Toto Wolff is fast becoming the poster boy for the adage that if you want to know the true measure of a person, watch how they deal with the bad times rather than the good.
The Mercedes F1 team principal was a smooth, poised pitlane operator while his team was winning seven straight driver championships and eight consecutive constructor titles.
But since Max Verstappen burst that bubble in Abu Dhabi two years ago, the wheels have come off Wolff’s composure more than once.
This one, I think, we can all forgive him…
But then there was the woefully mistimed hubris ahead of the team’s one-win 2022 season…
Followed by the change-your-*******-car slap-down from the new sheriff in town.
And now there’s this. Offered the chance to make polite noises over Max Verstappen’s new consecutive-victories record last Sunday, Wolff’s dignity instead took a hard left into the crash barrier.
How graceless. How charmless. Ron Dennis could be hard-nosed but I think even the former McLaren chief would have done better than this.
Sadly, I have no doubt that were the boot on the other foot, Red Bull principal Christian Horner would have demonstrated pretty much the same childish nonchalance.
And would have fooled pretty much the same number of people.
It’s an irony of Formula One that while the sport relentlessly moulds materials and technology in its pursuit of perfection, human frailty rattles on unchecked like a 1970s Ford Escort.
It takes more than a wind tunnel to sort that out.
Christian Horner did what every good boss should do on Sunday.
Defended his people.
Responding to suggestions that his Red Bull team’s dominance this season and much of the last might be making Formula One a little dull, Horner responded thus…
“You have to recognise and applaud what Max is doing at the moment. It’s very special to have achieved what he achieved. We shouldn’t detract from that in any way. In sport, very rarely things like this happen. I think it’s a golden moment for him and a golden moment for the team.”
All true and perfectly expressed.
And all a complete waste of time.
Call us philistines but people don’t watch sport to be impressed. Not primarily.
We watch sport to be entertained. If you can impress us into the bargain, that’s great, but impressiveness will always be the support band.
The prospect of entertainment is what gets the gig heaving. Expectation confounded; heroes stepping out of the shadows; people with the cup to hand, only to die of thirst.
Call us vulgar but as long as Formula One takes place at weekends, it will be always thus.
Monday to Friday are our sensible, restrained days. We wear suits, talk in measured tones and embrace excellence, clapping politely as Marcia collects her 10th straight Salesperson of the Month award.
Come Friday night, we’re looking for something a little more visceral. Pretty much, I suspect, as we always have done.
There’ll have been some people in the Colosseum, no doubt, happy enough to ‘celebrate’ the lion with the fastest average human-consumption time. But there will have been many, many more who just wanted to hear screams of unbridled terror and the splat of organs against stone.
We’ve evolved some since then but you get my drift.
So, by all means, let’s pause to give Red Bull their due. Not least an acknowledgement that Christian Horner has done what we lionised Sir Alex Ferguson for; presided over not just one all-conquering era for his team, but two.
Great leadership, great driver, great team, great job.
Now please give someone else a chance.
We’ve had it up to here with being impressed. We want to be entertained.
My grandmother loved Match of the Day; hated the goal celebrations.
“All that kissing and cuddling,” she scornfully called it.
Which is why death’s merciful side should not be overlooked.
She left us in 1987, and so was spared the nonsense that has consumed the game since. Insatiable greed, football clubs as billionaires’ playthings and the Cock-Up Central that is VAR.
As for the ‘evolution’ of goal celebrations since the ’80s, heaven knows what she’d have made of the pouting, cupped ears and other self-indulgences that accompany the feat nowadays. Something tells me she’d have started seeing Mick Channon’s windmill routine as iconic of purer times.
And while I’d welcome her back tomorrow, I’m pleased she wasn’t with me on Saturday, when I beheld a particular aspect of the ‘matchday experience’ at King’s Lynn FC.
Because when it comes to explaining why the person in charge of a football club’s PA system sees fit to drown out crowd celebrations for every home goal with vacuous music at full volume, I wouldn’t know where to start.
Although I have my theories. Someone’s holidayed in the States, I suspect, gone to a basketball game and flown back to Norfolk with what he or she imagined was a Really Good Idea.
No it’s not.
The best advice I ever read on visiting America was that you must never lose sight of the fact that you’re in a foreign country. Some of what they have over there works over here and some of it doesn’t.
There’s a reason the word ‘razzamatazz’ never appears in a sentence that isn’t referring to America or its people. Razzamatazz is generally how Americans are wired.
I’ve been served ice cream in Boston by a street vendor whose spiel was of stand-up comedy calibre. I’ve sat next to a likeable old crank on a Greyhound bus who delivered dialogue like he was Walter Matthau in a movie.
But that’s them. It’s not us. You can’t bring razzamatazz to King’s Lynn, any more than you can to Kilmarnock or Merthyr Tydfil. It goes down like fingernails on a cultural blackboard.
One of the gimmicks with which Sky Sports announced its pact with top-flight English football 30 years ago were cheerleaders. It was the least surprising development in football’s ‘new dawn’ that they were dropped faster than a handful of lava.
