Try to Tell the Story

by David Thomson

  There was the open terrace on one side of the ground, but Dad had got us seats in the new North Stand at a corner of the ground. This was providential because it gave us a lovely, high-angle view of the part of the pitch where a right-winger took on the full-back. I think it was 1948, and it was Chelsea vs. Blackpool. I was about to see Stanley Matthews, who had just joined Blackpool from Stoke City. He was capped for England before the war and was famous as the greatest ball controller in the game—he could dribble the ball up to an opponent and go round him, with the ball, leaving the opponent flat on his back or cast adrift. He was hunched, rather frail-looking, and his hair was receding.

  Matthews had a routine. The ball would be passed to him and he'd face the Chelsea full-back. He'd stop in his tracks. The whole game would pause for its great show. Then Matthews would jink and side-step and do his magic, and as a rule he got past. There was already talk that his style was all very well, but rather show-offy and not the most effective way to play team soccer—especially not if you marked Matthews with a man who cut off the ball before it ever reached him. The great dogmas of work rate and finding space were hardly current yet, so for a moment Matthews's virtuoso balance won gasps and those rhythmic roars of delight such as you hear at a bullfight. Some full-backs weren't having it. They fouled Stanley, they pounded him. The Chelsea back that day—I don't know his name—was a servant of beauty. He waited to be defeated over and over again by this pale figure in a tangerine shirt, and at the end of the game the fans gave him a nice ovation for being such a good sport and a clean lad.

  We waited in the seats when the game was over to let the crowds clear. And I hated the exit. On a Saturday evening, after the soccer, there was always greyhound racing at Stamford Bridge, and it was during the match that the dogs were delivered to the kennels. Well, the dogs were excited and the noise of the crowd only made them worse. So as you went past the kennels you got not just their howling but the benefit of the great loads of shit they were shifting. Still, it was sensible to wait. The crowd was so big and the buses—extra buses for game day—were passing the stops without any room. We always took two or three times as long to get home as we had to get there. But a big soccer match at the Bridge was the class of the game. In those days you were seeing the best players, national heroes, doing it on slavery contracts for no more than £15 a week. The live crowds were as big as the game has ever had in Britain, and there was no TV, no Match of the Day, with some soccer players as pundits and comics on the box. But the size of the crowds daunted me. In fact, years later the rules for watching soccer in Britain changed when there was a disaster at Hillsborough. It was another big game, and the crowd on the terrace was surging. That's when you could get lifted up and trampled. At Hillsborough that day a barrier broke and something like a hundred people were killed. That's when a new law was passed that everyone at a game had to have a seat. So soccer was reformed. It became an expensive entertainment for richer people. And in the end the violence went out of the game, but not without a struggle. By then soccer players were super-stars from all over the world. But as late as the early ‘60s, if you went to see Chelsea you were watching South London kids who had been apprenticed to the club and who might play an entire career there. The loyalty and the identification were like gang warfare, though at that point no hint of violence had appeared in the crowds.

  But in my first days, just after the war, you could believe that England was the stronghold of world soccer. In 1947, as another gesture to the end of the war, there was a game at Hampden Park (in Scotland, the biggest stadium in the country) where Great Britain beat the Rest of Europe 6-1. In 1948, in Turin, England beat Italy 4-0. In Lisbon they beat Portugal 10-0. And then in 1950, the World Cup resumed and it was confidently predicted—by Dad and other dads—that England were favorites. That Cup was played in Brazil, and everyone in England thought that it was a peculiar place to play a World Cup.

  Never mind, we had a cracking team: it included Bert Williams as goalkeeper; Alf Ramsey at full-back; Billy Wright and Jimmy Dickinson in the half-back line; and a forward line that could choose from Stanley Matthews and Tom Finney (the best wingers in the world), Jack Milburn of Newcastle, Wilf Mannion, Roy Bentley of Chelsea, and Stan Mortensen of Blackpool.

  That side was beaten at a jungle clearing called Belo Horizonte in front of ten thousand people, 1-0, by the United States.

