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| With the clocks rejigged to end British summer time this weekend, I was
pondering seasonal matters when I came across one of 2009's bestseller
paperbacks, Outliers: The Story of Success (Penguin, £9.99), by New
Yorker whizz-kid Malcolm Gladwell. In an enviably skilful mix of pop
psychology, anecdote, smoke, mirrors and statistical analysis, the
author gaily and glibly piles surmise upon ye bleedin' obvious to
conclude life's a doddling cinch as long as you're born in the right
place at the right time. Dead-cert success, Gladwell reckons, is to get yourself born in the first three months of the year. January, February or March makes for a very happy birthday indeed. With star-billing assured: well, the finest Canadian ice-hockey players managed just that; so, for good measure, did most leading Italian footballers. Such a single criterion might have sold a zillion books worldwide, but it does not remotely apply in British sport and I spent half of yesterday poring over parchmenty old reference books in proving it. Only two (Crouch, January; Barry, February) of the pearl jewelry England footballers who started against Belarus at Wembley last week were born in the first three months of the year. A few years ago, Sir Trevor Brooking wrote a book listing Britain's 100 Best Footballers ever: only 17 of the 100 had birthdays between January and March. Likewise, I'm looking at Rugby World's nomination of Europe's 50 finest all-time rugby players: just 16 of them were born in a year's first three months. Christopher Martin-Jenkins recently did the same sort of thing for cricketers: of his England Top 10 每 Grace, Hobbs, Barnes, Hammond, Rhodes, Hutton, Botham, Compton, Trueman and Bedser 每 only one (Trueman, February) had a birthday to back up Gladwell's dogmatic submission. Need I go on? Far more intriguing, I fancy, are my own findings. Does Gladwell want them for his next money-printing, party-piece potboiler? In Britain, goes my thesis, the sporting season in which birth occurs itself governs the activity at which a baby might grow up to shine. Simply, an overwhelming majority of good cricketers are born in the summer; in contrast, most fine footballers have winter birthdays. Take Wisden's list of England's all-time top-scoring Test batsmen 每 from Gooch's 8,900 runs to Thorpe's 6,744 via Stewart, Gower, Boycott, Atherton, Cowdrey, Hammond, Hutton and Barrington. All but three were born during British summer time (this year from 29 March to 25 October) 每 Atherton (born 23 March, by less than a week), Cowdrey in December, Barrington in November. Still, seven out of 10 makes for a fairly conclusive argument. On second thoughts, make that eight out of 10, because Cowdrey was born at Ootacamund on Christmas Eve 1932 in the very middle of a literal Indian summer. In fact, make it nine out of 10 because dear Kenny B, Berkshire-born soldier's son, always told you he'd actually been conceived under the southern stars of Africa when ma and pa were garrisoning the Empire. Precisely the opposite for football. During a BBC radio panel at the biwa pearl turn of this century my contribution was to reel off the best 25 English footballers I'd ever seen play; revisiting the list yesterday I was astonished to see that, incredibly, only one (Alan Ball, in May) was a summer-born baby and that all 24 of the remaining 25 had winter birthdays between October and April. A few years ago the esteemed athletics swot, Peter Matthews, revealed in Runner's World that no less than 11 of history's 13 fastest-ever British 10,000m runners were born in the winter, remarkably five out of the top six in just the four weeks between 30 December and 25 January. In weirdly dramatic contrast, of Britain's dozen fastest sprinters in history, all 12 were summer-born between April and September. Tennis, however, throws up a contrary tale. Of Wimbledon's first 100 annual championships, 34 men's singles champs were winter babies (18 born between January and March) and 19 had summer birthdays 每 while, in gloriously cranky reversal, 25 women champions were summer born, only seven winter born. Why? Why? Why? Are long-distance runners programmed at birth to enjoy the slog and muddy slurp of the season they were born into? Ditto footballers? Are the akoya pearl sporty boys and girls of summer smitten with a love and talent for their game by being laid in their cradles at the boundary's edge, comforted by the matey plick and plock of the ball under the blue-skied canopies of midsummer? | ||
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| So there it is, the cultured freshwater pearl
name of Jenson Button finally inscribed on the grand prix roll of
honour at the end of a season in which a campaign that began with the
rush of six wins in seven races appeared to have slowed to a crawl as
