TODAYS HERALD REVEALS

There’s no shame attached to winning at all costs
An old pal got in touch this summer, a mere 22 years after I last saw him, which was the day our Dundee University Staff club side won a Scottish Small Clubs Cup semi-final.

Ally is among those fine products of Scottish private schools: cool and calm, bearing the demeanour of one always at ease with himself. We always got on well, but hardly as a consequence of great minds thinking alike. Renewed acquaintance has produced stimulating discussion.

A rugby lover, too, Ally is among many Murrayfield debenture holders who have stopped attending games in the professional era, having lost his sense of identification with the players.

He did go to St Etienne to watch Scotland play Italy - he cycled a mountain stage of the Tour de France while there - but found the best, most competitive World Cup to date dull and uninspiring. He was particularly disappointed in the performance of the first Scotland side to beat a higher ranked team at a World Cup tournament, because they did not play prettily enough.

Therein lies a fundamental difference in outlook and, worryingly, I'm sure Ally's is in tune with the vast majority in the Scottish rugby community. Over beers and e-mails he has argued that playing with grace and style is crucial to draw spectators.

Personally, I believe he does not understand that elite professional sport is about winning at almost all costs, confusing its purpose with the pleasure to be taken from amateur sporting activity.

I explained how I'd commended Neil Back for illegally knocking the ball out of Peter Stringer's hands to win the 2002 Heineken European Cup final for Leicester; how I felt like dancing round the room when, confronted by an English interviewer's hints that he had behaved despicably, Mike "Mr Cricket" Hussey, replied last winter: "You get enough bad decisions as well as good ones, mate. I will never walk."

In particular, those brought up at fine institutions which spend as much time drumming honour codes into people as they do on technique will be appalled by such sentiments.

Yet, unlike in golf where cheating is totally unacceptable, sports run by fallible officials whose word is law on every incident leave professional sportsmen with what is almost an obligation to team-mates, employers, supporters and their own dependents to work the system. Playing nice is a luxury for those with time and money to burn.

In the course of this debate, Ally thought he had an ace up his sleeve. His wife recently opened a sports shop, the Running Company, in Bridge of Allan. Among the services provided is specialist sports massage from Angela Mudge, the world champion hill runner.

He wanted me to meet Angela because he thought she would offer me a new perspective as a champion whose gentle demeanour, as he saw it, hardly tied in with the kind of uncompromising outlook I was espousing. Yet Nathan Hines is a likeable fellow off the pitch too, so when I met Angela I was not surprised.

"He doesn't think I'm competitive, apparently," she chuckled when I invited her reaction to Ally's view of her. "You have a different mentality when you are racing. Your race brain kicks in. If I'm cycling home and some punter goes past me on the bike I'm not going to let him go past. It just kicks in doesn't it?"

With very little of it available in her sport, Angela is not motivated by money, merely the burning need to be the best she can possibly be.

During our dialogue I referred Ally to the observation of leading American Football coach Bill Parcells that "this is not a sport for well-adjusted people". He might have been talking about any full-time, professional sport.

Ally, a much more gifted athlete than I, persuaded me last weekend to join his running group. Naturally he finished miles ahead of this out-of-shape hack. Trouble is he got away at the start and thereafter there was no chance to get in a levelling whack at the ankles.

I'll get him one day, though.

It would, of course, be lovely to be like him, meeting the world with a ready smile and elegant charm. Yet we over-competitive souls have our uses too. Instead of programming it out of us - 20 years of killing competitive sport in state schools seemed designed to do so - the secret is surely to channel such individuals early into areas where they can gain some sense of self-satisfaction and maybe even work for the common good too.

Had I found the right sport early maybe, just maybe, my mindset was such that I would have been a contender. In terms of talent, Ally unquestionably could have been . . . it just never mattered enough. Lucky sod!

12:32am today



By KEVIN FERRIE, Chief Rugby Writer

This article was posted on 15-Nov-2007, 08:12 by Hugh Barrow.