One of my proudest achievements as a schoolboy was the PE report that I picked up when I was about thirteen: ‘Morgan-Grenville,’ it said ‘is just about keeping his end up in the bottom group.’
There is so much in that report to savour, from the damning with praise so faint that it would need a seismometer to pick it up, to the ‘ooh matron’ suggestiveness of what it was I was actually keeping up. Even the idea of a ‘bottom group’ carries with it the comforting solidity of complete uselessness, and is a far cry from the ‘everyone’s a winner’ stuff of nowadays. My parents, who were paying good money to receive these reports three times a year, turned out to be rather less worried about my uselessness at PE than they were about the state of my bedroom at home. They never mentioned it.
Fast forward nearly half a century, and I like to think that I have kept up my commitment to an almost unheard of level of sporting incompetence but, unlike many others, I have continued to play as many sports as I can, as often as I can. In a fair world, where brilliance was routinely settled upon the heads of those who worked longest at it, I would be unstoppable.
Aside from one blip in 1983 when I ran a marathon in 2 hours 58 minutes and 57 seconds, proving merely that I could devour any sport that required no greater skill than putting one foot in front of another 20,000 times, I have loyally maintained my uselessness. From time to time, with a rasping backhand here, and a sharp slip catch there, I have bucked the trend, but, generally, I have been the one that makes others shine. That, I think, is my role in life.
Even this week, my unfortunate partner and I suffered the indignity of a 6-0, 6-1 second round exit from the Petworth mens’ doubles tournament (please note: second round, in case you are thinking that I am a complete pushover). And don’t underestimate the importance of that ‘1’ in the second set; any old fool can go down to a doughnut, but it takes skill and commitment to get onto the scoreboard, just on the scoreboard. Even this truncated cricket season, my scores have been, respectively, 5, 1 and 0, which raises the delicious prospect of where that sequence will go tomorrow, at Coldharbour. Logically, I will be fined a run for being late, and then be out first ball, for a minus 1. I haven’t bowled, haven’t caught anything and have conceded captaincy duties to someone who is younger and better than me, and yet my commitment to playing and enjoying cricket is still complete. When I last played golf, I stopped counting quite early on, and moved seamlessly from strokeplay (which is a ghastly incremental humiliation) to matchplay, when you can only go down by one point a hole.
I have always thought that society is far too interested in the small group of people who are brilliant at things, and not nearly interested enough in the vast cohort of us who exist only to make them look better. Quite apart from anything, there are so many more of us in the second group, that numerically it makes sense to give us more respect. Mediocrity is a much under-rated virtue, as is its close cousin, anonymity; cloaked in those two, it has to be said, are many of the people that I hold most dear.
What I hope it means is that I can go on ploughing my sporting furrow for some years to come. At Chatsworth, a few years ago, we played against a man who was in his late seventies. Three or four overs into his personal innings, he suddenly walked back to the pavilion without anything having obviously happened to cause it.
‘What’s up with him?’ I asked the umpire.
‘Retired.’ He said blankly.
‘Retired hurt?’ I asked
‘No. Retired tired,’ he came back.
Now that is the kind of sportsman that I want to be.
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