A memory from young adulthood: my dad shaking his head sorrowfully, bewildered, then sloping off for a stroll round the garden and a smoke. “Why did he do it? What was he thinking?” he asked, with a hint of anguish. “I’m so disappointed in him.”
“He” was Ray Wilkins; “it” was throwing the ball away in a flash of temper, only to see it catch the ref a glancing blow and the result was a red card. The sole dismissal of his career and the end of his involvement in the 1986 World Cup; suspended for the next two games, he didn’t make the team for England’s quarter-final match against Argentina. You might say he was well out of the affair of Maradona and the Hand of God, though I don’t think Wilkins agreed.
“When the Argentine kit man came in with shirts to give us, I thought Ray Wilkins was going to hit him,” team-mate Kenny Sansom remembered 30 years later. “I’d never heard Ray swear before but he got this chap out the dressing room, shouting, ‘We don’t want your shirts, you’re fucking cheats’.” (For younger generations: put thoughts of sour grapes out of your minds – they were cheats and the country entered a period of outraged depression as a result. But what’s probably harder to imagine is that only four years had elapsed since Britain and Argentina had gone to war over the Falklands, so the match was not, shall we say, free of context.)
I like to think that “Butch” Wilkins, the Chelsea, England and AC Milan player whose unexpected death at the age of 61 has floored so many football fans, was channelling Alf Ramsey, who intervened during another testy England-Argentina World Cup clash to stop George Cohen swapping shirts with an opposition player. In that tournament, in 1966, England famously prevailed over all challengers, and also kickstarted the national side’s lengthy decline into the painful, three-lions-on-the-shirt cycle of hope and despair, the highlights of which are best known as Gazza’s Tears, Beckham’s Metatarsal and Lampard’s Disallowed Goal.
Back to that evening in 1986. My dad wasn’t even a Chelsea fan – his hero was Bobby Moore, England captain and feted Hammer. But he loved Butch nonetheless and, more to the point, grasped the awful essence of the moment: a momentary lapse of control, a disproportionately serious consequence, a sense of letting oneself and others down.
If it seems perverse to mention a sportsperson’s uncharacteristically bad day just after their death, I intend the opposite. Tributes to Wilkins have returned again and again to his decency, his warmth, his loyalty to friends, family and colleagues. (He used to call my partner, with whom he worked from time to time in sports radio, “young man”. Wilkins was three months his senior.) Obituaries have not shied away from the issues he experienced in recent years: depression and alcohol addiction that led to a lengthy driving ban, perhaps in part the result of the ups and downs of his post-playing career. The Guardian’s notice concluded with Wilkins’s words: “Footballers who think they are something special are making a terrible mistake,” he said. “I always told my kids I’m nobody but their dad. But I just don’t cope well with rejection.”
Wilkins, I think, was not much like the darts player Eric Bristow, who also died last week. The Crafty Cockney was all about the razzmatazz he could build around his talent – he all but engendered the darts explosion that endures today. Except that both belong to a certain era of sports-watching experienced by my generation and upwards that now seems starkly at odds with contemporary mores.
Mindful of a predilection for nostalgia and acutely aware of rose-tinted specs that filter out, for example, football hooliganism and the emerging evidence of widespread sexual abuse of young players, dinosaurs such as me still hanker for a simplicity that appears to have been lost – the hero worship, the us and them, the onrush of delight and the pain of disappointment.
But more than anything, I think, is the idea that one might know and love one’s sporting idols without actually having to find out too much about them. This thought occurred to me as I watched the Winter Olympics and returns now as the Commonwealth Games get going. In part because the BBC has lost so many of its sporting rights, the corporation must max out its coverage and the way it has chosen to do so is through the personal stories of competitors.
How many times have you got the late-night beer and popcorn organised, only to turn on and find yourself embroiled in some form of heartfelt documentary? How far do you stick with interviews with sportsperson X’s siblings, grandmother and best friend before you crack, desperate for some actual sport, and hurl the popcorn ceilingward? How do you begin to describe the bathos when, following an hour of painstaking analysis of past mistakes/injuries/comeback strategies, said sportsperson takes to the field/track/rink/cycle and falls flat on their back in the first 30 seconds?
How to put it? I have enough trouble in dealing with the failures and disappointments of my own life without taking on those of barely known athletes. I do not want to see a journey – I want to see a football match.
And, even more specifically, I do not want to see cheating cricketers parading their children, spouses and parents on television while breaking down in tears and apologising to the nation (before, one notes, the opponents they defrauded). Especially since the incident itself was the result of such monumental thickness – sandpaper in pants! More CCTV than Curry’s on sale day! – you worry for the future of the species. Here’s a lesson from the old days: take your lumps and don’t do it again.
• Alex Clark is an Observer columnist
