Note: I’ve been trying to knock this piece into shape for a while, but it keeps evading my attempts to pin it down to a shape I’m entirely happy with. Then I saw today was 9 May, Liberation Day. It is 79 years since my home island of Jersey was liberated from Nazi occupation, and because some of the themes here coalesce around my father, who lived through those years, it seems right to publish this today.
My daughter is a fan of The Therapy Crouch, the podcast that charts the life of ex-footballer Peter Crouch and his wife Abbie Clancy. She happened to mention the latest episode to me earlier this year on the same day JPR Williams, icon of Welsh rugby, died. Throughout his sporting career, and beyond, JPR was an orthopaedic surgeon. There is a pleasing symmetry in a lifetime full of weekends spent crashing into others at great speed and with full force, tearing muscle and tendon, breaking bones, cutting skin, and spending the weeks delicately putting it all back together again, ending by admonishing the patient to take care, or be more careful next time.
JPR Williams, amateur rugby player, professional surgeon. It’s just a scratch Mum, honest.
That was of course, in the days when rugby was an amateur sport, and one of the joys of amateur sports was that it allowed people to be world class at a pastime while having a day job. Professional sport means the days of medical students playing for their country at the weekend are long gone. It also means many players are barely equipped for life after sport. Or life during sport for that matter. Any international competitor is likely to have spent the hours that a normal, rounded person spends failing to learn to play the guitar, hanging around shopping centres, or otherwise unproductively, in the gym doing some repetitive task, building muscle fibre upon muscle fibre, a life of luxury punctuated by the pain of ice baths, as if in some reality show in search of a format.
Imagine that for an experiment: give someone more money at a young age than most can handle, take them out of formal education and see what happens. Lots of tattoos, busted knees, illegitimate children, defrauded by a trusted advisor, all capped off with early onset dementia. It’s a board game isn’t it: your collection of Patek Phillipe watches gets stolen (you never actually own them, didn’t cha know?), move back three spaces. Your dad is exposed as a love rat, lose £2m. The media scream that you aren’t a good role model, take on a “new challenge” in Saudi Arabia.
That “amateur” has become a veiled insult reflects badly on modern values: it’s not worth doing anything unless you are paid to do it, and the equally depressing but different view that unless you are paid to do something, you can’t be very good at it.
There is another nuance here, which is that everything has an objective standard that is desirable, and with training, and dedication, that standard can be achieved. That sounds right in theory, but in practice it leads to monotony, a flattening of the world. All politicians sound the same, all footballers play the same, all cars are designed the same, everything converges to a point of what management perceives as perfection but which to the audience is forgettable blandness. Professional becomes synonymous with predictable[1].
Eno, before and after hairclippers.
Brian Eno once commented about Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” that, despite its obvious greatness, it was an extraordinarily uneven track. He is very attuned to these things, and made the point that the looping, funky bass varied throughout the song. It is playing the same set of chords throughout, but each time there is a slight difference: because it is a recording of someone playing the whole track. If it was recorded today, Eno said, the guitarist would get the loop perfect once, and that loop would be spliced and repeated throughout the song. The song would be more “perfect”: but it wouldn’t be as good. That is probably why listening to Coldplay is such a thoroughly dispiriting experience[2]. But in Superstitious, the imperfections in the bass, the chords hit with slightly different strength at slightly different times, all create a sense of vitality that a more perfect rendition would lose.
What is the point in dedicating your life to the pursuit of conformity? What becomes of the risk taker, the memory maker, the politician who dares to answer a question honestly, the rugby full backs of memory (Blanco, Campese) who refused to play the percentages because they believed that at any moment they could transcend the percentages and achieve the improbable? Or is it all about money these days? That is, after all, what professional really means.
Kerouac, looking like he’s out of the Boden catalogue, only with a pipe.
I happened to be listening to Frank Skinner’s Poetry Podcast (highly recommended) and he was speaking about Kerouac, who was unfortunate enough to be the sort of innovator who quickly sounds horribly out of date. Writing in “On the Road” about Prez, a boxer turned jazz musician:
You see, man, Prez has the technical anxieties of a money-making musician, he’s the only one who’s well dressed, see him grow worried when he blows a clinker, but the leader, that cool cat, tells him not to worry and just blow and blow–the mere sound and serious exuberance of the music is all he cares about. He’s an artist.
