Sporting Nostalgia
By Ben Dover
June 8 2006
Ben Dover takes a seat on the veranda of our sporting past and wipes a misty eye...
Sporting Nostalgia
If you are one of those people who fail to understand the hit TV sketch show Little Britain. Look wonderingly at extremely young police men and women and think that your kids teachers don’t look old enough to be students let alone educators themselves, then it’s highly likely that your either approaching or have advanced well past the thick end of thirty.
As someone who is about to cross the virtual midlife boundary, I’m continually aware that many of my early life experiences have progressed beyond just ordinary memories and are now being advanced into an account marked nostalgia.
For me recalling a great sporting moment is a bit like the experience of rediscovering a toy when you’re a child, a toy that you’d forgotten all about until under advanced parental pressure you were forced to tidy your room. For an instant you’re back at the moment when you first got the toy for your birthday, Christmas or on holiday. You remember where you were, how you felt, the smell, the sounds, the whole experience.
Indeed life has become indelibly marked with classic sporting signposts. Moments of brilliance, magic and sometimes disaster that define years of existence and evoke whole decades of feelings. Increasingly workday afternoons are spent debating all important sporting encounters of the past, stories that draw blank faces from the younger members of the office as I slowly slide down the slope to becoming the sad old man that I‘d vowed I’d never become.
My earliest sporting memories come from my father who was a keen armchair enthusiast. During the summer, great cricketing encounters filled the months; if you could hear Test Match Special in the house then you knew my dad was home.
“Who’s winning Dad” I’d ask, only to be greeted with the response “No one is winning until the last ball has been bowled”. A reply that I now know to be untrue, it was really my dads’ way of saying England are losing. Although anyone who witnessed last years ashes series will realise that there was a grain of truth in what he said.
In the winter I remember him in front of the telly, continuously thumping the armchair as Dusty Hare kicked the line for fiftieth time in the match. A full five nations match would be lucky to see 15 minutes with the ball in play.
But when do memories become nostalgia? And why do some events retain a special place in our hearts whilst others are just recollections. When there are gaps in the memory do we invent our recollections of such occasions? Just like the unusually large amount of people I have met who claim to have seen the Beatles before they were famous.
In this respect I promise to remain honest to my generation in recollecting memories of sport that continue to warm the cockles when looking back.
It would be unfair to express a love of cricket and then fail to mention the Ashes series of 1981 and in particular the third test when Ian Botham and Bob Willis took on the Aussies. England were all but dead and buried, having been forced to follow on and finding themselves 92 runs behind and 5 wickets down when Botham stepped to the crease.
Botham decided to set about the opposition in a do or die final fling. In an awesome display of batting Botham smacked ball after ball to the boundary. He finished on 149 and England had a lead of 129 runs. Australia in reply quickly knocked up 56 runs. But nothing could take the ball away from either Botham or Willis after the first wicket fell and the two bowled in tandem for what seemed like the whole afternoon. Australia collapsed to 75 for 8 and after a mini revival fell short of the total by 18 runs.
To my mind this series still compares favourably with last years Ashes series and the Headingly match in particular was a completely and utterly mesmerising game, frightened to take your eyes off it for just one minute you knew you were witnessing something special even at the time.
It’s only when I penned this piece that I realised that the summer features heavily in my personal catalogue of memories and it was the summer months of my formative years that were dominated by two very special individuals; unique opponents whose contrasting styles inspired me to endless hours of tennis. I played countless Wimbledon finals against the garage wall. Indeed there was no grass left on my parents lawn as I mentally progressed through complete tournaments in the back garden.
I am of course referring to Borg and McEnroe two players whose contrasting styles and approach to the game contributed to some of the most entertaining encounters ever seen. McEnroe was an awesome talent a guy whose real skill hid behind his reputation as a tennis firebrand. ‘Super Brat’ as he was christened was in reality just passionate about his game.
Borg by contrast was like an automaton, a cool emotionless machine who relied on keeping his feelings locked away until the final point. It was this different approach to the same game and their contrasting styles that made the game so attractive, McEnroe the young pretender with so much power and Borg whose stroke play seemed so effortless. I swear I once saw him bend the ball two or three feet to drop in the corner of the court.
Both of these players polarised followers of the game and a lot of people nowadays profess to have been McEnroe fans at the time. Personally I loved Bjorn Borg’s approach to the game. The idea that someone could remain so cool under such pressure was a really attractive trait and one that ultimately he paid a price for.
It’s fitting in a World Cup year that my final memory is from the 1990 FIFA tournament. Not a great tournament historically, but for me the first and last time I have seen England get so close to a final. It might be heresy to hold forth the round ball game as the single most entertaining spectator sport but I genuinely look back on this encounter believing it to be one of my favourite sporting memories.