Football player, Rugby Training, Sports books

The six candidates

- My Father and Other Working-Class Football Heroes – Gary Imlach (Yellow Jersey Press, £15.99)
- Butcher: My Autobiography – Terry Butcher with Bob Harris (Highdown, £18.99)
- Push Yourself Just a Little Bit More – Johnny Green (Orion £14.99)
- Dragons and All Blacks – Huw Richards (Mainstream, £9.99)
- Engineering Archie: Archibald Leitch – Football Ground Designer – Simon Inglis (English Heritage £14.99)
- The Great White Hopes: The Quest to Defeat Jack Johnson – Graeme Kent (Sutton, £18.99)

The latest William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award was announced in December. Andy Etchells reviews the judges’ deliberations and finds himself broadly in agreement

The William Hill shortlist of six books about four sports (three on football and one each on cycling, rugby union and boxing) has a definite tinge of nostalgia about it. Only two of the titles – Terry Butcher’s autobiography and Johnny Green’s behind-the-scenes account of the 2003 and 2004 Tours de France – are about contemporary subjects. The other football books are Gary Imlach’s homage to his father Stuart, an old-school player of the 1950s, and Simon Inglis’ enchanting survey of football stadium architecture. From the oval-ball code comes Dragons and All Blacks, another look back to the 1950s and the one and only time Wales overcame the All Blacks, while Graeme Kent takes us further back in boxing history to the time of Jack Johnson, the first black world heavyweight champion.

For my review, I have opted for a shorter shortlist of three. Those not to make my cut are Green’s Push Yourself Just a Little Bit More, Huw Richards Wales/All Blacks book and the Inglis work on stadia. Inevitably criteria are subjective but, in brief, here’s why:

Green gets the chop on grounds of style; I find it impossible to read and take seriously a book which self-consciously drops the ‘g’ off doing, going and cycling (and hundreds of other participles) and turns the word ‘and’ into the one letter ‘n’! Richards is a proper writer and will be appreciated by really devoted rugby historians – especially Welsh ones – but the subject is somewhat arcane. Engineering Archie, the survey of the work of Archibald Leitch, football ground designer is a visually outstanding work, lavishly illustrated by memorabilia, plans and photos. But I was looking for a good story with a gripping narrative, so I come to my final three.

Although Butcher announces itself with a bit of marketing spin – a reversible cover showing both the iconic bloodstained English Lion image and the Glasgow Rangers captain – one of its chief virtues is its almost deadpan straightforwardness. There is none of the usual sense of straining for publicity endemic in books of this genre; if anything, some of the significant moments in his long playing career, such as Ipswich Town’s loss of the 1981 League title, are underplayed. This is in keeping with a recurring theme of the book: the unpredictability of a player’s career; the vulnerability to injury; the dashing of dreams. After all, Butcher became a left-footed player only after spilling scalding tea on his natural right foot! Some might complain about the list of changing room doors kicked by one or other of those feet in the process of psyching up himself or his team, but this is a readable, above average example of the genre.

By contrast, Great White Hopes, an account of the succession of white boxers lined up to wrest the heavyweight title off Jack Johnson during the six years he held it from 1908, is much less of a chronological read. In fact, at times it risks confusing the uninitiated. It shouldn’t be necessary to re-read a section to get a full understanding of the story, and this is an undoubted weakness along with what sometimes seems an inappropriately light tone when discussing some of the worst degradations of the times. And yet, the sheer drama and significance of the story makes this an important book, though I suspect not the definitive one on the period.

The phrase that gave rise to the title was first coined by the writer Jack London who was far form alone in believing that the white man needed to be restored to his rightful place at the top of the boxing pyramid. Johnson was the first non-white to win the title under Lonsdale rules and he committed three unforgivable sins: he won in the first place; he didn’t play the role demanded of him by his supposed betters; and he didn’t even please those of his own race by refusing to see himself as a role model for black Americans.

Stuart Imlach was never in danger of thinking of himself as a role model, despite winning four caps for Scotland and being voted ‘man of the match’ when Nottingham Forest won the FA Cup in 1959. Like every other player on the team, his reward for winning the Cup was a take-it-or-leave-it offer of £20 per week if in the first team, or £15 if in the reserves. His son Gary wrote the book partly out of a desire to find out more about his father’s life and partly to understand why he himself had fallen out of love with the game. Apart from ‘Who really was my Dad?’, perhaps the most important question he poses is: at what point does the weight of money in a sport lead to a feeling that you ‘can… no longer taste the sport in sport’? This is a genuinely moving account of an honest life lived without flashiness – a life that would be alien to those currently gorging on the excesses of the modern game. Gary Imlach manages to blend a personal elegy with a damning critique of the world’s most popular sport and this achievement makes him a worthy winner of the 2005 William Hill Award.