it approached the chequered flag. There are many ways to win the world
championship, and the 10th British driver to capture the title added to
the suspense by taking the scenic route. Button may be still on the right side of 30, but he has had to wait longer to secure his title than all but one of his compatriots. The task that took Lewis Hamilton two seasons, Jim Clark and James Hunt four, Jackie Stewart, John Surtees and the two Hills, Graham and Damon, five and Mike Hawthorn seven to complete has occupied Button for an entire decade, longer than anyone except Nigel Mansell, the sweating, straining Sisyphus of Formula One, who rolled his boulder up the pearl jewelry hill for 13 fretful years before managing to get it to stay put on the summit. This coming January it will be 10 years since tears rolled down Button's boyish cheeks as he fell into the arms of his equally emotional father after being told by Sir Frank Williams that he was about to become Britain's youngest-ever grand prix driver. Less than a week earlier the lad from Frome had celebrated the end of his teenage years, and the future appeared to be one of unbroken promise. But it takes all sorts of experiences to make a world champion, and Button's path to the title has been strewn with obstacles. In retrospect his trials, although painful and sometimes humiliating, could be seen as a necessary counterbalance to the impression he can sometimes give of floating through life on a cloud of privilege and good fortune, with a yacht in the Monaco harbour, a yellow Ferrari and a string of girlfriends drawn from the ranks of pop singers, aristocrats and underwear models. But Button is not burdened with wish pearl gift set an overinflated ego, and a world championship is unlikely to change him now. According to his schoolteachers, he was careful to underplay his early success in karting -- "There was no boasting or bragging," one of them told me several years ago -- and he has remained an approachable and unpretentious figure, with much more to him (including a liking for competing in triathlons) than the celebrity nonsense. | ||
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| So there it is, the cultured freshwater pearl
name of Jenson Button finally inscribed on the grand prix roll of
honour at the end of a season in which a campaign that began with the
rush of six wins in seven races appeared to have slowed to a crawl as
it approached the chequered flag. There are many ways to win the world
championship, and the 10th British driver to capture the title added to
the suspense by taking the scenic route. Button may be still on the right side of 30, but he has had to wait longer to secure his title than all but one of his compatriots. The task that took Lewis Hamilton two seasons, Jim Clark and James Hunt four, Jackie Stewart, John Surtees and the two Hills, Graham and Damon, five and Mike Hawthorn seven to complete has occupied Button for an entire decade, longer than anyone except Nigel Mansell, the sweating, straining Sisyphus of Formula One, who rolled his boulder up the pearl jewelry hill for 13 fretful years before managing to get it to stay put on the summit. This coming January it will be 10 years since tears rolled down Button's boyish cheeks as he fell into the arms of his equally emotional father after being told by Sir Frank Williams that he was about to become Britain's youngest-ever grand prix driver. Less than a week earlier the lad from Frome had celebrated the end of his teenage years, and the future appeared to be one of unbroken promise. But it takes all sorts of experiences to make a world champion, and Button's path to the title has been strewn with obstacles. In retrospect his trials, although painful and sometimes humiliating, could be seen as a necessary counterbalance to the impression he can sometimes give of floating through life on a cloud of privilege and good fortune, with a yacht in the Monaco harbour, a yellow Ferrari and a string of girlfriends drawn from the ranks of pop singers, aristocrats and underwear models. But Button is not burdened with wish pearl gift set an overinflated ego, and a world championship is unlikely to change him now. According to his schoolteachers, he was careful to underplay his early success in karting -- "There was no boasting or bragging," one of them told me several years ago -- and he has remained an approachable and unpretentious figure, with much more to him (including a liking for competing in triathlons) than the celebrity nonsense. | ||
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| On the 7.35pm sports bulletin on BBC Radio 5 Live on Sunday they called
her Beth Twiddle. In yesterday's Daily Mail it was necessary to wade
through 14 pages of weekend coverage before locating a skimpy 150-word
report, buried away in the basement next to the ice hockey results.