  It was regarded as a fluke and a freak—though it was like losing to American boxers. It was hardly believed.

  In the next few years, the truth about soccer dawned. In 1954, Hungary came to Wembley, England's ground. Since that stadium opened in 1923, only Eire, the Republic of Ireland, had ever beaten England, and as in so many other respects the Republic of Ireland was supposed not to count.

  The golden year was 1953—or so we were told. The very young Queen Elizabeth was crowned. Edmund Hillary (with Sherpa Tenzing) climbed Mount Everest. Stanley Matthews got a medal as Blackpool at last won the FA Cup. And England took the Ashes from Australia at the Oval, not held for twenty years. It was as if Buckingham Palace people had arranged the calendar. But the following year the “Mighty Magyars” thrashed England 6-3. Theirs was a team that included Puskás, Kocsis, Hidegkuti, Czi-bor, Bozsik—great players, in a military attacking system. Players changed positions, and so evaded their set defenders. It was the turning point at which England had to see that soccer was not just strength, courage, or Englishness. It was a brain game in which there might be a system as well as bravery, perseverance, luck, and magic. In a return match, in Budapest, the Hungarians won 7-1.

  Soccer might be art.

  “Hey, Mum, that's not fair!”

  13

  If god called it “sport” we gave it a try. We went to Gaelic football and speedway. I saw Reg Harris cycling at Herne Hill and I loved the way the cyclists climbed into the camber of the track in their effort to stay motionless before surrendering to a savage sprint attack. We went into some churchy parlor where a green table was stretched out in the light. A natty little man in a bow tie and a black waistcoat strolled around the table and the reds and the colors made dainty journeys to the corners. “Joe Davis,” whispered Dad. A master and a god—and why not imagine God in his six-day work doing it at a table with a cue stick? We even saw a game of baseball, played by American military teams, and decided it was a dud. Lucky for the Americans they had never had to face the real sports of England.

  But it was not just the watching. Long before I was able to perform, Dad had me out on the Common with a ball, a bat, and rackets. We used to get equipped for half a dozen sports. And on Tooting Bec Common in those days-provided and maintained by the LCC—there were grass tennis courts where I played. Dad was a very good tennis player. He found a light racket—wooden, of course—for me. He shortened my grip and taught me how to move to the ball. I couldn't serve, and I tried to run round my backhand, but we rallied, and I noticed the extra speed of the ball on grass.

  This real play was added to by our regular trip to Wimbledon on the first Saturday of the fortnight. We went early, with a picnic, queued and always got good seats on court number 2. These were the days of great Australian players—Bromwich, Sedgeman, and McGregor—and we went for several years. Our last year was the first visit by a new generation of Aussies, Lew Hoad and Ken Rosewall, teenagers who seemed superior to their parents.

  My favorites, though, were Jaroslav Drobny, who went from being Czech to Egyptian in one year—such were the vagaries of nationality—and a very elegant American, Budge Patty. (I'm sure it was the name that first drew me to him—he lived in Paris and seemed like a character out of Tender Is the Night.) One year, late in the afternoon, we left court 2 and took the chance of picking up spare seats on the Centre Court. After five p.m. anyone could fill them. We were there in the hallowed place watching two Americans, Shirley Fry and Louise Brough, and realized that the Centre Court was really different. The overhang roof that gave way to openness changed the light and the sound so that it fe
lt indoors with just an extra soft light falling on the court. Whether a tennis court or a small stadium, the atmosphere was special. Years later, in September 1975,I walked into Fenway Park in Boston for the first time one night and had the same confusion about whether it was indoors or outdoors.

  There was another thing about tennis. It was the space allowed to women. I think the first time I noticed anything that might be called sex was at Wimbledon watching a player called Kay Stammers. She was lean and dark and I thought she looked like my mother. She was also very tan and I noticed that when she stretched for a shot and her skirt swirled the tan went all the way up her legs to the white underpants. As if a bell had sounded, signaling my interest, tennis itself changed. An American player hit town, Gorgeous Gussie Moran, and she had the idea that if your underpants were going to show—and they were— well, give the public a thrill. She wore show pants, frilled pants, pink bow panties, knickerbocker glory panties— what you might even begin to think of as lingerie. I was moved, and I began to collect pictures of the players that you could purchase at Wimbledon: Pauline Betz, Doris Hart, Pat Todd, Nancy Chaffee. I bought pictures of the guys, too, with my pocket money, but it was the girls I was collecting, and so I learned to be nonchalant and resigned when court 2 followed a dramatic men's singles with a ladies doubles match.

