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.
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…”
Those whose idea of ‘commentary’ oscillates between calling someone “a legend” or “worse than Hitler”, based solely on whether his opinion tallies with theirs, should click away now.
I come from an era where ‘nuance’ is not merely the name of a nightclub, however, and where black and white are frequently separated by numerous shades of grey.
Because if there’s one thing you eventually pick up on if you live life long enough, it’s that for all the hot air expended at opposite ends of an argument, the truth often resides somewhere in the middle.
I follow neither gymnastics nor women’s tennis, so when Ms. Biles removes herself from competition, as Naomi Osaka did from the French tennis Open two months ago — both citing mental health reasons — I would be entering the realms of pure speculation were I to take their decisions at anything other than face value.
I find it hard to believe that Osaka would walk lightly away from a solid shot at landing one of her sport’s marquee events, and while I wasn’t overly sold on Biles’ body language when she explained her withdrawal, I do understand that troubled people are often masters at hiding the fact.
This post is not about them. It is about a potential pitfall in this sporting evolution and about the spurious hot air it’s engendering in the meantime.
First up, a newsflash. Biles and Osaka have been neither “brave” nor “heroic”. They have simply shown the kind of resolve that the least of us must show more than once in our lives if that life is not to be a car crash.
They recognised they had a problem and that they needed time to sort it out, so they stepped away. That was neither courage nor cowardice, but fortitude. Somewhere in the middle.
“She got her tracksuit back on, she got out there and she stood and clapped on her teammates…to me, that is a champion.”
To me, that is a statement that makes no sense whatsoever. Champions are the ones with their tracksuits off, who get out there and win stuff. Biles is entitled to a modicum of sympathy and understanding but she does not get to have reality warped on her behalf.
“It’s okay sometimes to…sit out the big competitions, to focus on yourself, because it shows how strong of a competitor and person that you really are…rather than just battle through it.”
Hark at the slightly dismissive tone with which those last six words are spoken. As if “just” battling through were the inferior option now; something lesser athletes do.
I can remember the stand-up comedian Ben Elton, thirty years ago, bewailing a world in which bad is so often represented as good and good as bad. In view of where we’ve gone since, I wonder if he dares leave the house these days.
In one area, however, Samantha Quek was quite correct. It is long overdue for mental health to be afforded the same credibility as physical health, particularly now, when sports personalities face not just trial by media but trial by social media. The same goldfish bowl, but beneath a much larger spotlight, and with infinitely more faces pressed against the glass; some of them distinctly unsavoury.
That parity in the health of body and mind, however, must be applied consistently. Which means that when athletes withdraw from competition citing mental health issues, they cannot be outraged when the media politely asks to see a doctor’s note.
Because for as long as there have been physical ailments, there have been those who milk them. Ask anyone in the workplace and most will be able to recall a colleague at some point in their careers who was heading for the exit at the merest hint of a sniffle or headache.
If you seriously think that there will never be an athlete in the future who uses mental health as a smokescreen for bruised ego or a disinclination to take the rough with the smooth, then I have a bridge over the Tyne that I’d like to sell you.
And because of the problems that those frauds will create for those with genuine mental health concerns, there can be no unquestioning free pass for anyone. Just as you can’t be off for more than a couple of days without your boss asking to see a sick note.
Luckily, I believe the media can play a key role in this filtering process. When a sportsperson pulls out of an event because of mental health issues, I suggest the press gives itself 48 hours to talk about it — which is important — and then the competitor concerned gets full radio silence until he or she decides to come back. Media focus switches exclusively to the grinders still out there, giving it everything they have, through thick and thin.
If you have a genuine mental health issue, this media holiday will be manna from heaven. You get to step out of the goldfish bowl and work on your problems, free of prying eyes and repetitive questions for as long as you choose.
If you’re just gaming the system, on the other hand… Well, let’s just say that if one or two athletes respond to becoming their sports’ forgotten people by returning to the spotlight with an alacrity suggesting a recovery of New Testament proportions, we shouldn’t be too surprised.
Human nature can be a mental health issue all of its own.
I smiled when they said replay technology was coming to football.
I laughed out loud when they said it would improve the game.
Many times since the advent of VAR, when a decision has come down from on high, only for the whining among footballers to continue regardless, has my cynicism been vindicated.
Last week, however, that vindication reached its peak and VAR in football its nadir.
Two VAR calls went against the Argentine team Boca Juniors in their Copa Libertadores matches with Brazil’s Atletico Mineiro. The latter ultimately went through on penalties.
And let’s face it, who can blame them? Some upstart in a booth, armed only with objectivity plus high-definition, frame-by-frame, ultra-slowmo replays filmed from every available angle, dares to presume that he knows better?
Better than 11 men drunk on a cocktail of testosterone and adrenaline, with the benefit of a full split-second in which to play judge and jury?
The sheer impertinence of it.
No, let those wimps in tennis and American football adopt replay technology with barely a hitch, if they must. Football as the rest of the world knows it is made of sterner stuff: full of visionaries who realise that VAR is but extra fuel on the fire. As it was always destined to be.
I know professional footballers past and present bridle at the suggestion that they’re all a bit thick. Many of them are nothing of the sort.
But the intellectually-honest among them must surely realise that sorry episodes like this are what feeds that perception. They are the reason why the phrase “bloody footballers”, accompanied by a roll of the eyes, has been a cultural meme since before we even knew what cultural memes were.
I’d knock the whole VAR thing on the head if I were you, football. You’re trying to sell sophistication to people who just aren’t having it. Bless them.
Taking a Pen. - thoughts of a small-time sports writer 