"God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast and when I run, I feel his pleasure."

Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire

A Book of Heroes

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A Book of Heroes (or a sporting half-century), Simon Barnes, short Books 2010

I do not know Simon Barnes personally but we did sit next to each other in the press seats at the European Athletics Championships this summer. As we are of similar age I have lived through the same decades and had my own sporting heroes. Many of his would be on my list – but not all. Mine would include no horses.

There were some uncanny resemblances. He describes the experience of watching Usain Bolt and Yelena Isinbayeva in the Beijing Olympics – two indelible memories of mine. Writing of 1960s heroine, Anita Lonsborough, he writes of speaking to her for the first time in the Watercube in Beijing. We were on the same flight from London and I first spoke to Anita as we waited for our luggage at the Beijing airport.

There is no one better as finding the apposite phrase to sum up sport than Simon Barnes. The book is full of them

· Barnes earns his living “giving serious thought to the trivialities of sport”

· Johan Cruyff is “the conductor as in an orchestra”

· On Joe Montana: “And that really is the essence of sport: to find your best when you need it most”

· Jonny Wilkinson could “tackle like a rat-trap”

· Usain Bolt “was an awkward starter: at 6ft 5, (1.96m) he was a man who stood up in instalments”.

· Cantona “He liked to behave as if he spent most of his time in pavement cafes discussing existentialism for hours at a time over a single petit noir, between occasional bouts of playing football”.

· Colin Cowdrey v Australia 1974-75 is a “Patrician old buffer at the crease as the wild colonial bowlers brought in the modern world and sent it humming around his head”

· “People said Gower would be better if he put his mind to it: it seemed to me that Gower’s basic strength was that he didn’t put his mind to it”

At times he just finds a clever or witty phrase:

· Flo Jo “knuckled the lift button. She couldn’t touch it like a normal human being because her nails were an inch long, maybe more.

· “Mark Todd and I are both horsemen: I have no more in common with him than a house-painter has with Rembrandt”.

· “Like Tim Henman, Beckham came to prominence at Wimbledon in 1996” – Get it?

· Any footballer, any cricketer, any professional athlete of any kind who declares “I see myself as an entertainer” should be sacked on the spot.

I did feel that he was looking for more in sport that it can offer when he wrote that “the job of a hero in sport … is to make sense of life, to make some kind of order from a crazy and chaotic world”. (Page 326). I too was enthralled and spellbound by the Isinbayeva show in Beijing but was never tempted to see in it “a meaning that might even stretch as far as the salvation of the human race”. (Page 325). What nonsense!

The book is full of reflections on what is a hero – courage, capacity to cause us pain, achieving greatness, not always a winner, a leader, failing and not giving up etc. To sum up, “There are many reasons for choosing a hero but there are two principal ones. The first is that the person admired is like you; the second because he is not like you” (Page 116)

There are two strange reflections on religion. I quote them in full as the relationship between sport and religion is of particular interest to me:

“Religion is used as a sporting metaphor nearly as often as war: a stadium becomes a cathedral, fans are the faithful, new managers are messiahs and on and on. In some ways sport does seek to fill the void religion left. But sport doesn’t pass muster, in that it has no core belief, no faith, and a somewhat ambiguous relationship with moral codes. But it does some of the old functions of religion. Religion has many tales of great people and noble deeds, and many fables and to make important moral points. Religion is full of the lives of the saints, a litany of heroes, a panheroikon for many of whom gave up their lives for what they believed in. Senna was the sort of person who, in an earlier age, would have been a saint”. (Page 195)

Jonny Wilkinson. “Had he got religion, he’d never have been just a good, solid, church-going Christian. He really would have given away all his earthly goods, he really would have given himself up to prayer and good works. Like Ayrton Senna, he’d have been a saint, though a very different kind”. (Page 277)

I am not quite sure what to make of these!

Overall a great read and a book that will disappoint few people if they find it in their stocking this Christmas.

PS Beckham and Henman? In 1996 Henman beat Yevgeny Kafelikov, Beckham beat the Wimbledon goalkeeper, Neil Sullivan, with a goal scored from a shot from within his own half.

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