 I have a piece in the Feb 2012 issue of Prospect magazine, on squash. Here’s one I did last year, on wrestling (August 2011):
By the end of this July’s ‘second chance sale’, over three and a half million tickets had been sold for the 26 sports making up the London 2012 Olympics. There were seats unsold for football and volleyball, but the only individual discipline with tickets left over was freestyle wrestling. In the competition for least-loved Olympic sport in Britain, freestyle wrestling was the winner.
What is it, exactly, that no-one is in a rush to see? Freestyle wrestling differs from all-male Greco-Roman wrestling (sold-out) in three ways. Holds below the waist are allowed, the legs may be used in both attack and defense, and since 2004 the sport has included four weight-categories for women.
Not enough, it would seem, for a nation of discerning sports-fans, even though the highlights play well to rock music. The crisis moment of a freestyle bout is a flurry of explosive athleticism, bodies driven hard into the ground and wrestlers in barely credible contortions, legs awry and ears cauliflowered to the mats.
In 3000 years the objective of a wrestling contest has barely changed – to overpower and gain total control over an opponent. This can take a while. A bout at the 1912 Olympics lasted eleven hours and forty minutes, which led to the introduction of a points-scoring system. Points require rules: wrestling would never be so simple again.
At London 2012 the freestyle wrestlers will grapple on a circular area nine meters in diameter for three two minute sessions in a best-of-three contest. If a session ends in a draw, there is a thirty-second tie-break mechanism called The Clinch. The attacking wrestler locks his arms around one of the defender’s legs and has thirty seconds to make a decisive move. This is more complicated than it looks.
The Clinch was not a feature of wrestling as first recorded at the Olympic games of 708 BC. This was a direct hand-to-hand contest to discover the fortius in the Olympic refrain of Citius Altius Fortius (Faster Higher Stronger). It soon became evident that in wrestling ‘stronger’ requires brain in addition to brawn, strategy before a fall. The philosopher Plato (meaning ‘broad’) was a keen wrestler, and his name may have been decided by his wrestling coach.
As a sales angle, the cerebral side of wrestling doesn’t appear to have worked. The chief executive of the British Wrestling Association, Colin Nicholson, calls freestyle wrestling ‘combat chess’, and while the combat can be astonishing the chess is a problem. The technical manoeuvring for a hold or a takedown registers in minor shifts of balance and leverage, almost imperceptible to the casual spectator. The psychological battleground, so vivid to the competitor, is masked by stoicism and concentration.
Olympic wrestling must also contend with the shadow of what it is not. The razzamatised World Wrestling Entertainment organization pushes televised wrestling as pure ‘sports entertainment’. By comparison, Olympic wrestling can seem like fighting with the entertainment taken out. Nicholson would like to change this perception.
‘We’ll have at least three wrestlers involved in London 2012 because of the wildcard entries for the host nation. Unfortunately, for each wrestler we qualify by right we lose one of those places, but our objective is at least one top-eight finish.’
Televised wrestling has always understood the importance of personalities. At London 2012 the British wrestler to watch is Ukrainian-born Yana Stadnik, a 48 kg silver medalist at the 2010 European Championships. For the men, Britain’s top freestyle hope is Bristol’s 96 kg fighter Leon Rattigan.
Olympic success can revive an obscure sport – curling is the most obvious recent example. The next best shortcut is to get a sport into schools. All sports administrators know this, but wrestling has the advantage of needing little or no equipment. It is more controlled than boxing but can claim similar benefits as a self-help sport – encouraging self-control, self-confidence, self-esteem. The British Wrestling Association can plausibly claim that wrestling leads to ‘greater physical development’ (muscles! – wrestlers are ripped), ‘flexibility, strength, balance, co-ordination and razor-sharp reactions’.
If Olympic medals and school sportsdays remain a distant ambition, the fate of wrestling is more likely to be influenced by immigration. The arrival of fighters from Eastern Europe, a stronghold of world wrestling, can provide a solid base for future British participation and success. The Olympic pot currently pays for wrestling’s full-time chief executive, an administrator and a national coach. Five wrestlers have received funding. The brooms will be out after London 2012, but there is hope for spending rounds to come – wrestling will also feature at the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games.
Between now and next August the wrestlers will be working hard at the British Wrestling Academy, a low-roofed single-storey gym in Salford (bookable for events). By then, the last seats at the Excel centre will surely have been sold, as this is a rare chance in Britain to see the world’s best compete at one of the original Olympic sports. Wrestling may not have fared well in the ticketing ballot, but it is a sporting truth that someone has to come last. Otherwise there would be no winners.
 Sorry, but boo. This was the Rugby World Cup that was going to extend rugby’s horizon. The game would show a surprising new face in unfamiliar surroundings to hundreds of thousands of potential start-up fans and players. Then the IRB decided to give RWC 2011 to New Zealand, and not Japan. This was a gift not just of the Cup, but of the cup too. Not even the flakey All Blacks could fail to win the Webb Ellis trophy with home advantage, though they tried their best, offering at the last a glimmer of hope to anyone who loves the game.