Had it just been about ambience last Saturday, though, I wouldn’t be writing this. What really irked about the musical gate-crashing was what it does for the fans.
Working people, most of them, they’ve had five days straight of being expected to keep their heads down, shut up and graft. Free of their boss, spouse and kids, they get a 90-minute window on Saturday afternoons for unbridled raging and exulting.
It is their time. Footballers can score and officials can adjudge but the reaction to both is all down to the people in the stands. Their moment; their contribution.
Surely an essential part of that catharsis is being able hear themselves? Not being drowned out by a tsunami of third-rate Muzak the moment the net bulges.
In fairness, King’s Lynn is by no means the first football club to go down this route but it’s part of a trend that prompts a wider question.
At what point did we decide that atmosphere at sporting events could no longer be solely entrusted to the audience but had to be manufactured instead, with the help of fireworks, loudspeakers that could wake the dead and enough renditions of Simply the Best to make you want to tear your own ears off?
When they occupy a cherished corner of your home, you like to think football programmes are a cut above the cliched destiny of newspapers as tomorrow’s fish and chips wrapper.
When writing some of those programmes put food on your table for over three years, that veneration only intensifies. And yet I now find that it may be an illusion.
Sunday afternoon on my knees was devoted to the heathen’s favourite religion for once. The desire to declutter that grips every self-respecting sixtysomething had turned my attention to the overflowing box of old programmes in the corner of my study.
Along with a small bookcase next to it, that pile of matchday memories was now blocking too much heat from the radiator behind it, in what is the coldest room in the house.
And besides, how long does any man need tangible reminders of a 1979 trip to Witton Albion?
I hoped to empty the box by half. Blokes being blokes, I eventually settled for a third. It was as I mulled over the fate of the cull’s marginal candidates, however, that the strangest thing happened.
Whatever their fate, the last thing I wanted to do, I realised, was open any of them and peruse their contents.
There is a bleak pointlessness to roll-calls of long-gone players and incomplete fixture lists. T.S. Eliot would have had a field day with the futility of 40-year-old AA directions to Plymouth Argyle.
And even if you’re one of the London School of Economics’ favourite sons, I defy you not to feel a dab of irrational resentment at no longer being able to get Puma Dalglish Hat Trick boots for £21.99.
No, the inside pages were a foreign land to which I had no desire to return.
Or need, for that matter. As the best and worst of them littered the carpet around me, I realised that reading the programmes wasn’t necessary. Like rolling a cigar by your ear without lighting it, I could assess them all by feel and nostalgia alone.
I held each one in my hand and its accompanying narrative rubbed off on me all over again like wet ink.
Who I was when I went to that game. Where I was living. What was worrying me and how different was the world in which I found myself.
Leicester City v Newcastle United, February 2 1980. The day I discovered that hooliganism was not the breaking point in a crescendo of accumulated grievances that I’d imagined; just spontaneous madness. “He’s got a blue shirt on…the kid ower there. Ha’way, Geordies, let’s get him…”
Bolton Wanderers v Southampton, February 16 1992. My ‘Douglas Bader Moment’. Crossing the road afterwards, a car at an uphill junction slid backwards, leaving my right leg momentarily trapped between his bumper and that of the car behind. Never have I been so relieved to hear first gear finally engage.
Middlesbrough v Southampton, November 18 1978. I reach every teenage football fan’s utopia, as Dad and I make the TV highlights on Tyne Tees’s Shoot, 24 hours later, in the backdrop to a throw-in. Do any men of advancing years still wear trilbies to football, I wonder?
Newcastle United v Everton, December 26 1986. When I discovered my 65-year-old father was tougher than I knew, his thoughts only for me as we were momentarily lifted off our feet in a horrid surge of humanity that squeezed its way down steps into the stadium like toothpaste from a clogged-up tube.
Three years later, the moment came flooding back to me. While other factors were in play at Hillsborough, that day at St James’ Park, there were morons shouting “HEAVE!!!” and cackling as they shoved the log-jam in front of them. I know because I heard them.
Ultimately wedged into the ground-level paddocks, Dad spent the whole game moving his head from side to side like a charmed snake in a fruitless bid to see any of the action.
So bad do I still feel about putting him through all that, I don’t know why I kept the programme in the first place. A sense of exorcism accompanied it onto my ‘REJECTED’ pile, 35 years later, its pages resolutely unopened.
In some of the memories, football is merely tangential…
England v New Zealand, August 24th, 1986. The day I broke a tout. The key, I now know, is to have Plan B straight in your head before you meet them. If I couldn’t get into The Oval, I’d decided on the train, I’d swap cricket for football and high-tail it to Highbury instead. Manchester United was in town and those were the days you could just breeze up to the gates on the merest whim and watch top-flight football.
He started off at three times the official asking price. “No, it’s okay, thanks.” I wasn’t being smug. It really was okay.
Twice the price. “No I’ll go and see the Arsenal game instead,” I replied turning back towards the Tube station.
