Ken Jones: Question talent and performance, but leave a competitor's heart out of it

Published 30 years ago, Roger Kahn's book The Boys of Summer is the story of his love affair with the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team of the 1950s; the story of the players as they were in their prime, and what became of them in retirement. It also contains a powerful truth about games playing that laypersons, critics of every kind, seldom, if ever, consider.

Kahn describes an incident during training that forever altered his perception of professional baseball. When idly watching a pitcher Clem Labine at work with a troublesome arm, Kahn was asked to stand over the batters plate to assist with control and direction. Kahn picked up a bat and took a normal stance. "Don't swing. Stay perfectly still," he heard the catcher say. The catcher had no mask.

Kahn wrote: 'Walker [the catcher] squatted and Labine threw a sinker. Although Labine was not regarded as very fast, and was complaining about his arm, the ball exploded past the plate with a sibilant whoosh, edged by a buzzing as of hornets. I had never heard a thrown ball make that sound before. The ball seemed to accelerate as it came closer; an accelerating, impossibly fast pitch that made the noises of hornets and snakes."

Again, Kahn crouched, watching the ball approach. "I was paralysed. Then, at what seemed to be the last millisecond, the spinning ball grabbed air and hooked away from my head over the plate. Labine threw another curve, wincing. Through a resolute act of will I held my ground. The impulse was not simply to duck, but to throw away the bat and throw my body to the thick-bladed Florida grass... I could no more have swung, let alone hit, one of Labine's pitches than run a three-minute mile."

Back in the press room Kahn drank an early scotch and then another. He began to sweat and then the shock gave way to something deeper. The game the Dodgers played, the game he wrote about, wasn't his game. It was too full of menace.

Since England's overwhelming defeat in the first Test a number of correspondents have twitched in mortification. The crisis they see is not so much one of technique as nerve. By implication, some of these self-admiring fellows suggest that England's only hope of avoiding total embarrassment in Australia is to acquire the services of someone expert in skills pioneered by Dr Christian Barnard.

They are on dodgy ground. Questioning a sports performer's competence is one thing, but questioning his courage without having any clear idea of what he actually goes through is something else.

Once, I happily arranged for a fellow tradesman to obtain his first experience of live professional boxing. Fighting, I told him, is not a coward's business, no matter how much the air might be polluted by cries that one or other of the contestants is gutless. Having previously seen boxing only on television, he sat uncomfortably through a punishing contest without uttering a word. On our way out he turned to me and said: "God, I didn't realise just how hard these people hit each other."

A thought comes back to me. Reporting on Hogan Kid Bassey's loss of the world featherweight title to Davey Moore on a 13th-round retirement in 1959, two prominent British sports columnists of the day implied that Bassey had quit. A few days afterwards, a still photograph of Bassey as he looked at the end of the contest was shown on television while the offending words were read out. Both Bassey's eyes were closed, blood seeped from a grotesquely swollen mouth. "That," the presenter pointedly said, "is the face of a coward." One of the columnists was furious. Threatened legal action. He should have been ashamed of himself.

I know of a sportswriter who could not bear to watch as Mike Tyson ripped into Larry Holmes in Atlantic City; another who turned ashen during a particularly violent cup tie between Leeds and Manchester United; another who fainted after watching a doctor stitch a wounded Manchester City player after a Cup final at Wembley.

Courage is easy to find in the press box, in the comfort of an office, up at the bar. Not so easy on the field of play. Defeat, particularly humiliating defeat, confirms the player's worst fear of himself. He is not effective, after all, not truly competent, not manly in a crisis. He stands naked, before an unflattering mirror, hearing hard laughter that includes our own.