Sport is an inexhaustible source of good conversation and friendly disputation. The other day I was conversing with a group of friends who, like myself, find nothing more companionable and enjoyable than holding forth on the latest events and controversies in the world of sport.
For some reason the talk departed from recent victories like India’s in the Champions’ Trophy and the Miami Heat in that classic NBA Final against San Antonio and the extraordinary victory of Andy Murray at Wimbledon and turned to what it was like to lose, and lose
catastrophically, in sport. The world of the also-ran is a very worthy subject. In any such discussion I am capable of holding my own since in my own sporting career I had a good deal of experience in losing – which, of course, made it all that much sweeter when one sometimes had a victory. Which, in turn, is a salient point about life itself I dare say.
One thing I can say with some certainty is that the so-called ‘24 hour rule’ ( in sport a loss or a win hurts or elates for 24 hours and then you move on) invoked by the great Roger Federer at the press conference after his stunning second-round loss at Wimbledon – that rule is pure nonsense!
In the talk I was able to give examples of famous record-breaking losers in sport which I have collected over the years. In Japan in July, 1981, the Osaka Seikei Women’s Junior College beat the Konan Women’s Junior College by 221-0 to record what must be the most lopsided score in the history of basketball.
And in cricket surely the heaviest defeat in the history of the game was inflicted in a league game in Lahore in December, 1984, by Pakistan Railways who scored 910 for 6 declared and then bowled out the hopeless Ismail Khan eleven for 32 and 27. In football, in 1975, in a Scottish Ladies league match Edinburgh Dynamos beat Lochend Thistle 42-0. Also in my list of glorious failure in sport is Dolinar of Yugoslavia who in the final of the 1955 World Table Tennis Championships lost to quicksilver Tanaka of Japan in 13 minutes flat including time spent changing ends, towelling down, retrieving Tanaka’s bullet smashes from among the spectators and bowing and shaking hands at the end.
And my favourite loser in big-time cricket was the New Zealander, Jack Rutherford, who famously started his Test career with a string of scores which, as one pitiless Jamaican commentator put it, reads like an international telephone number: 010-202-3003, something like that.
One of the most memorable ‘losers’ in sport has a lesson for all who do not win but have the good fortune to be associated with greatness all the same. Recall the case of Malcolm Nash. Cricket lovers will remember his name as long as the game lasts: he was the man Gary Sobers hit for six sixes in one over in that Notts versus Glamorgan country match years and years ago. Sobers himself tells a very interesting story about the episode.
As they were walking off the field together at the end of the innings Sobers couldn’t help noticing that Nash was looking not at all down-in-the-mouth, almost grinning in fact. So he said to Nash: “Hey, Malcolm, you don’t look like a man who has just been clobbered for six sixes in six balls!” And Nash waved his hand at Sobers and made the significant reply: “To tell the truth, Gary, I feel pretty good. You’re not the only one going into the record books you know!”
For every great champion there are thousands of also-rans. Without this mighty throng of run-of-the-mill aspirants, without the anonymous army of try and try again competitors, without them all, it goes without saying, sport would not survive.
And amongst these there are always one or two in any game anywhere who stand out as hopelessly, magnificently, memorably bad and, strangely enough, they are very often among our favourite characters in sport. Anyone who knows sport will know what I mean. What would any game be without the loser who loses so spectacularly that he becomes a winner?
When I was a youth in Trinidad there was a man called A Simmonds who played in all the tennis tournaments. He was always beautifully turned out at the start of every match. He was deadly serious about his game, he practised hard, and he always played his heart out, sweat pouring off him in streams, his knees often bleeding from hurling himself about on the clay courts.
But he never won a match, and by never I mean never. In 10 years he was beaten in the first round of every tournament he entered and then in the first round of the Consolation event for first-round losers. But he never despaired. His entry would always be one of the first in the lists. By the time I came on the scene he was a great figure in Trinidad tennis.
Crowds used to gather to see his matches and urge him on. Tennis would have been much the poorer without him. And, I remember to this day, much better even than some famous Brandon and Davis Cup matches in later years, the time I watched in a crowd of excited spectators as A Simmonds won his very first match; it was a first round Plate match and he won 10-8 in the final set after a heroic struggle against a youngster of 13 just beginning in the game.
But he won and lifted his arms in glory after all those years of trying, and it was as if he’d won Wimbledon. Later the Club captain cracked a bottle of champagne and to resounding cheers everyone toasted A Simmonds to the high heavens. And who will say he did not deserve it?