  Decades later there was a film I loved—Godard's Pierrot le Fou—in which the narrator's voice said something about how as Velázquez grew older he painted nothing but the spaces between things (the nervous system of movies). And the image cut to a girl playing tennis running in a set court, this way and that, reaching, stretching, keeping the ball in play. And somehow being as lovely as she can manage. Rallying. And my mind went back to those first intimations of sexuality and the feeling for an athlete at their best.

  In those days, the next best thing to watching tennis was going to athletics. Dad would take me to the big events at the White City: Oxford vs. Cambridge; the Inter-Counties Championships; the AAA; and then the international matches. I loved to run, and was fast as a boy, so this was a great source of pleasure. It was there that we first saw Roger Bannister run, as well as McDonald Bailey and Arthur Wint, black men living in London, it was explained. Bailey was an explosive sprinter who had qualified to run for Britain in the 1948 Olympic Games, while Wint was a Jamaican, so tall he had an eight-foot stride that carried him in apparent slow motion.

  In those days, the chief target in track athletics was for someone to run the mile in under four minutes. I remember seing Bill Nankeville win the Inter-Counties mile in 4 minutes, 8.8 seconds. That was getting close to the world-record times run by two Swedes, Gunder Hagg and Arne Andersson. There was also the English runner Sydney Wooderson, who looked like a railway booking clerk. My father raised the possibility that “young Bannister” might do it one day. He won the mile every year for Oxford and one year, lo and behold, after his race Bannister came into the stands with his parents, close to where we were sitting. I got a piece of paper and asked for his autograph. He laughed out loud at my request—perhaps it was the first time he had been asked—and signed for me.

  We went to Wembley for one day of the 1948 Olympics. It was very warm and the crowd was huge. I wanted McDonald Bailey in the 100 meters and we were there the day of that final. They were off and everyone stood up. I was too small to see anything. But I heard the feet on the cinders go past and Dad had to tell me that “Mac” was last. I know the finishing order still: Harrison Dillard; Barney Ewell; Lloyd La Beach of Panama; McCorquodale of Britain; Mel Patton; and Bailey.

  The same day, in the heats of the 5000 meters we saw Emil Zátopek, the most extraordinary runner of the time, and Fanny Blankers-Koen, the Dutch woman who won every event she competed in.

  Bannister was aimed at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki. He was a favorite to win the 1500 meters but came in fourth. Dad said he had been out-thought in the race and hadn't used his ability to the best. I stayed following athletics in a time when I was running myself, and doing well enough. I used to train and run on the Common every evening. I even read articles about “interval training” and tried to copy it myself.

  Then one morning in May 1954 I opened the paper and Bannister had done it: 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds, on a rainy evening at Iffley Road, Oxford. It was a minor track meeting, but Bannister had had his friends Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway with him as pacemakers. This was dubious, legally—was it a proper race with everyone running to win? Not really. Still, there had been enough timekeepers there and the record would stand.

  Of course, I hadn't seen it—there was no way of seeing it unless you had been at Oxford that night. Then one day not long afterwards my mother and I were in Pratt's, the big store in Streatham, in the furniture department.

  “Want to see something?” one of the clerks asked me.

  “All right,” I said.

  The store had a new line of goods that was being sold in the furniture department: television sets. I had seen one the previous year when Grandma got a set—brand-new and very temperamental—for the coronation of the Queen. And I had cycled over in pouring rain to watch that. It seemed to go on all day, and fifty-three years later it is still the last coronation.

