A return to sporting localism is no bad thing
Tom Finney, perhaps the greatest English footballer for a dozen or more years after the Second World War, played in the days of the maximum wage. The term will puzzle many today, and some will understandably be astonished to learn that this was imposed on clubs by the Football league. For much of Finney’s career it was fixed at £14 a week. Win bonuses could be paid on top of this – very modest ones – and in some cases a player might find an additional pound or ten-shilling note stuffed into his boot. But the law suited the clubs who were the players’ employers. Players might sometimes be described as “wage-slaves”, but it made for much fairer competition than is possible today. It was difficult for big clubs to buy success. There was no lawful financial advantage for a player in moving to another club, and Finney’s whole career was spent with his home-town club Preston North End.
Being paid £14 a week was a decent working-class wage. Many lower league clubs paid less and most footballers were part-timers. Finney himself was a plumber, having served his apprenticeship before the war, and continued to supplement his football wage, eventually having his own plumbing business. This was usual. The Aberdeen team I supported as a small boy included a couple of PE teachers, a journalist and a dentist, while its star forward, George Hamilton, a Scottish international, could be found some afternoons behind the counter of his newsagent’s and tobacconist’s shop.
Some sports, notably Rugby Union and athletics, remained purely amateur. Roger Bannister was a junior hospital doctor when he ran the first under four minute mile in 1954. But even in sports which had long admitted professionalism, most were part-timers.
Tennis was amateur, though there was a small professional circuit, known as “Jack Kramer’s circus”. When Jaroslav Drobny, the exiled Czech who travelled on an Egyptian passport, at last won the Men’s Singles at Wimbledon in 1954, he was working, if only part-time, as an accountant in Surrey. Tennis didn’t “go open” till 1968 when Rod Laver, who had joined the professional ranks six years previously, became the first professional Wimbledon champion.
English professional county cricketers were full-timers, since there were two championship three-day championship matches a week, but only from April to September. Most had to find some other employment in the winter months. Even for Test players there wasn’t an overseas tour every winter. Australian cricketers all earned their living outside the game. Don Bradman was a stock-broker in Adelaide.
There had been professional golfers since the mid-nineteenth century and the days of Old Tom Morris, but in Britain, most of them still made their living as Club Pros, coaching members and running the Club shop. There simply weren’t enough tournaments this side of the Atlantic to allow golfers to make a living from tournament play. Not surprisingly amateur golf received as much attention from the Press as professional golf; and one reason for this was that very few amateurs were tempted to turn pro.
Why recall all this now, even in haphazard fashion? Well, there are two reasons. First, it makes the point that sport doesn’t need big money to interest and excite spectators. Second, in this summer without sport, there has been much speculation about how our experience of Covid-19 and lockdown will change sport, and indeed whether it can return to what we have come to know as normal.
Will, for example, global sporting traffic resume? Will tennis-players and golfers be flying to and from tournaments for thirty or forty weeks of the year? Will tens of thousands of football and rugby fans follow their clubs in European competitions? Will it still seem reasonable for two South African rugby clubs to participate in the Guinness Pro14, a league for Irish, Italian, Scottish and Welsh clubs? A couple of years ago Ireland played the All Blacks in Chicago; is that sort of venture still on? Will the IRB’s globe-trotting Sevens circuit be sustainable? And, even if it is, will it be thought justifiable?
Of course answers to such questions can’t even be suggested now. There are too many unknowns – even known unknowns, let alone unknown unknowns. We don’t know for instance how likely a second wave – and then a third wave and so on – of the virus may be; therefore, for how long Governments will require us to practise social distancing. We don’t know to what extent air traffic may recover, or when recovery is likely. We don’t know when people will feel confident about travelling again, or how many won’t.
Some confidence will return when this first wave is over, more still when a vaccine has been proved effective and is available. This is what common sense and experience suggest. But economists seem certain that we have already entered on a recession, one which may be so severe that we shall be talking about a slump or depression. Lots of businesses are going bust, and it is likely that professional clubs in many sports will be among them.
We have grown accustomed to international – even global – sport. Are we going to pulls our horns in, and return to localism? It’s possible, and might not be a bad thing. A local derby may still generate more interest than a match against a club from a faraway country, even one from the other end of your own country. Take boxing for example. We now have a proliferation of so-called World Title fights and so a fight for the British title is small beer. It wasn’t always so. When I was ten I could have named the British champion at every weight – admittedly easier then when there were only eight recognized weights than it is now. But how many young boys could do so today?
Likewise it is now assumed that every sport should be professional at the top level and full-time professional even at levels far short of the top. Indeed my thoughts about Tom Finney which kicked off this piece were provoked by some scathing remarks from Gordon Strachan, once a great footballer and till recently manager of Scotland’s national team. Dilating on the sorry state of Scottish football and talking about the lower leagues, he scornfully asked how you could call yourself a professional club if you were paying a player £80 a week to play before a few hundred spectators. Well, at £80 a week such a player will be only a part-timer – but what’s wrong with that even if today. taking a pint of beer as a measure, eighty pounds will not go near as far as Tom Finney’s fourteen did seventy years ago?
That’s not really the point which is rather that in the bad times that are just around the corner we may find ourselves reverting to a different way of life and taking more interest in what’s immediately around us than in far distant fields.
Support your home team whether it’s amateur or at most semi-pro and you may get as much enjoyment from doing so as from paying the huge price of a ticket for a Premier League match. And you’ll have no difficulty in observing social distancing.