LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

indeed the best medicine, Akabusi will live to be 140. The problem for the rest of us is that while he was getting all the health benefits, we were stuck in the placebo group. Worse than that, the insane chortling that was doing him such a power of good had the disturbing side effect of raising the blood pressure in the rest of us.

      If there is an unflatteringly jealous tone in the above, the reason for that is simply put. Of all the human traits, the one I envy most is the Akabusian gift of being easily amused. In a dark and gruesome world, what ineffable bliss it must be to laugh uncontrollably at nothing until the ribcage creaks and the bladder screams for mercy.

      In what passed for his televisual heyday, when he was a presenter on Record Breakers and a guest on just about everything else, nothing – not one thing – Akabusi could hear would fail to strike him as outlandishly amusing. If the Shipping Forecast on Radio 4 revealed a high ridge of pressure moving towards South Utsira, he’d squeal with mirth. If the Hang Seng index in Hong Kong had been marked sharply up in brisk early trading, he would yelp and shake with merriment. If his GP had told him that he’d developed gangrene in both legs, and required an immediate double amputation, he’d have collapsed with mirth and crawled around on the floor until the limbs detached themselves of their own accord. In his commitment to laughing uncontrollably at the studiedly unfunny, he was a one-man Michael McIntyre audience long before that alleged comedian emerged to raise fresh doubts about the taste and even the sanity of his compatriots.

      Whether the unceasing screeching was genuine, possibly due to an undiagnosed neurological condition, or the stand-out feature of a construction designed to get him media work, it is impossible to be sure. I don’t remember his eyes laughing in tune with his mouth, but it was all a blessedly long time ago.

      Today, Mr Akabusi does what retired sportsmen with a TV future buried in the past tend to do. He is a motivational speaker, using silly voices, demented changes of decibel level (whispering one moment, yelling the next, neither volume remotely explained by the text), anecdotes and archive footage of relay triumphs to give new meaning and direction to the lives of those unable to find a televangelist at the right price.

      No doubt he makes a decent living from reliving the highlights of a decent career, and explaining to those unable to better the late King of Tonga’s personal best for the 60-metre dash how to adapt his athletic experiences to become better, happier and richer people. I hope so. There is no obvious malice in the man, and I wish him well.

      For all that, I can’t help thinking that that the only people for whom a talk from Kriss Akabusi would constitute an effective motivational force are members of the voluntary euthanasia society Exit.

      90

      Ronnie O’Sullivan

      For this possessor of the purest natural talent ever known to British sport – or games, for those who believe that a sine qua non of any authentic sport is that it leaves the player needing a shower – lavish allowances must be made. He is the scion of a family next to which the kith and kin of John Terry, engagingly Runyonesque though they are, look like the Waltons.

      Rocket Ronnie’s father remains a house guest of Her Majesty for murdering an alleged Kray associate in a restaurant in 1982, although he is up for parole, while the mother did a bit of bird herself for tax evasion. You needn’t have a doctorate in clinical psychology, or be a close student of the parental poetry of Philip Larkin, to appreciate the effects on a formative mind.

      The extent of Ronnie’s confusion and vulnerability was spotlighted a few years ago when, flailing about to make sense of his life, a little (a very little, perhaps) like Woody Allen in Hannah and Her Sisters, he turned for a spiritual guide to the boxer Naseem Hamed. Mr Hamed narrowly failed to shepherd Ronnie into the Muslim faith. He never did become Rahquet Rhani al Sull’ivan, but it was apparently a close call.

      However unlikely the image of this tortured, saturnine figure being called to prayer by the muezzin, the external discipline might have helped a man who conceded a best-of-seventeen-frame match to Stephen Hendry when 0–4 behind with a terse ‘I’ve had enough mate’, and whose notion of good grace in defeat, at the China Open of 2008, extended to bragging about the girth of his penis at the press conference, and inviting a female reporter to fellate him, before giving her a helpful demonstration by mistaking the head of his microphone for a lollipop.

      In the absence of that religious discipline, it becomes ever harder to overlook the contempt with which he treats his genius. At times, in fact, genius has seemed an inadequate word. Roger Federer is a genius, but always had to work devilishly hard to cope with the raging Mallorcan bull Rafael Nadal (and usually failed), and even the likes of Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray.

      At his best, O’Sullivan appears not to be working at all, potting balls at ridiculous speed and with absurd ease with either hand. Perhaps this explains why he seems not to value his gift at all. Often, in fact, he seems to resent it, and to wish it dead. As a fabled wit once observed – Oscar Wilde, perhaps, or possibly John Virgo – each man kills the thing he loves. Ronnie hasn’t killed it yet, but it seldom blossoms as gorgeously as it did, or as it should.

      Still harder to excuse is the contempt he shows his public. Whether or not his lip-curling disdain for snooker is sourced in insecurity he tries to cloak in contrived diffidence, his concession of frames when he needs a single snooker to win them has been getting on the top ones for too long.

      The disrespect he shows almost every rival other than John Higgins is more a comment on him, needless to say, than on them. Whenever the likable Mark Selby, who has the nickname ‘Jester’ for the compelling comedic rationale that he hails from Leicester, wins the last four frames to beat him, Ronnie makes it crystal clear that he doesn’t rate him, and hints at having thrown the match away because scrapping against so palpable an inferior is beneath his dignity.

      As for the continual threats to quit, no public figure in history has announced their retirement so often – yes, Streisand, that includes you – and reneged. He knows he can behave as boorishly, lewdly and disrespectfully as he wishes without that retirement being forced on him because he remains the biggest draw, if not the only one, in snooker, and that without him the dangerous decline of the game (a world championship sponsored by Pukka Pies, forsooth) might well become terminal. But the little-boy-lost act ran out of whatever minimal charm it had long ago. There comes a time in every wounded lamb’s life when, however much they fucked him up, his mum and dad, the leonine thing to do is not to roar but stoically to hide the misery and behave. At thirty-five, that time is now. If not, the next time he announces his retirement, he might find that the majority reaction isn’t a plea to reconsider, or even a weary shrug, but a sigh of relief.

      89

      Pelé

      If Pelé had shown the same talent with his feet as he has exhibited since retiring with his mouth, he would have been, at best, Emile Heskey. Never has the old saw that former sportsmen should be neither seen nor heard been more perfectly illustrated – and that includes such fellow entrants in this work as Mark Lawrenson, Sue Barker, Sebastian Coe and even Kriss Akabusi.

      Genius that he was on the pitch, off it he struggles to make the cut as a half-wit. You can barely wade through five pages of his autobiography without encountering a variant of ‘Once again, my business judgement sadly betrayed me.’ So it was that money troubles obliged him to advertise Viagra, thereby betraying our memories of the wonderfully lithe, natural seventeen-year-old striking talent who devastated Sweden in the 1958 World Cup final, and later electrified the 1970 tournament. The last thing you want from a sporting god is the image of him struggling with flaccidity.

      The same talent for misjudgement that caused his frequent flirtations with bankruptcy (you could sell him a batch of $103 bills for twice their face value) extends to his reading of the one thing he might be expected to know a little about. As a football pundit, Pelé is barely less mythical a figure than he once was in the yellow and blue of Brazil. Romario, a successor as leader of the Brazilian attack, once said, ‘Pelé is a poet when he keeps his mouth shut,’ while the World Cup-winning coach and briefly manager of Chelsea Luiz Felipe Scolari chipped in with this little gem: ‘I believe Pelé knows nothing about football. His analysis

Скачать книгу