Sporting snobbery
At Wimbledon I noticed that the famous statue of Fred Perry by the Church Road entrance, our last male winner of the tournament, had been removed. I presume to somewhere else, but it wouldn't be out of keeping if they had decided to be done with him altogether.Perry, the working-class son of a Labour MP, was not one to shout his grievances from the rooftops, but wrote of 'the shabby way I was treated when I won Wimbledon in 1934'. Shabby is an understatement. The head of the All England Club apologised to Perry's defeated Australian opponent, ruefully noting that it was shame that kind of man' had to win.
There can be no doubt that snobbery of this sort has been, at least in part, responsible for Britain's poor historical record at sports that it mostly invented. The ethos of the 'amateur' combined snobbery, hypocrisy (amateurs often got paid more than professionals) and incompetence, beautifully illustrated in this 1939 cricketing tale of Ross Mckibben's:
In congratulating David Sheppard on his century for Cambridge against Gloucestershire at Briston, Tom Graveny [a professional] called him 'David' whereupon his skipper [Basil Allen] rounded on him with the remark 'He's Mister Sheppard to you'. Allen later went into the Sussex dressing-room and said to David Sheppard 'I must apologise for Graveney's impertinence. I think you'll find it won't happen again.
posted by Matthew @ 7/05/2005 09:26:00 PM
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