KENNETH Wolstenholme was a decent, rather plodding sort of a commentator, but for the supreme ten seconds of his professional life he was a genius. And it is 40 years since he uttered the words that have been part of folklore ever since, long before a quiz show was named in their honour.
I remember at the time, even in the moment of glory itself, being struck by their perfect appropriateness. “Some people are on the pitch — they think it’s all over. It is now!” But rising to the greatest of occasions is the least of the sporting commentator’s task. The best commentator does not tell you what is happening, he enriches your experience of what is happening. He does this by means of insight. But it’s not necessarily insight in the technique or tactics or personality. Rather, it is an understanding of the event itself and what it means to those who watch or listen.
This is a continuing process, a long-term relationship that builds up over the course of sporting seasons. When I first met Richie Benaud, I had known him for years. So have we all, which is why he was given a standing ovation at the Oval last summer when he completed his final commentary stint in England. “Very embarrassing,” he said.
Tough. You have to take this sort of thing when you have enriched our sporting lives.
The commentator’s art is important for all of us who watch sport because the majority of us watch most, if not all, of our sport on television. Commentators are vitally important people in our sporting lives and yet they are mocked worse than anybody. We allow the sneerers and the mockers to set the agenda in too many areas of our lives and, according to the mocker’s view, all commentators are word-fumbling, metaphor- mixing fools who live — “quite literally”, as many a commentator has said — with a foot in their mouth.
Before we continue, then, let us reject Colemanballs and all the mean-spiritedness that this involves.
Commentators get it wrong, sometimes amusingly. This is inevitable. Try muttering a commentary yourself and see how you get on. You will get farther and farther behind the play, stuttering, hesitating, misidentifying and finding your mouth saying all kinds of peculiar things that you never say in conversation. What is remarkable is how few, not how many, Colemanballs there are.
Rather, let us celebrate what the great commentators give us. And no, it is not their professionalism. Professionalism is not what makes a good commentator. Professionalism is merely the minimum requirement of this and any other professional task. Being a great commentator is not only a matter of doing your homework. Take Peter O’Sullevan. He was not a great commentator because he always knew the name of every horse in the race. He was a great commentator because his voice ached with passion for what he was doing.
He loved the sport, he was potty about it. And here is the point: he communicated that love, invited us all to share that love. He didn’t tell us about it all in highly coloured language, but it all came out in the incomparable warmth of his voice. He loved what he was talking about, he loved to share it. It is this generosity that is the key to all great commentators — the desire to share.
The listener, the viewer, is invited to become an insider, a co-conspirator. The great commentator is never a show in his own right, never steals the thunder from the action. He couldn’t do that; he loves the action too much. He has a little irony and perspective, for sure. He doesn’t take sport entirely at its own valuation. But he’d rather be watching this sport with you than anything else on earth and he doesn’t need to say so because his voice tells you.
That is the illusion that the great commentators beguile us with; that is the persona they present to you. They inform you, but never hectoringly or gloatingly. By the end of last summer, half the country was expert in reverse swing. It just happened, because the Ashes action was enthralling and its presentation utterly beguiling.
Broadcasting has splintered and fragmented beyond recognition since sports commentary began. The personal relationship between listener and commentator is harder to establish, harder to maintain. Football commentators, away from the top people on every channel, tend to a kind of hysterical sycophancy.
The founding fathers of the genre of sporting commentary come from the days when the BBC ruled sport as Queen Victoria ruled the Empire. They are apostles of broadcast sport: O’Sullevan, Dan Maskell, Bill McLaren, John Arlott, the eternally and unjustly reviled David Coleman. Coleman made the flickering black-and-white images become solid. He made the heroes and heroines live because he breathed his own breathless, excited, quite remarkable life into them.
Each sport presents its own difficulties, each medium — television, radio — its different challenge. But the common thing is generosity. We need the knowledge and the insight, we need the journalistic skills (shut up and tell us the bloody score).
Arlott talked on the radio “to the blind man who was once sighted”, Benaud speaks only when he has something worth saying, which is about four times as often as people who spoke four times as much. Whispering Ted Lowe was taken ill during a stint of snooker commentary and was silent for something like eight minutes — perhaps the ultimate piece of commentary.
Sports commentators are the conduits of our sporting joy. The good ones bring the action from the field of play to the sitting-room with a seamless ease, the great ones add something of their own. What they add is their generosity, their humanity. Find it in the wit of Arlott — “and that ball went through Boycott’s defence like a bullet through a hole in a Henry Moore” — or find it in glorious understatement.
I leave you with my vote for the finest line of commentary, from O’Sullevan on the victory of Attivo in the Triumph Hurdle at Cheltenham in 1974, delivered without additional flourish and without additional restraint, but, as always, with relish; as always, inviting you to share even this, the greatest of all racing moments: “And it’s first Attivo . . . trained by Cyril Mitchell . . . ridden by Robert Hughes . . . owned by Peter O’Sullevan . . .”
