You Cannot Be Serious!: The 101 Most Frustrating Things in Sport. Matthew Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ the dock. Judges hate that. And however badly you think your barrister is performing, Blake, on no account criticise him publicly until the verdict is in. In court, as on the diving board, it is essential to work as a team.

      95

      Peter Fleming

      John McEnroe’s old doubles partner may be the most unnervingly weird character ever to analyse any sport on television. His air of intellectual superiority may be well-founded, as it would be for anyone with an IQ over ninety sharing airtime with Barry Cowan, but it does tend to grate.

      Although he behaves himself during Wimbledon, when he works for the BBC, Fleming seldom hears a question on Sky that isn’t beneath his dignity. His preferred mode of expressing disdain, particularly towards presenter Marcus Buckland, a modest and charming soul, is the exaggerated pause. How, Mr Buckland once asked him, would he explain the amazing abundance of talent in the men’s game today? Eunuchs grew rabbinical beards in the time Fleming took to ponder this, before offering a desolate ‘I dunno,’ and lapsing into quietude once more.

      On a good day, the silence in response to a seemingly unchallenging enquiry – Does Novak Djokovic’s second serve look a bit off? Are Rafa Nadal’s knees playing up? What is the time? – puts you in mind of Pinter performed by the Theatre of the Mute. On a bad one, you could write a wistful rite-of-passage memoir in the style of Alan Bennett in the time he requires to address a wayward Andy Murray two-hander down the line.

      Occasionally, when Fleming feels that the foolishness of the question requires more peremptory treatment, he might wince, snort or raise his eyebrows to the crown of his head. Now and again, he will stare in disbelief, the gaze apparently in homage to Jack Nicholson in The Shining or Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men.

      When Mr Fleming, facially a hybrid between the Addams Family’s butler Lurch and Jay Gatsby, does deign to share an opinion, it’s invariably worth hearing. He is an extremely bright guy, and he certainly has a presence (that of a Harvard philosophy professor stunned into an existential crisis at mysteriously finding himself redeployed as a third-grade teaching assistant). Tennis, like darts and nothing else, is a sport Sky covers well, and the languid gloss Fleming lends to its broadcasts does much to explain that bucking of the form book. I wouldn’t be without him for the world.

      Nor, however, would I wish to get into a big-money staring contest with him, much less be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the Situation Room at the White House demanding an instant decision from a President Fleming about how to respond to worryingly raised activity levels in an Iranian nuclear silo.

      94

      Tony Green

      The most perplexing event in the sporting calendar is the BDO World Darts Championship, broadcast each New Year by the BBC. The tortured history of the great darting split, as featured in a hilarious edition of BBC2’s documentary strand Trouble at the Top, needn’t detain us long. Suffice it to say that in the 1990s a trickle of BDO stars flowed away to form the rival PDC, now run with typical commercial élan by Barry Hearn, and that the trickle later became a torrent.

      Where the PDC is dart’s equivalent of football’s Premier League – a point it subtly underscores by naming a competition ‘the Premier League of Darts’ – the BDO is, at best, its Conference. So robbed of talent has it become that the trades descriptions people risk a class action for negligence by failing to have it restyled The World Championship for People Who Try Hard, Bless ’Em But Just Aren’t Terribly Good at Darts. An averagely well coordinated male who threw the first arrow of his life on Christmas Day could expect to reach the quarter-finals, at least, a fortnight later.

      The timing of the BDO event, which starts immediately after Phil ‘The Power’ has retained the real world title on Sky Sports, is the equivalent of rescheduling Wimbledon as a warm-up for a satellite event in Cleethorpes, and adds an additional layer of poignancy that isn’t strictly required. That the work of lead commentator Tony Green perfectly reflects the quality of the darts completes a startlingly surreal picture.

      Best known to students of game show theory as Jim Bowen’s Bullseye stooge (‘And Bully’s special priiiiize … a reverse lobotomy!’), this John Prescott lookalike, and alas soundalike, must be the most clueless commentator in the history of televised sport. Like the former deputy PM he so closely resembles in girth and jowls, Mr Green boldly pioneers aphasia as a mainstream lifestyle choice.

      His trademarks may be boiled down to two. Whenever the director shows a cutaway shot of a palpably bored crowd sullenly watching the apology for top-flight darts on a giant screen (and isn’t that the special appeal of a live event? It’s so qualitatively different from watching at home) he will respond with an elon-gated ‘Yeeeeeessssss, there they are!’ Technically, it’s hard to pick a fight with that. There is invariably where they were. On other levels … well, it’s not Richie Benaud, is it?

      The other signature dish is to respond to a cosmically witless pre-prepared pun from co-commentator David Croft with the wheezy breath of an obese hyena dying from emphysema. This death rattle is then followed by ‘Dear, dear … oh dear,’ to suggest a psycho-geriatric-ward fugitive reacting with a mixture of delight and shame to a bladder accident induced by unquenchable mirth at Arthur Askey affecting, on the London Palladium stage in 1957, to be a busy, busy bee.

      How Mr Green has been retained by the BBC for so long, in defiance of the verbal facility of the inter-stroke victim, is less mysterious than it seems. The BDO is effectively the property of a cabal – a couple of veteran players, chairman Olly Croft, master of ceremonies Martin Fitzmaurice (the sea monster who screams ‘Are you ready? Let’s. Play. Darts’), cackling sub-Kray blingmaster Bobby George, and Mr Green himself.

      Between them, this bunch have transformed the BDO into a hybrid of kitschily ironic entertainment, aversion therapy for those terrified of becoming hooked on televised darts, and crèche for those who might one day grow up to join the PDC.

      Mr Green himself refuses to acknowledge the existence of the rival organisation, which unusually for him makes some sense. The immortal Sid Waddell, his one-time BBC colleague, is of course the PDC’s main commentator, and even Mr Green can see the danger of drawing attention to the contrast. Even when the BDO version was won by a disabled man unable to extend his arm fully when throwing, the Australian haemophiliac Tony David in 2001, Mr Green’s confidence in its supremacy remained unshaken.

      ‘Yeeeessssss,’ is how he greeted the winning double that day, ‘it’s Tony Davis!’ After two weeks of the tournament and two hours of final action, how cruel to come within a single space on the middle line of the Qwerty keyboard of calling the new champion’s name right. For once, Mr Green had stumbled on a certain eloquence. Albeit unwittingly, and with unwonted succinctness, he had told his audience all it needed to know, if only about himself, in a syllable.

      93

      Frank Warren

      How a man of such exquisite sensitivity has survived and made money in the rough and Runyonesque world of boxing is one of the miracles of the age. Mr Warren’s vulnerability to criticism does him nothing but credit. Where others become hardened by long careers in the big-fight game, he has been softened remarkably.

      Other than offering sincere admiration, what can you say about the adorably florid-faced boxing promoter and gunshot survivor? Not a dickie bird. While Frank lives up to his own belief that when people have an opinion, ‘they are entitled to express it’ – for example, he repeatedly expressed his opinion of me (‘moron’, for example) in his News of the World column – experience teaches that this passion for freedom of speech is a one-way street. Even the most affectionate of СКАЧАТЬ