updates about the weather, his girlfriend, and rock concerts he had attended as evidence that the England team weren’t “focused” on winning the Ashes. While I hesitate to argue with such passionate fans, perhaps the online diary of Liam Plunkett, who for all intents and purposes was on an extended holiday, wasn’t the place to look for competitive bluster and fighting talk.

That cricket should provide such a flaccid, dire effort, is somewhat sad considering it is usually regarded a more cerebral sport than football. Yet football beats cricket hands down in the BBC Blogs stakes- Plymouth manager Ian Holloway, never a shrinking violet, at least uses his to get things off his chest- recently on the sensitive topic of referees. Or at least, it’s sensitive to anyone other than Holloway, who typically said it as he sees it- “The word professional means they're full-time, although it doesn't mean they're any good! But are the rules any good? No, they're absolute garbage.”

Owen Hargreaves occasionally slips into what we’d expect from a footballer, with nuggets like “The window opens twice a year - in January and again in the summer - and it is part and parcel of football”, but overall does manage to provide an interesting perspective as an English international plying his trade abroad. Bolton captain Kevin Nolan meanwhile gives a typically frank account of his life as a footballer, his BBC column providing an endearing look into the life of an engaging and down-to-earth character.

On David Beckham’s big-money transfer to the LA Galaxy, he writes, “Beckham has taken a lot of stick from people all around the world but he has just hit back at them with a huge wad of cash…with those sorts of figures I think he would be daft not to.” And, whatever we think to the Beckhams’ move to LA, it’s hard to argue when it is so clearly Nolan’s honest opinion. Of course it’s also hard to argue with Liam Plunkett’s description of Christmas as “nice”- you just get the feeling the BBC might wish they’d offered the column to one of his team-mates instead.

Grandad Grandstand Put To Bed

The recent months have seen the sad demise of some of television’s best-loved institutions. Now, as of last week, Top of the Pops and Magnus Magnusson are joined by the venerable Grandfather of TV sport, BBC’s Grandstand in the “Fondly Remembered” section of TV’s archives.
The landmark sports programme that defined the weekend for millions of sports fans throughout its time is no more- the fact its title is so close to “Grandad” is convenient, for that’s the esteem it is rightly held in.

What is sad is not that it has been scrapped, but the manner of its passing. It could hardly be said to have indulged in a grand finale. After a slow but irresistible decline into old age, a large majority of people would be completely unaware it has now disappeared from our screens, while the sports featured in the last ever instalment of televised sport’s original icon were a scant mixof ice-dancing and carpet bowls.

Once upon a time every cup final, every world record, and every medal of every tournament would have been shown on BBC. And Grandstand would have been the vehicle to carry it. Yet these days, now sport isn’t limited to Saturday afternoons, Grandad Grandstand had become a fondly thought-of but largely senile elderly relative; struggling every weekend to claw its way back up to the coverage given by its competitors throughout the week. It was confined to the armchair and wetting the bed.

What reduced it to this state is pretty clear. With the rise of satellite TV, the BBC faced competition from new, advertising-funded, dedicated sports channels. Sport is only one strand of the BBC’s enormous remit, all of which the license fee had to stretch to.
The BBC couldn’t ask every year for money simply to buy the rights to more sport. There would be uproar from all its other services, and from the taxpayers. But as the BBC became increasingly unable to compete in the financial climate of sports television, the quality of service reduced, to the point where the taxpayer was now asking why it was worth paying for at all.

To ask if it could have been saved is really to miss the point- there simply isn’t any amount of re-jigging that could make up for the fact that Saturday afternoon isn’t the be all and end all of sport, at least not on a shoestring budget. It became a haven for obscure sports, and the better-known ones so horrifically painful to watch that they were cheap enough for Grandstand to show. Grandad’s pension doesn’t stretch very far these days, of course.

It was first broadcast on October 11th, 1958, making the show 58 years old. In a way it seemed much older; an archaic remnant of the age it came from. It brought us one of the most memorable theme tunes of all time, and it is entirely possible that the show was kept running just to be able to preserve it. Towards the end it was spruced up; but the introduction of Craig Doyle’s vertiginous hair and some slightly more trendy livery didn’t make up for the agonising lack of real sporting action on show.

It is ironic that, in this age of ruthless TV executives, Grandstand lasted months longer than Top of the Pops, which even to the end had bands to play and a chart to report on. Grandstand really only had a studio, some presenters, and what sporting insight they could conjure from the Swiss Under-21 clay pigeon shooting championships.
And so, while we mourn the loss, we must accept that it was the kindest thing to do. We will miss it; but not as much as Grandstand itself missed being able to do what it did best.