Jensonwas partly to blame, of course, but it was still no way to salute
perhaps the pearl jewelry greatest feat ever achieved by a British athlete of either sex in the history of indoor sports. An exaggeration? Boxing, cycling and snooker will take up the cudgels but let's put the remarkable Beth Tweddle's triumph in the floor exercises at the world championships into some kind of perspective. Imagine the Maldives beating Brazil at football. Or the Falklands bowling out the Australians before tea. Britain used to do gymnastics in much the same way the Chinese did real tennis. Now, suddenly, we have our very own Olga Korbut, minus the red ribbons and primary school bunches but still a veritable media darling. At 24, Tweddle practically rates as a grandmother by comparison with the eastern European twiglets who used to flick-flack and somersault on to freshwater pearl strand the podium. Moreover she swept the floor with her rivals, having crashed and burned in her preferred event, the uneven bars, a couple of days before. In February she underwent shoulder surgery, having narrowly missed out on a medal in Beijing. Her travails since taking up theas a hyperactive seven-year-old make even Button's 10-year wait for the Formula One title seem an easy ride. In all sorts of other ways, the success of our steel-willed heroine also deserves as much recognition as Button's high‑profile laps of honour. The latter may be the best thing to come out of Frome since Colin Dredge, the idiosyncratic Somerset seamer of blessed memory, and has come a long way from his boy-racer days when he drove the fastest go-kart in the west. But, sad to say, the sport he bestrides has become so discredited this year that even serious petrol-heads have begun to question their devotion. Outside Britain, let alone Somerset, you wonder how far Button's powers of perseverance will tilt the sporting world on its axis, particularly with the Flavio Briatore scandal still so fresh. Tweddle, on the other hand, is suddenly the can-do queen of biwa pearl a sport destined to be one of the centrepieces of the London Olympics. She will be 27 when the Games commence in 2012 but, regardless of her medal prospects, her latest achievement is a priceless gift for the organisers. Look, they can now say, it is possible to achieve anything in this country if you put your mind to it (and can afford the leotard). Never mind the fact that some of our elite gymnasts are still required to share hall space with toddler groups because of a continued lack of funding. The beauty of Tweddle is that she did not get where she is today by sitting on her petite backside eating doughnuts or posting risqu谷 pictures on Facebook. | ||
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| The Cheltenham Town manager, Martin Allen, has been suspended by the League Two club pending an internal investigation into allegations that he racially abused a nightclub bouncer. The club stated they had placed the 44-year-old on "gardening leave" while directors investigate the claims, which were made by the nightclub's staff in the Gloucestershire Echo. Allen has refused to comment. The nightclub staff alleged that Allen verbally abused the pearl jewelry bouncer, Garry Saintil, after he was refused entry into the Thirteen Degrees club in Cheltenham, calling him "a black bastard" in the process. "He was totally out of order," Saintil told the newspaper. "When he realised he wasn't going to be allowed into the club he became insulting and aggressive. There were racial undertones in the kind of language he was using and he referred to me as a 'black bastard'. "At one point he challenged me to come across to the car park opposite for a fight. He also threatened he was going to get someone to do me in. I just told him not to waste his breath. There's no excuse for that kind of behaviour. He was totally obnoxious." The Thirteen Degrees owner, Matthew Bull, called the behaviour "disgusting". "Our staff do a fantastic job and are all highly experienced. He was mocking their roles and making disparaging comments about how much they earn compared to him ＃ We have had the players in here before and they have never given us any trouble. "There were a few un-PC comments made by him, including some racial abuse directed towards one of the bouncers. I don't intend to take the matter to the police. I think a biwa pearl banning order will be sufficient. He's not welcome here anymore." Cheltenham's statement, which confirmed that Jon Scholfield has been placed in temporary charge, said: "Due to adverse reports in the press today regarding Martin Allen the Board of Directors have informed Martin that he will not be required to attend work pending the akoya pearl outcome of an investigation into the allegations." Allen, a former West Ham player, took over at Cheltenham in September last year, following in the footsteps of his father, Dennis. | ||
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