We are all to blame for lost age of sporting mavericks
Hmodern obsession with ‘role models’ and the rise of a ‘gotcha’ culture have killed off the great entertainers
‘Frank always laughed at the game a little bit,” according to Ian Greaves, the Huddersfield Town manager who was the late Frank Worthington’s first mentor. That was the enduring charm of Worthington – and of contemporaries such as Stan Bowles and Rodney Marsh. The childlike sense of fun.
As we grind through this fan-free season, Worthington’s era exerts a romantic pull. Yes, the pitches might have been claggy and the tackles inhumane, but at least a man could indulge himself in a tipple, a flutter or a canoodle, without fear of being caught on a camera phone.
A more innocent time? Not really. That’s the whole point. The “Mavericks” – to use the collective term foisted on Worthington, Bowles and Marsh – were all party animals, following the lead of George Best, their patron sinner.
In the 1970s, a sportsman did not have to pretend to be an angel. He could revel in the newfound celebrity provided by colour TV. He could live off the profits that flowed from the end of the minimum wage. He could enjoy the fruits of the sexual revolution.
But even as he enjoyed plentiful benefits, his freedom remained unconstrained. Any moral panics over football tended to surround the fans – these were the early days of hooliganism – while the players enjoyed their nightclub hedonism in peace.
It was too good to last. By the 21st century, footballers existed in a gilded cage. And the bars were inscribed with that dread phrase “role model”.
We in the media are largely responsible. The insistence that sporting stars must be clean-living citizens developed during the 1980s and 1990s, along with the rise of a “gotcha” reporting culture. The theory makes for the odd prurient, page-turning scoop. But is it logical?
No one ever pursued Alice
Cooper or David Bowie to complain about their cocaine habits. No one said that boozy actors such as Oliver Reed or Richard Harris were setting a bad example. But Paul Gascoigne’s night swilling tequila shots in a Hong Kong dentist’s chair? That was a betrayal of sporting values.
For a watershed moment, see The Sun front page of May 31, 1996. The photo of a half-cut Gascoigne under the headline “Disgracefool” and the subheading “Look at Gazza – a drunk oaf with no pride”. Never mind that Darren Anderton – hardly a noted hellraiser – would later say that the drinking session “created a team club environment which is what you need”.
There are several possible explanations for these double standards. Do sport’s origins as a moral force in Victorian public schools still resonate? Do we resent rich athletes for their privileges and youth? Do we feel entitled to pronounce judgment on anyone who plays under the national flag?
Whatever the answer, a sportsman is as much an entertainer as Katy Perry or Robert Downey Jnr. And the policing of off-field behaviour has produced an ironic consequence: modern sport is much less entertaining than it could be, or would be, given a full and varied cast of characters.
I am sure that the monochrome impression is illusory. Wealthy, testosterone-fuelled young men will find ways to entertain themselves. But they all know the importance of keeping everything under wraps.
Here was the joy of 1970s sport. It was the time of James Hunt, Ian Botham and Ilie Nastase (the Wimbledon finalist whom Worthington cited as his favourite player in a magazine Q&A). These men never pretended to be shrinking violets.
As a member of the Fourth Estate, I should perhaps pull back from blaming newspapers for everything. We must not forget social media, enabling every punter with an iphone to make an online citizen’s arrest. Nor the sponsors who will drop an athlete at the first hint of a transgression, plus the governing bodies who legislate for off-field activities such as recreational drug use.
So, yes, like Agatha Christie’s passengers on the Orient Express, we are probably all guilty. But the upshot is that the likes of Worthington shine all the brighter in hindsight; birds of a different feather. Our obsession with sporting “role models” has a lot to answer for.