mechanics of grace, The

Spectator, The, Jun 26, 1999 by Kavanagh, P J

P. J. Kavanagh

GREEN FADING INTO BLUE

by Alan Ross

Deutsch, L17.99, pp. 232

C. B. FRY: AN ENGLISH HERO

by Iain Wilton

Metro, L25, pp. 498

Joe Davis, world snooker champion for 20 years running - in the days before television discovered that the green table fitted neatly inside the screen - told Alan Ross that he began to play when he was 11 years old. `That's the time to start. It's like music or ballet, you have to grow up with it.' Like music or ballet. . . that's the trouble with descriptive sports writing; to convey the beauty of a cricket stroke, or the run of a wing three-quarter in rugby, it's tempting to bring in Mozart or Nijinsky, and the sceptical reader sniffs pretentiousness, or at least disproportion.

In Green Fading into Blue, a collection of a couple of decades of sporting pieces, Alan Ross avoids this danger by, on the whole, concentrating on the appearances and mannerisms of great protagonists, and these are indeed among the great delights of sport-watching. `The most noticeable thing about Peter May's appearance was his parting, a clean, undeviating line from crown to temple'; this could do as a description of May's batting. Their social background: `Trueman, hair blackly flopping over a face that never lost an industrial pallor.' Overall impression: Brian Lara: 'A small Buddha, perhaps, some musk or incense emanating from his waistcoat. But when in mid-afternoon he decides to leave the field for a moment you feel it is not nature calling but his broker.'

Time and again he explains with a phrase, to those of us who share his passion, why it is that we do so. He describes Derek Randall's fidgets, his posture of a disjointed rag-doll leaking sawdust. Then: `At the wicket, the body suddenly settles, the head stills. He freezes like somebody waiting for an old-fashioned photographer to get under his hood. Meanwhile a butterfly could alight on him with perfect confidence.'

Ross reviews the autobiography of that phenomenon C. B. Fry, whom he cannot have seen play, and here can only register the mild puzzlement Fry's life inevitably evokes. An English international footballer and cricketer and world long-jump recordholder while still an undergraduate, `the handsomest man in England', classical scholar, brilliant journalist - Cudlipp cleared the front page of the Evening Standard for 'C. B. Fry Says' - it is not just the envy of lesser mortals that makes Fry mysterious.

C. B. Fry: An English Hero acknowledges the mystery but cannot quite solve it, despite some astonishing new material. In some ways Fry's life could be seen as an allegory of Edwardian England in its imperial pomp: mens sana in corpore sano, 'a Greek god', a gentleman (i.e. an amateur), a man able to quote Sophocles in the original and by the yard. But - what's this? He came down from Oxford with a third class degree; he was accused of violent and foulmouthed play on the football field; he was married to a woman ten years his senior who already had two children by her married lover, Charles Hoare, of the banking family. Throughout his life Hoare helped Mrs Fry financially and therefore, presumably, helped maintain Fry's status as a Gentleman.

This is in no way a sneering or feet-ofclay biography, but the questions are faced. Why did Fry not serve in the first world war? Why was he never invited onto the MCC committee? Where was he for the six years during which he disappeared from public view? This one is answered; he suffered a prolonged nervous breakdown and, poor man, had to endure ECT. Why did Fry not interfere when, at the naval school she ran, his wife's punishment of the boys became increasingly sadistic? (This may have had something to do with his breakdown; she seems to have been a fearsome woman.) At all events, if Fry was a heightened allegory of his time, there was clearly much amiss in the Edwardian cellarage.

He emerged from breakdown to become the anecdotal host, entertaining regally in his box at Lord's. He had written what is said to be the classic, Batsmanship, and was fond of demonstrating strokes with an umbrella, a sabre, whatever came to hand. Ross may have come upon him in full flow. `Fry was often considerably more wearing to listen to than to read.' Nevertheless, his was 'a mind consistently interested in the mechanics of grace - scientific, sporting, intellectual'. In Wilton's biography, a little clogged with Fry's sporting statistics, the English hero comes across as a man of unfocused genius, distracted by his physical prowess. (His party trick was a standing leap from floor to mantelpiece. If he was a bounder, he was world-class.) A man of dotty - or perhaps not so dotty - visions, he thought he could solve the Balkan problem by teaching the Albanians cricket. Today, typing this to a background of the Cricket World Cup, India versus Pakistan in a crowd atmosphere of friendly hysteria, it seems possible that he may have been right; anyway, no better solution has yet been found.