“All right, face value,” he said, a gratifying hint of desperation appearing in his voice. “Don’t go to Arsenal, mate; you’ll get stabbed…”
As is often the case, the more whimsical memories come from the non-league game. Behold the back cover pictured at the head of this post, for example. If there is no longer a place for watercolours in the programmes of Matlock Town, then it’s a crying shame. As is the spurious ‘e’ at the end of ‘Spennymoor’.
Sweeping all before it in the What-the-Hell? category, meanwhile, comes this 1994 cover image from Colwyn Bay…
A subliminal message, perhaps?
There may be trouble ahead [promotion denied due to dilapidated stadium perimeter] but while there’s moonlight and music and love and romance, let’s face United and dance.
Well, you have a go, then.
What so many of these old programmes had in common, though, was that way in which their accompanying recollections could all flood back to me with barely a page being turned. For all the effort people had put into their contents, it was what I as the buyer vested in each one emotionally that made it a keeper or a goner.
I really hope I’m the exception to the rule in that respect. If not, then I effectively spent three years as a programme writer belting out arias to an empty opera house.
In the hope that it’s just me and because I regard throwing old football programmes into a bin as being one notch up from book-burning, the following are all available to a good home for no charge.
If interested in any of them, email me your name and postal address (British Isles only: I’m not made of money) and which programmes you want. And because it’s the era in which I grew up, allow 28 days for delivery. Yes, you have read that correctly…
FOOTBALL
Wolves v Moscow Dynamo 1989
Aston Villa v Barnsley 1972
Aston Villa v Watford 1969
Aston Villa v Fulham 1971
Birmingham City v Southampton 1984
Newcastle Utd v Everton 1986 (if I get shot of only one, please let it be this one)
In just a matter of days, my household has seen quite the transformation.
Younger Son, a mad-keen golfer, has been greatly tickled by my view that the Ryder Cup is the most embarrassing freak-show in professional sport.
Embarrassing because of the mountainous fall from grace that this biennial ‘handbags’ squabble has come to represent.
The Ryder Cup is now golf’s version of a week in Magaluf. People with respectable jobs put all that on hold for seven days while setting new personal bests in the kind of behaviour they wouldn’t want their grandmothers to see.
In years gone by, of course, we could console ourselves with the thought that all this guff stops when the cup is handed to the winning captain, and professional golf rediscovers its sanity for another two years.
I’m not sure we have that luxury any more. The Ryder Cup is no longer an aberration. It is now the norm in what is a looming perfect storm at the apex of the sport.
On one side of the ropes, you have increasingly unprepossessing young golfers with all the talent in the world and barely a personality between them. On the other side, a weekly convention of village idiots, lured in not so much by golf as by the irresistible cocktail of beer and television cameras.
(And please don’t tell me “Yes, but that’s just Americans.” To do so ignores one of the biggest cultural cliches of the last 50 years. What starts in America ends up over here. If you’re in the habit of saying “snuck”, you prove my point.)
And presiding over it all, yet another set of blinkered sporting administrators whose only criterion of a job well done is how much money they raise.
I doubt Koepka and Berger will receive so much as a stern glance for their behaviour from the game’s would-be custodians. Why should they? Those same custodians have sat back and done nothing while ball and club technology reduce even the best golf courses on the planet to an irrelevance. On their watch, what should be an even contest between man and terrain has become Tyson Fury vs Mary Berry.
Those same custodians apparently have no problem with spectators bellowing routine inanities when players tee off. “GET IN THE HOLE!!!!!” on a par five being the least ridiculous of them.
Those same custodians somehow convinced themselves that nothing screams “classy” quite like something called the Waste Management Phoenix Open. Although given the s***-show that professional golf is fast becoming, maybe they deserve some credit for foresight.
Koepka’s outburst at rules officials is the most ominous portent. No-one’s under any illusions that professional golfers converse like choirboys when things aren’t going their way but until recently, they have at least kept it down, mindful that it’s one of the niceties that their sport demands.
Don’t be surprised if that’s gone now. The brat Koepka’s entitlement trumped all last Saturday and many of his peers will take their cue from that.
Golf, though, needs to remain a cut above other sports when it comes to the way its competitors conduct themselves, even under the fiercest pressure.
It doesn’t have the immediate visual drama of football – whatever the code – with which to sell itself. Being able to watch grown men and women play it without feeling embarrassed for them the way you so often do in a football stadium; that was one of its compensations.
It could be played good and hard by its finest exponents; there might be meaningul glares aplenty and little love lost out there on the links, but they all knew there was a standard to be observed and heaven help anyone who decided it was optional.
Let other games go to hell in the proverbial handcart; there was always golf to remind you that civilisation is still out there somewhere. At the amateur level nowadays, people from all walks of life play it for that very reason.
If, in its shop window, however, golf becomes just another sport, I believe it has some hard days ahead in the marketplace.
Younger Son is 22. The target demographic. Bullish and worldly, he also likes nothing more than sending up his father’s ‘old-fashioned values’. So I was as much surprised as saddened when he announced that he, too, on reflection, has probably observed his last Ryder Cup.
“I’m actually pleased Arnold Palmer’s dead,” he told me. “The thought of him having to watch that crap…”
Taking a Pen. - thoughts of a small-time sports writer 