Sport and mental health: the truth is somewhere in the middle

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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.

So I’m not steaming in with Piers Morgan over Simone Biles’ withdrawal from the Olympic gymnastics team event, but nor am I holding hands and tossing bouquets with those on the more gentle side of the debate.

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.

Alas, in our frantic efforts to “just be kind”, too often these days we’re just being silly. This was the BBC’s Samantha Quek on Biles’ commendable decision not to hide after pulling out.

“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.

Unfortunately, she may not have been above doing a little warping herself by the sound of it. Listen to this interview from the 1:02 mark, especially the closing segment:

“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.

Boca Juniors and the natural conclusion for VAR in football

Pic courtesy of Marco Verch

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.

To say that the club I will henceforth call Boca Infants wasn’t happy would be an understatement.

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.

Carlos Reutemann and an age when the ‘man’s man’ was a thing

One of my favourite F1 pics. Reutemann wins at Long Beach in 1978. I love the palms, the shadows, the dignified arm aloft. And, mercifully, not a “Get in, Carlos!” to be heard.*

Not being a Spanish speaker, I assumed that Carlos Reutemann’s daughter was Tweeting birthday greetings to her old man.

Then I ran her words through Google Translate and I realised with horror that the Tweet was an epitaph. My second-favourite Grand Prix driver of all time was dead.

If Gilles Villeneuve’s maverick brilliance was everything I wanted to see when a racing driver goes to work, Carlos ‘Lole’ Reutemann was everything I wanted to see when the helmet and balaclava came off.

Swarthy, handsome, imperious, he was a walking Grand Prix cliché. Had he been in his pomp 15 years sooner, I’m not sure James Garner gets the part in the movie Grand Prix. Director John Frankenheimer would have spent whatever it took on acting lessons and Carlos would have been told, “Just be yourself…”

He had a full life, doing something I always admire in former sportspeople and reinventing himself. When his racing days were over, he became a politician in his native Argentina and was held in such high regard that he had to reject several overtures to run for the country’s presidency.

At 79, he’d had the proverbial ‘good innings’. Why the news of his death hit me hard enough to remove some of the shine from England’s Euros semi-final win, I only fully realised some days later, when I saw pictures of Lewis Hamilton out of uniform in the Silverstone paddock.

This was Carlos Reutemann, looking a million dollars in glorified mechanic’s overalls. And this was Lewis Hamilton.

Times and fashions change, of course, and I readily acknowledge that I am yesterday’s man. And a Hamilton fan, to boot, so for all these reasons I’m not about to sartorially unload on the seven-time World Champion.

But this, I realised, was what I was mourning. More than the death of a racing driver, the death of his era. A time when you could utter the phrase ‘man’s man’ without having to look nervously over both shoulders beforehand.

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Motorsport journalist Peter Windsor remembers his friend Carlos Reutemann, in a style that is also of a bygone age. Devoid of cloying mawkishness, and all the more moving because of it.

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*This picture is from the 1978-79 Autocourse. While Nigel Snowdon was the publication’s chief photographer, the book also acknowledges photographic contributions from these people, so the shot could have been taken by any of them. Anyone who can narrow it down would be most welcome. I like to give credit where it’s due.

The way England players conduct themselves is “none of your business”. Since when?

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I don’t write this post lightly. Back to back blog entries taking shots at my hero, and the vague, nagging dread that I’m starting to sound like this man (minus the aggression and kidnapping, I hasten to add).

Alas, Martin Samuel stumbles on from his weird flip-flopping over Gareth Southgate to a piece of tosh concerning his players that cannot go unchallenged.

I have two problems with footballers ripping runners-up medals from their necks within seconds of a dignitary placing them there. I think they make a motivational error and drop a behavioural clanger.

Defeat should be taken squarely on the chin, not concealed in the palm of your hand or buried in a drawer. When you remember well and truly what second-best felt like, the days when it’s you going up last for your medal will feel so much sweeter.

Optics-wise, meanwhile; you look like a petulant child. There is no getting away from that.

Now if the Mail columnist wants to dismiss both arguments and suggest that anyone espousing the first one clearly hasn’t the first idea how professional athletes process defeat, then that’s his prerogative. Had he left it that, this post wouldn’t have been written

Martin Samuel, however chose to defend England’s de-medallers following the Euro 2020 Final, with a statement so odd, it needs to to be set out in full, lest you think I’m making it up.

