Wimbledon (tennis)

Tennis? Formula One? Neither for me I’m afraid. I vaguely remember having two or three motor racing picture books – published by Swift I think – as a child and, although I loved those old black-and-white images of Fangio, Moss and assorted rally cars, my interest in any form of motor sport petered out after the age of ten. From memory, this must have been around the time my father refused to consider entering the Monte Carlo Rally even though I’d volunteered my services as navigator.

But this didn’t stop me developing an interest in a relatively wide range of sports in addition to football. I first went to a county cricket match aged eight, a test match aged nine and – at thirteen – I even went to an athletics international at the old White City. I was totally obsessed by the 1968 Olympics, listening to boxing on the radio and – to a lesser extent admittedly - I could also get reasonably excited by watching golf, swimming and the Winter Olympics on the telly.

Not tennis of course – and especially not bloody Wimbledon which often got in the way of the sacred test match coverage. Nor, as Chelston will be relieved to know, could I ever stomach show jumping which – as those of a certain age will testify – was unbelievably “massive” at one time. Good grief, I even remember Boring Bobby Charlton going on about the bloody Horse of the Year Show in his column in Goal magazine. Four faults for that, Bobby....foot in the water.

And, looking at my shelves, a couple of books show testimony to my wide-ranging interest in sport in those days. Firstly, there is the simply marvellous Encyclopaedia of Sport and Sportsmen published in 1966. This covers seventy-five sports - including bridge, cycle speedway, Eton fives, gliding and roller skating – with a football section compiled by Bernard Joy of the Evening Standard:

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Then, from 1972, I still have a copy of Rules of the Game edited by Billy Wright who, by that time, was head of sport at ATV in the midlands. This book contains the rules for eighteen sports and I must confess I’ve held on to it solely because it was awarded to me as Grammar Snob 4th Form Geography Swot of the Year. To be truthful I’m now beyond caring about the rules of water polo forty years ago:

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Thereafter I think I maintained a fairly wide interest in sport until well into my thirties. Certainly at various times I paid to watch athletics, baseball, basketball, boxing, cricket, greyhound racing, horse racing, rugby league, rugby union and speedway. Then, in 1988, I missed watching the entire Seoul Olympics on telly because I was changing jobs and moving half-the-length of the country. That, I soon realised, broke the spell and habit of televised sport and it’s never been the same for me since. Whereas as I once relished the yearly calendar of sporting events I now became slightly bored by yet another British Open, Grand National or whatever. I’m not sure if that’s just age, boredom, over-familiarity with recurring events or a deadening of the soul on my behalf. But, either way, it’s certainly something I would never expected as a young TV sports-watching obsessive. How could I be so indifferent to something I once loved and so enjoyed?

Mind you I guess that, although everybody on this site is interested in Torquay United, we’re all a bit different in our interest towards sport in general. Once upon-a-time I worked with a bloke called Nigel who was interested in football but no other sport. And, in football, he was only concerned with Huddersfield Town (literally, without exaggeration). That seemed rather extreme to my mind but I know plenty of other people who follow football without showing any interest in other sport at all. I’m not quite at that point myself because I follow other sports through the papers and on the radio but, yes, my sporting interests have narrowed. Maybe I should be disappointed by that and perhaps I should have been busily attempting to get tickets for all manner of events at the Olympics (as I’m sure I would have done had the Olympics been in this country any time between 1976 and around 1992 or 1996). As it happens I concentrated on getting tickets for the football at places such as Coventry, Newcastle and Hampden. Is anybody here off to the handball?