  But the television at Pratt's went for just 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds, and then some extra as Bannister collapsed. It was the film of the race. It was painfully simple. The men just ran round the track. By the third lap it was clear that Chataway was nearly dying to keep up the pace and then on the last lap Bannister went free and ran into his own wall of pain and disbelief. And history.

  I knew already that great achievement at sports was fueled not just by talent, but by need. Dad had a view of boxing, that it was for the underprivileged people in the world—above all, in his time, the blacks. People hurt in such drastic ways in life were hardened against damage in the ring. You had to be hungry, rough, coarse, uneducated. It is a good theory. But Roger Bannister was a boy like me: middle-class, nicely brought up, sent to a good school, and so on. His parents had been in the stands just a few rows away, eating hard-boiled eggs like us, with little squibs of foil paper filled with salt. Bannister was bright, well-spoken, polite. There was no killer instinct. He wrote about running very well later—in the spirit of a young doctor and a polar explorer—and it was clear that the four-minute mark was a barrier in his mind. And a challenge he took personally. In the last hundred yards it looked as if he was going to collapse and he talked about being in some other zone, deprived of oxygen, ecstatic yet desperate. Was that what glory was? And was it accessible for some nicely brought-up boy? Such questions preoccupied me. But the drama and the headlong imagery of his run were amazing. Was he escaping, or running toward something? For that last two hundred yards he had been so alone. And I felt lucky that someone had thought to film it. Though the film had made decisions: it was a documentary record, shot from a car circling the running track. For the most part it was a single shot. And the refusal, or the inability, to cut was vital to Bannister's passion. I was crying, for Bannister, for running (which I loved for its own sake), and for man getting closer to … to what? To zero? But I think I saw even then that you could make kids cry just by running, or by deciding where to put the camera.

  “There you are,” said the man in the store. “Buy a television set and you can watch that sort of thing all the time.”

  I nodded grimly and said, “It's not a very good picture, though.”

  “What do you mean?” he said, aghast.

  “You can see the lines,” I said. “It's not like cinema, is it?”

  “This will make mincemeat of cinema,” said the man in an aggrieved way.

  14

  “HE LIKES IT,” said my mum. “He likes it very much, but it upsets him.” And so it does, still. What else do you expect out of life? But what part of life was she talking about?

  I loved sports and still do, and there was a brief period in my life when I kidded myself that I might be good enough. The thought was nonsense. I was
a middling all-round talent. I had an eye for a ball. I was fast. There are millions like that, and if we're lucky we go on dreaming till we drop, and we're shy if we ever meet the real thing. Going to the Bridge once, Dad and I found ourselves walking beside one of the players. Never mind who it was. And Dad tried talking to him—for my sake, I'm sure. But the bloke hadn't got two words. No small talk, let alone stories of the big game. To this day I know few things more crushing than having to listen to geniuses (with their feet) trying to say what it felt like. Don't worry, I'll tell them what it felt like, because I was imagining it all.

  BUT THERE WAS ANOTHER PLACE, and there I had a chance.

  For years, I knew the residential roads, the Common and the High Road in Streatham and not much else. And there was a shop for everything on the High Road, a hundred small establishments with a fixed staff selling everything from bread and pastries to books, fruit and vegetables, records, cosmetics, lipstick, sheet music, coffee, and toys. There was nothing yet in the late ‘40s of the supermarket or one-stop shopping. Streatham in its time would be nearly ruined by the absence of parking on the High Road. By the late ‘50s as people got cars they went to the new markets, where you could park. These were built on the edges of towns. The specialty shops of Streatham— to which everyone walked—were killed by the changing trade.

  There were only a very few large buildings on the High Road: the railway stations, Streatham and Streatham Hill; the bus depot at Telford Avenue; the several churches in a kind of throttled Gothic; the library; and the cinemas. When my mother took me shopping in the mornings, those cinemas were the special, alluring places because they were not open yet. Their heavy glass doors turned at midday, but at nine or ten the places that did nocturnal trade were “resting,” sleeping in late, while servants cleared away the night's garbage and freshened the air with scented sprays. The cinemas smelled pretty, like women, and despite the scale of their buildings there was no question about their gender.