That hope was extinguished. The All Blacks held on for their win that had been ordained since the IRB decision in 2006. There were no surprises. The All Blacks win their first World Cup since 1987, thus bringing to an end the narrative spice that has made the first 24 years of the Rugby World Cup such a success: the All Blacks will be the best team and they will not win. Think how rugby would have closed in on itself if New Zealand had triumphed each time they assembled the best team in the tournament: 1995, 1999, 2003, 2007. Only New Zealanders have shed a tear over their team’s failure to kill the sport stone dead.
Now that they’ve managed to win again, albeit at home by one point to a limited French side, the rugby world should stop the toxic mixture of pity and cowering that has characterised the IRB relationship to the All Blacks. New Zealand rugby administrators have played a smart game ever since they politically outmanouevred the Japanese in the bidding for RWC 2011. In their black jackets and black ties they work both sides: as a small nation with limited revenue New Zealand needs special dispensations before the World Cup becomes too big for their limited infrastructure. They spin a story which says poor little New Zealand.
Conveniently, this obscures the fact that in rugby terms New Zealand is a superpower, and not averse to bullying those with less political rugby muscle. Witness their bleating in the middle of this World Cup that they might not have enough money to attend the next one. Here was the classic double-play – ‘poor us’ immediately followed by an implied threat. Do what we want or we won’t be coming.
Let’s hope that the All Black administration can now put aside its self-pity, and see that rugby has interests outside the land of the long white cloud. Their bullying, whining insistence (yes, both at the same time – not pretty) that this World Cup be held in New Zealand has set back the ambitions of the game by at least eight years. However great a success this tournament might have been inside New Zealand, from outside it has been a drag. The story ended exactly as predicted. Each time an intriguing narrative threatened to make the tournament interesting, it was snuffed out by conservative play or incomprehensible refereeing.
Well done New Zealand. We no longer pity you. I hope that means we can stop indulging the caprice of your unhelpful rugby politics.
 'Let's Google him.' There aren’t many upsides to being a regular visitor to hospital, especially if you work there. This is the message I sometimes received from the nurses last year when I was in the Oxford JR to have my knee sewn back together.
This year, I ensured my regular summer bed on Ward 2A by breaking apart the other knee. I thought after a year of economic stagnation the situation might have deteriorated. Maybe the curtains hadn’t been washed since last July (my enduring memory of a year 2000 birth at RUH Bath was of bloodstains on the curtain. Not the one round the bed. The one at the window).
In fact the John Radcliffe Trauma Ward had been restaffing in Portugal and Ireland. Both nurses (one male, one female) were lovely and young and, I felt, wonderfully kind because they knew no better. Whatever has stood still in the UK over the last year, the equivalent has been going backwards fast in Portugal and Ireland – they’ve been manufacturing nurses they can’t afford to employ. The UK is taking advantage, especially as the UK salary of a first-year nurse is less than the same nurse receives in training while over the Irish Sea.
Staring at the clean curtains, and then the view towards North Oxfordshire and Chipping Mordor, I was mostly in sombre mood. Back so soon a second time, I wondered if there was something I hadn’t learned properly the first time. It might have been the inadvisability of applying logic to surgical situations. Calculating, for example, that every surgeon has his first solo job.
So thank god for anaesthetists, who take away all responsibility for rational thought. They apply the heavy medicine, and then make smalltalk until the anvil falls.
‘What do you do?’
‘I’m a writer.’
‘Are you famous?’
I have a stock answer to this not unfamiliar question. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Especially among people who know who I am.’ This has the advantage of being both clever and true, and avoids the embarrassment of getting into actual numbers. (‘Hundreds? Thousands? Have you been on the telly?’)
But no, on this occasion oblivion was imminent and I thought blow it. I’m about to go under the knife, I may never wake up, so what is the value of elegant deflection at a time like this?
‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘Yes I am.’
Which were, probably, my last words, and contented I fell asleep.
Two hours later, when I woke up, the anaesthetist made a point of coming over.
‘We googled you while you were under,’ she said, and not in an unimpressed kind of way. I smiled. Probably the soulful morphine, but also because I did learn something the second time round. Self-deprecation is rubbish.
 but with cricket pads on Eleven months ago, I jumped high into the air to catch a cricket ball. When I landed, without the ball in my hand, I ruptured the patella tendon in my right knee. This meant that the top half of my leg was no longer connected, in any active sense of the word, to the bottom half.
I had an operation, and wore a leg brace for twelve weeks, but as a keen sportsman I know the strength to be gained from cliché. It’s how you bounce back. I could return stronger than I ever was.