It's the same dichotomy between the “professional”, following rules, focusing on technical anxieties, wearing the uniform, assuming an identity, and ultimately, in it for the money, and the artist, who is always following a passion, true to the art and to the self. To be professional is to iron out the mistakes, but in doing so, you iron out the moments of brilliance too. To be professional isn’t the opposite of being an amateur, it is the opposite of being an artist.
This is why it is so absurd when people claim to be “passionate” about their chosen career in interviews, but what is passion if not following your dream, breaking conventions, flouting what it is to be professional. “Passionate in return for a big salary and in accordance with the firm’s policies” isn’t really passionate at all. Passion is for the artist, not the actuary.
Which reminds me – another aside - of the time I first realised that honesty is rarely the best policy in the professional world. Some bored/boring HR professional asked, at an interview for my first legal job, whether I was ambitious. “If I was ambitious,” I answered, with all the confidence only someone clueless could muster, “I wouldn’t be applying for a job as trainee at a law firm, I would be starting a business myself”.
Now that’s been established, that Peter Crouch has reinvented himself as a genial podcast host is therefore rather cheering. He natters away with his wife, who also appears remarkably well adjusted. Podcasts, with their rough and ready feel, have not yet fully succumbed to the deadening hand of professionalism, and the Crouch’s marital bants shines through.
There can be life after sport, and it doesn’t have to be confined to the straightjacket of commentary, a world that few sane people can navigate without falling into the realms of banal drivel or going the full David Icke.
In an unexpected development, what began as mild frustration at commentary duties being shifted from football to crown green bowling quickly escalated into a request under the Official Information Act for the Prime Minister of New Zealand to confirm whether he was, in fact, a lizard.
I remember the famous Italia 90 semi final, where Rodney Marsh, in football parlance a “character”, described the Germans as “defending like pansies”. Quick as a flash, the presenter (Brian Moore?) said “surely you mean Panzers?”. Well, we didn’t see much of Rodders again[3]. Maybe he turned up on topless darts, which did exist, primarily as a reminder that the recent past is often stranger than you remember. Rodney had proven to be an amateur in the world of commentary, by saying something memorable. Off to the gulag of Channel 5 with him!
We were all put on a strict diet of instantly forgettable drivel after that, as the professionalism of commentary reached its ultimate goal of maintaining a consistent level of high excitement without actually communicating anything.
Brian Moore, who famously died just before England beat Germany 5-1 away from home, and was immortalised in the Half Man Half Biscuit song “Dickie Davies eyes” by the lyric “Brian Moore’s head looks uncannily like London Planetarium”. Spent many years in a fury after Eno stole his hairclippers.
This is all a diversion. I had been thinking about my father, who was a successful amateur footballer in the 1950s. At that time, “professional” was a dirty word, probably because of the vestiges of such quaint ideas as “gentlemen versus players” and although he was offered terms to play football in England, he preferred to live in Jersey, where he could earn the same wage living in a place he loved.
Until Jimmy Hill broke the maximum wage structure, professionals were not well paid, could never again play in the amateur sport, and were only one injury away from being out of work. My uncle Ray did take the shilling and carved out a decent career playing for Grimsby, but he was also sharp enough to know that sport had a finite span and when he wasn’t training learned a trade which stood him in good stead when his career came to an end[4].
My dad was, it is both faintly absurd but also true to say, a local legend in a way that is now unimaginable. Everyone of a certain age knew him by his nickname: he was called “Tot” because he was relatively small in his youth, especially compared to his elder brother, but by the time he was playing for Jersey, he was strong and fearless and particularly good in the air. “People used to say my head was like a third foot” he would say. That was, with hindsight, a clue as to how things would play out. Heading a heavy, wet, leather ball was a surefire route to dementia.
Whenever I spoke to him, memories of the glory days came back. The days where, half-concussed, he scored the winning goal against a now-forgotten team from Guernsey. Being held aloft by team mates in front of a packed stadium, a fifth of the Island’s population in those days before football was ever on television, where watching the local team was the only way to watch the sport at all, and the local heroes were the equal of figures like Stanley Matthews or Dixie Dean, whose exploits were recounted in newspaper reports, teetering on the edge of myth. The days where your potential was limitless and the future full of possibilities.
