Or to be precise, I hate quite a lot of 'hearties' but most of all I hate, almost without discrimination, all the pursuits followed by 'hearties'. What I'm trying to say via this phony, public school voice I have adopted is that I loathe all sport! I am uneasily aware that within seconds, nay, nano-seconds, 'JK' will be diving through my blog history to find all those admissions I have made from time to time to the fact that first thing every morning I listen to 'TOOOOOORKSPOOOOOOORT', a radio station given over almost entirely to 'footie' matters with the occasional dollop of cricket and rugby thrown in.
Of course, like all 'men of a certain age' (which means old!) I look back to a 'golden era' in my youth when splendid chaps, and a few 'chapettes', excelled at various sporting activities and did so in the proper Corinthian manner, always abiding by the rules and prepared to admit that the best man won even when it was their opponent. Needless to say, winning at all costs, even including cheating, was unheard of. Yeah, yeah, I know, the other characteristic of old age is not only a bad memory but a selective one as well!
Of course, 'back in the day' we were not, so to speak, up front and personal with our sporting heroes in the way we are today with TV cameras and long distance mics. We would listen avidly to a BBC radio commentator describing a 'footie' match with perfect enunciation and without a hint of excitement and, of course, he would never describe the trajectory and make up of the gobbets of spit expelled by 'footie' players every five minutes which today we can see close up and in glorious technicolour in our sitting-rooms. We are no longer detached observers, instead we are in there with them, dammit, we can almost smell them!
The first time I noticed the rot setting in was when that loud-mouthed Irish-American, McEnroe, went off on one at Wimbledon aiming a torrent of abuse at the umpire. I say, old chap, I thought at the time, that's really not on, you know, this is Wimbledon! Actually, I didn't think that at all, I thought what a yob, why doesn't someone break a racket over his thick 'Oirish' skull? And thus was I, an innocent spectator, dragged down to his gruntish level.
I have tried very hard to think of a sport that has not yet descended to knuckle-dragging boorishness but the only one that just about maintains proper behavior is golf, although that is strained to the limit every two years by the Ryder Cup competition when the players come close to emulating the 'footie' yobs. Perhaps the greatest tragedy has been the descent into near criminality of track and field athletics where doping is rife. I think back with genuine nostalgia and fondness to those old black and white newsreels of Bannister breaking the 4-minute mile, a time when track and field was clean and honest.
Anyway, I'll just shuffle off now, muttering under my breath that things were never like that in my day ... oh dear me, no ...
