Looking back to a golden age of amateur sport is for dodos
Most sport is amateur; most sportsmen play for pleasure and aren’t paid. But of course, if your knowledge of sport was restricted to the sport pages of newspapers, you might not be aware of this. Amateur sport gets little attention, except in the local Press.
It wasn’t always so.
Even after the Second World War, the broadsheet newspapers often gave as much coverage to amateur as to professional sport. Some sports – athletics and tennis – were still nominally amateur even at the highest level. Roger Bannister was a post-graduate medical student when he became the first man to run a mile in under four minutes in the summer of 1954. He retired from athletics altogether just a few months later after beating his great rival John Landy to win the 1500 metres at the Empire Games in Vancouver.
Wimbledon, like the other three major championships, remained amateur, though by the 1950s it was usual for a Wimbledon champion to turn professional and join what was known as Jack Kramer’s Circus (an American tennis player who was an early champion of professional tennis tours). That fair-sized handful of top professionals include undoubtedly the best players in the world, but little attention was paid to them.
Of course, the amateur game was not free of what was known as “shamateurism”, in the form of generous expenses and appearance money. Still, even top players usually had a source of income not directly related to the sport. The 1949 Wimbledon Champion, Ted Schroeder, didn’t defend his title the next year because he was a lawyer dividing his time between New York or Boston, and couldn’t find the time to cross the Atlantic (by sea) and spend two weeks in SW19.
Young Australian players were almost semi-pro because the Australian Davis Cup captain, Harry Hopman, had arranged for them to be paid adequate expenses so that they could tour Europe and the USA. Nevertheless, champions like Frank Sedgman, Lew Hoad, Ken Rosewall and Rod Laver all turned pro in their early twenties. Between 1946 and 1968 when Tennis went “open”, nobody won the Men’s Singles at Wimbledon more than twice.
Amateur golf was as fully covered as professional golf in British newspapers. The Amateur Championship used to get almost as much attention as The Open, the Walker Cup more than the Ryder Cup. There were very few full-time touring professionals in Britain, with most pros getting their basic income from their day-job as a club pro. They might play only a dozen tournaments a year. This was one reason Great Britain and Ireland almost never beat the Americans who were full-time touring pros. As a result, there was little incentive for leading amateurs to turn pro and so some like Joe Carr, a draper from Dublin, and Ronnie White, a Liverpool solicitor, became well-known figures. Nowadays young amateurs almost always turn pro after one Walker Cup.
Amateurs all but disappeared from Football League clubs in the twenty years after the war, though of course at all levels many players were only part-time professionals, while in Scotland the amateur club Queen’s Park held its place in the top division for some time despite always losing some of its best players to the pro ranks at the end of each season.
I remember, with some embarrassment, a conversation in a hotel bar with Bill Dodgin, manager of a number of clubs including Fulham and Brentford, and saying, snobbishly, that it was a pity there weren’t more amateurs in the league now. I instanced George Robb, a schoolmaster who played outside left for Spurs. Dodgin contemptuously – even indignantly – replied that Robb had been paid more in expenses than his team-mates in wages.
Cricket maintained the amateur-professional divide until 1962, when the Advisory County Cricket Committee recommended the abolition of amateur status in English first-class cricket – a recommendation which the Daily Telegraph’s Jim Swanton thought “not only unnecessary but deplorable”. In truth “amateurs” from the days of W.G. Grace onwards had often made more money out of the game than professionals, and by 1962 there were very few genuine amateurs left, among them the occasional schoolmaster who turned out for his county during the summer holidays.
Others were genuine “shamateurs”, given near-sinecures as “assistant secretary” to their county club. Paradoxically, and perhaps unfortunately, cricket and the place of cricket in society have developed in such a way that a much higher proportion of Test and County English cricketers are now educated at fee-paying schools, if only in some cases for the last couple of years of their education. Cricketers educated at state schools – what used to be called “Board Schools” – are rarer than they were in the days of Hutton and Washbrook, Edrich and Compton, Bedser and Evans, Laker and Lock, Wardle and Appleyard, Trueman and Statham.
Rugby Union was the last major sport jealously to cling on to amateurism, doing so for more than thirty years after the last cricket match between Gentlemen and Players at Lord’s in 1962. All international rugby players had jobs, almost all of them real, rather than contrived ones, or were still students or apprentices, until the game went “open” after the 1995 World Cups. It did so, often reluctantly, for two reasons.
First, some countries, notably Wales and Australia, were losing many of their best players to the professional game, Rugby League; second, thanks to air travel and, one should add in fairness, the growing popularity of the sport, ever-greater demands were being made of players who found it increasingly difficult to juggle family, work and rugby.
Moreover, the expansion of the international game, with summer tours played regularly, had the Unions seeking to exercise more control over their players, as the following (true) story indicates. Finlay Calder, redoubtable back-row forward and captain of both Scotland and the Lions, got a call one day from the Secretary of the SRU who had heard that Fin was intending to go on a short unofficial tour – to, I think, Bermuda – a couple of weeks before Scotland’s summer tour. “That’s forbidden”, he was told. “Oh aye,” said Fin, “and the cheque’s in the post, is it?” “What do you mean?” “My employer’s a grain merchant, not the SRU, and it’s between me and my employer, not you, what time I take off from work.” Well, it was only a few years before the SRU was indeed the employer off all professional rugby players in Scotland, and now of course the best of them everywhere earn very high salaries for careers that are, inevitably, not for life.
Those of us who look back fondly on the game as it was thirty, forty, fifty years ago are dodos. Rugby like other sports is now work and business. And, thanks to television, other sports are following, going the same way. Who, even a dozen years ago, would have thought to see women’s football, rugby and cricket, becoming professional sports, featured on TV? Indeed, Sky Sports now shows netball, as well as basketball – and I guess it either already is, or in on the way to becoming, professional too.
Even so, we should still remember that most people who play games do so for enjoyment, fun, recreation, not money. Indeed in Scotland, the SRU, having just created a new tier for semi-pro clubs, is insisting that all rugby below this level – that is to say, 99 per cent of the game – is to be strictly amateur, and amateur status is to be subject to rigorous scrutiny. We’ll see how that works out. No generous but surreptitious expenses? No twenty-pound notes in boots? Aye, right.