He was 39 when I was born. An ankle injury had curtailed his playing days nearly a decade before and he was a rep for a whisky company, selling cheap brands to busy pubs, drinking from dawn until dusk. Photos of my childhood show me with a black dog on a beach, a creature I cannot recall. My mother, slim and glamourous in a 70s bikini, my father, noticeably older and overweight. His best was well behind him[5].
But that’s true for all of us. For every Keir Starmer, thinking of election victory, there is a Boris Johnson or Tony Blair, possessed by a belief that they have one last push left, desperate to stay on the stage long after their character has run out of road. Geoff Hurst must have known, as soon as he struck the fourth goal in 1966, that his life had reached its zenith. “They think it’s all over – it is now” was a beautiful piece of commentary, but also an oblique acknowledgement that it was all downhill from here.
As I wrote this piece it began to coalesce around the phrase “Glory Days”, and somehow, the memory of that song, which I can’t have heard in over 35 years, came back. It was on Bruce Springsteen’s iconic (hate that word, but it is appropriate here) Born in the USA album which I owned in 1985 when I was in my formative years and Dancing in the Dark was everywhere.
I’d left Springsteen behind – he seemed simplistic and didactic, but with hindsight, I didn’t appreciate what was going on – because now it seems to me that he often captures things perfectly, particularly the disappointments of a life that has not lived up to expectations (i.e. almost everyone, after the age of about 30, if you are lucky).
One of the great album covers. And a very ambiguous record all round.
“Glory Days” is one of the more memorable tracks on Born in the USA. Because it has that anthemic rock quality that he nailed so well in the 80’s, if you hear it in a bar or on the radio it sounds, well, like an anthem: “Glory days, yeah, glory days”, something to sing along to while drunk. The whole album is like that. Listen again.
Think I'm going down to the well tonight
And I'm going to drink 'til I get my fill
And I hope when I get old, I don't sit around thinking about it
But I probably will
Yeah, just sitting back
Trying to recapture a little of the glory of
Well, the time slips away
Leaves you with nothing, mister, but boring stories of
Glory days
They'll pass you by, glory days
In the wink of a young girl's eye, glory days
Glory days
Few song lyrics stand up as poetry, and I’m not going to pretend this is Auden, but it does nail an idea. The juxtaposition of “hoping” that he won’t dwell on the past but acknowledging that he “probably will” is a deep human truth. We don’t control our lives: we age and become precisely the person that we don’t want to be, the old fool fixated on those bright days of youth when possibilities were endless. It’s as good as anything that Bob Dylan has ever written. It’s up there with “whom the Gods destroy they first call promising”.
“But I probably will” is, on paper, one of the worst lyrics you could ever think of: weak, uncertain, forgettable. And yet here it carries so much weight: regret (“but” is always filled with regret), the resignation and inevitability of a life that is past its peak, with nothing to remember but “boring stories of glory days”. And again, that word “boring” is heartbreaking. Is there anything worse in life than knowing that you will become boring, that what once shone bright is past and forgotten?
Sometimes my dad would talk about whether he should have become a professional footballer. More than once he told me “my brother said ‘you should have gone kid, you could have gone all the way’. I never asked him what he meant.”
Glory days. Yeah.
[1] The obvious exceptions in modern sport are Bazball in cricket and Real Madrid, especially Vinicius jnr, in football. In both, victory comes about as a by product of the creative process, in a form of chaotic overwhelming, rather than the suffocation brought about by the Guardiola model of total control.
[2] If you are thinking what I think you are thinking, I know, you know, Eno. Let’s leave it at that.
[3] I have not been able to find any record of this exchange on the internet. Which makes me wonder if it ever happened. It is the sort of thing that could have happened. Is that sufficient?
[4] https://jerseyeveningpost.com/sport/2022/07/25/we-played-with-rags-in-the-war/
[5] I really wish I had that photo to hand. Mind, I’m in the nuddy noo, which is not what anyone would want to see.
Excellent essay, Paul. Very poignant and with many truths.
Thanks, Mark