Yes and no. After Christmas I got myself fit – a bit of running, a spot of cycling. I started the cricket season at the end of May and have been averaging a mundane but not unsatisfactory 30 or so. Yesterday, towards the end of the innings, I set off at a fair clip for my 45th run of the afternoon.
I ruptured the patella tendon in my left knee.
It was no consolation to recognise the drill: the ambulance on the field, the friendly paramedic called Kirsty, the ins and outs of Accident and Emergency before the taxi home at eleven pm after six hours on a trolley with a copy of Grazia magazine.
Rupturing a patella tendon, so the doctors and nurses said (again), is a very rare injury. In seven years the registrar hadn’t seen a single instance, until yesterday when he saw two in the same pair of legs. There is no accepted reason for the snap to happen, so inevitably the brain scrambles for connections – coffee not tea before the match; the ball I should have hit differently in the over before; the greater disaster from which this providential injury, in ways that I can never hope to comprehend, saves me. In six hours, Grazia long finished and forgotten, I imagined many alternate universes.
The over-powering feeling, ultimately, is the dread. Not because of what happened last year, but what would have happened tens of thousands of years ago. My heart knows this (although my brain picked it up from an episode of Timewatch) – the weak and injured will slip to the back of the herd, and are the first to be eyed by panthers.
I’ve seen programmes solving the puzzle of Neolithic skeletons, young in the bone and dying with no obvious sign of violence. With modern forensics, the cause always turns out to be the teeth or the joints. The teeth are bad so the creature couldn’t eat (this also applies to dinosaurs). Look – the knee joint has wasted away. The nomadic tribe does not wait for the injured.
The lions, the tigers, they know. They see me slipping to the back. All they need do is wait, and sometimes they don’t even do that.
 In 2003, I went to Japan as Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo, a post that had evolved from the Professorship held in 1924 by the First World War poet Edmund Blunden. Blunden wrote the prose account of his wartime experiences, Undertones of War, in the shadow of the University’s grand Red Gate referring only to some trench-maps and his anxious unforgetting.
Blunden’s time in Tokyo was immensely productive, inspiring new poems, edited texts, critical commentaries. He also kept up with his beloved cricket (there is a separate chapter on Cricket in Barry Webb’s definitive biography). However, my own combination of interests meant that while teaching in his shadow I was presented with a literary scoop, or so I hope.
I had largely forgotten about this until now, but in one of my classes I had the pleasure of teaching Mr Iba, a mature student and former President of the Tokyo University Rugby Club. He had read Muddied Oafs, and enthusiastically introduced me to a spirited live version of the Tokyo University Rugby Club song. I was intrigued that it should be in English, and before long we were both researching its provenance.
We eventually discovered that the poem had been written in 1924 and presented to Mr Kayama, a rugby enthusiast who had written the first book about the sport’s development in Japan.
[A mini-extract, as kindly translated by Mr Iba:
1. We play Rugby to satisfy our Fighting Spirits sleeping in our blood.
2. But, We have to control it by our Gentlemanship.]
Blunden scholars will surely let me know if this lyric has surfaced in the past. If not, I hesitantly claim the rediscovery of a lost work by Edmund Blunden, two verses of poetry that remain a living force in twenty-first century Japan.
Up, Up!
I hear from winters long ago
Resounding to the frosty sky
The shouts of “Feet, feet, feet!” “Go low!”
The splendid roar that hailed the try.
I hear from winters yet to come
Those old glad cries from new throats hurled,
And feel, when you and I are dumb,
Still Rugby will refresh the world.
Friend, may this book of yours advance
This noble sport in old Japan
Till your disciples take on France,
England, New Zealand; when they can,
May we be there to swell the cheers
That loud and brilliant will proclaim
‘Japan’s first try!’ In after years,
Could your heart wish a happier fame?
I hope I can contribute to the happy posthumous fame of Mr Kayama, who was an apostle for rugby in the early days in Japan. The optimistic, global sentiment of the last line of Blunden’s first verse also seems fitting in a World Cup Year.
 The poem is still sung boisterously to round off Tokyo University Rugby Club functions, to the tune shown here (and Mr Iba intends to have it sung at his funeral). The music was composed by Mr Ryo Watanabe, in 1925, so the song (or Yell, as it is now known by the rugby club) was written soon after Blunden’s arrival. Perhaps he had a few hours to fill: later he would design his own cricket net, and set it up in the local park to await visits from anyone who had ever held a bat.
Edmund Blunden, sports nut, I salute you.
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About Me
About Richard Beard
I'm a novelist and non-fiction writer, and Director of The National Academy of Writing in London. As time goes by I'm gradually transferring the material from the old site (stories, articles, squibs) into the categories tabbed above. There's information on each of my books, with summaries and reviews, and now that I'm permanently back in the country I'm available for events and readings. Email me using Contact, below. I'll get back to you.
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I have a piece in the Feb 2012 issue of Prospect magazine, on squash. Here’s one I did last year, on wrestling (August 2011):