“England’s achievements are none of your business 

“A small clarification for those offended that some England players took their runners-up medals off after receiving them on Sunday: it’s not about you. They reached a final, not you. They lost, not you. It is their medal and their right to wear it or not.

“Some will still take pride in getting to the final, others do not want a ready reminder of defeat. Either way, it isn’t your business.“

I’ve just read that through a third time to make sure I’m not missing some deep sarcasm here. Sadly, I think I’m good.

Several years ago, when basketball star LeBron James spoke up on matters political, Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham caught all hell for suggesting that he “shut up and dribble”. Samuel’s implicit suggestion that football’s paying-through-the-nose customers should shut up and watch, deserves no less a fate.

Those small fortunes don’t buy us the right to stalk, threaten or racially abuse. They do most definitely buy us the right to opine. On anything players representing our country might do while in the office. Whether those opinions are spot-on or wider than a Chris Waddle penalty is beside the point.

And look who’s arguing otherwise, for goodness’ sake. A man who’s spent several decades paying the bills by making every nuance of sport generally, his business. Its villains and heroes, its right and wrongs; all fair game. How come it’s okay for the so-called ‘dukes’ of sports media to shine a light in whatever corner they please, while the serfs who actually pay to get in need to know their place?

Let’s hope you have a better Olympics than you did Euros, Martin.

If I might make so bold.

Gareth Southgate, Martin Samuel and how to talk yourself out of a job

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Daily Mail sportswriter Martin Samuel is one of my heroes in this business. This morning, however, he had me scratching my head.

Seven days ago, his Mail column included a segment beneath this headline:

Why do the FA want to tie down Gareth Southgate for the next Euros now?

Today’s column, meanwhile, starts…

Gareth Southgate is the best thing to happen to English football in decades

There follows a tribute so fulsome that the England manager’s PR officer would struggle to outdo it.

And I agree with every word. If we leave Euro 2020 with nothing, it will not alter the fact that Southgate, in his five years in the hot seat, has overseen England’s greatest triumph since its sole World Cup.

He has ruled a thick, black line beneath a July day of 55 years ago and created a culture of the here and now amongst a group of young men who couldn’t give a damn about 1966.

It is ancient history. You might as well try and gee up Harry Kane & Co with tales of Agincourt. They play for the present, gloriously unsaddled by the past.

Look at their body language. No ghosts shadow these men. No inner voices undermine them. No hexes, no here-we-go-agains, no thirty years of hurt mantras gnawing at the soul. This England is Norman Bates, minus his mother.

They were a week ago. They still are today. So in seven days, what on earth can have transported Samuel from a place where he’s urging the FA to kick Southgate’s tyres a little longer, to a place where he’s hailing the England manager as a Moses for our time?

Oh, of course. England has won two more games than it had this time last week. One of them an exorcism, the other a borderline rout.

I don’t know if former NFL coach Tony Dungy has any time for our version of football, but I suspect a knowing smile would cross his face were you to put Samuels’ conflicting columns in front of him.

For it was Dungy, interviewed in his time as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ play-caller, who exposed the relationship between a coach and his audience as being shallower than a teenage crush.

“If you’re real demonstrative and you win, you’re a motivator. If you’re real demonstrative and you lose, you’re too uptight. If you’re laid-back and win, you’re a players coach. If you’re laid-back and you lose, you’re not disciplined enough.

“The bottom line is, you’ve got to win. If you win, what you’re doing is right. If you lose, what you’re doing is wrong.”

Proof of this from an English viewpoint could be just days away, of course. If Southgate leads his team to the European championship, he can spend his next five internationals in full greasepaint, if he wishes, driving round and round his technical area in a clown car, and no-one will bat an eyelid.

Take a knee? The man could take a leak against the opposition dugout and excuses would be found for him. Nor would they have to be particularly elaborate to satisfy his besotted public.

“Well, he’s a maverick, isn’t he? If that’s what it takes…”

If this doesn’t say much for our inclination to look after much more than Number One, though, what does it say for the future of sports journalism?

When wins are the only story that matters, to the extent that just two of them can turn a senior journalist from Doubting Thomas into Billy Graham, why should we care to read about a coach’s preferred formation, lucky colour or how driven he/she is by having been bullied at school?

Suddenly, it all looks like pointless gossip.

I don’t say Samuel’s volte-face threatens the medium but he shouldn’t be too surprised if even some of his biggest fans change the habit of a lifetime and start reading their newspapers from the front page backwards.