Sanders and Moss were big winners in life
Both missed out on top prizes but were colourful figures, writes Simon Briggs
Last weekend, we bade farewell to two charismatic sportsmen – one American, one British – who were known as much for their nearmisses as their hits.
Doug Sanders, a golfer from the Deep South, was runner-up in a major four times, including at the 1970 Open Championship, where he missed a three-foot putt for the title. Londoner Stirling Moss finished second in the Formula One table four years in a row, inspiring a biography called The Champion Without A Crown. These men fit one of sport’s rules of thumb. By and large, you will have more fun on a night out with the runner-up than the winner.
Sanders was only 11, by his own account, when he lost his virginity in a ditch. He went on to marry three times and enjoy numerous Las Vegas escapades with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, who adopted him as a kind of oversized, flamboyantly dressed mascot.
As for Moss, one obituary reported that he had two scrapbooks in his Mayfair house: the first, bound in green, to cover his racing exploits, and the second – in black – for his sexual ones. A gifted raconteur, as well as a James Bond fan who filled that same house with exotic gadgets, he once confessed: “I’ve spent my whole life chasing crumpet and racing cars.”
Did these colourful characters wish that they had completed that final, daunting step to the very peak of their sports? Of course they did. But they came to terms with their pasts, and developed ways of parrying the first question that everyone wanted to ask.
“It’s better to have had those chances than not,” Sanders liked to say. “I’ve been very blessed.” Moss added an extra layer of ingenuity. “I’m better off never having won one [World Championship title],” he would argue. “I’m the man that people say, ‘Gosh, he should have won’.”
Of course we feel a twinge of sympathy for any player who chokes under pressure, with the eyes of the world upon them. Everyone, including the culprit, knows immediately the error will hang around their neck for ever. Even so, most ordinary mortals would give several digits just to be in that position in the first place.
Plus, there are all the other times when everything went right. How about Sanders’s 20 PGA Tour victories? Or Moss’s completion of the Mille Miglia road race at an average speed of almost 99 mph? A feat which GQ this week called “the single greatest competitive drive in the history of motorsport”.
Both Sanders and Moss fit the archetype of athletes who play for joy and romance more than silverware. It is almost a truism of sport that such charmers end up being shot down by cold-eyed killers whose entire self-image is bound up with the end result.
If we flash back to the Nineties for a second, the ultimate parable of silk versus steel used to be enacted on an annual basis at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre. In the final of snooker’s World Championship, Jimmy White was vanquished by Stephen Hendry four times in five years.
And yet, Hendry felt a tinge of envy for White’s carefree attitude. “It strikes me that I can’t play the iceman for ever,” he wrote in his autobiography, while describing his eventual loss of the No1 ranking. “At some stage I might want to loosen up and enjoy life a little.”
As with those kids at school who are annoyingly popular, but end up working in a petrol station, the aftermath of a sporting career is hardest for Type-a personalities such as Hendry. Such monomaniacs will always feel a sense of emptiness, knowing that they can never recreate the adrenalin rushes of old.
For their polar opposites – the more rounded, take-in-theview types such as Sanders or Moss – there will be regrets, for sure. But also the warmth that comes with a life well lived.