Words and images that draw us to the game Vantage Point

Rob Hughes The New York Times Media Group
International Herald Tribune
05-07-2008
Words and images that draw us to the game Vantage Point
Byline: Rob Hughes The New York Times Media Group
Edition: 3
Section: SPORTS

No reasonable person would blame Mathieu Flamini for choosing to move house this week. He is footloose, a 21st-century player whose industry in midfield was so impressive against AC Milan in this season's Champions League that the Italian club decided to buy him.

Flamini is 24. His roots are in Marseille, but Arsenal had been grooming him for four years until, with his contract up for renewal, Milan made him the offer he could not refuse: it is doubling his salary.
With all respect to Flamini, a young man I know and like, he is unlikely to leave an imprint on his game as rich in memories, loyalty and affection as another player, Johnny Haynes, whose lifelong commitment to one club, Fulham, was commemorated in a book released Wednesday.

Haynes was the finest passer of a ball in the game. And those are not my words: they are spoken again and again by players who shared the ball with him. And they are endorsed by the incomparable Brazilian, Pele.

When you leaf through "Johnny Haynes - The Maestro," you feel the history of a true soccer player of his time, and you sense the labor of love of the fans who put this tribute together. It is there in the words of the author, Martin Plumb, and the often sepia-tone pictures of Ken Coton.

They share their 50-year loyalty to Fulham with many other fans, like Sheila Seymour from the north of England, who worked tirelessly on library archives to bring this book together.

This weekend, the club, which still nestles in a stadium of preserved antiquity close to the River Thames in London, will play for its life, trying to stay in the league of financial giants, England's Premier League. There will be three American starters, Kasey Keller, Clint Dempsey and Brian McBride, in Fulham's team, and the owner, Mohamed al-Fayed, an Egyptian, in the stands.

Do any of them, I wonder, truly understand the legacy Haynes left them? Without Haynes's 658 league games and 158 goals, the club might not have survived his near 20-year span to 1970. Without his perfectionism, his ability to hit a pass as true as a laser beam, and his leadership of the English national side, the renowned old club would not enjoy the fame it does.

Haynes wasn't a goal scorer, per se, but his finest performance for England is reputed to have been at Wembley Stadium in 1958, when he scored a hat-trick while orchestrating a 5-0 drubbing of the Soviet Union.

"Once you got used to watching that perfection, you realized the rest of the secret," recalled Bobby Moore, one of his successors as England captain. "John was always available, always hungry for the ball, always wanting to play. I loved watching the player and later I learned to love the man."

That love, that respect, are bywords for this book, which may be of a bygone era. The player and his loyalty give the club a greater history than it would otherwise have merited. More's the pity, the shame, that Fulham today does not stock the book in its club shop. It wanted a greater share of the sales than the publisher and authors could afford.

The club is myopic if it cannot see that its history is Johnny's history.

The man, who died after a car crash three years ago, was a thread through all that mattered to Fulham, and all that counts for those who support it.

No matter how much inflation has occurred, it now seems incredible that Haynes, the first player anywhere to be paid pound(s)100 a week, could have been worth just one-50th of Flamini.

His story seems to me worth more than the combined weight of all those pulp biographies of starlets and celebrities who are still in puppy fat when their "life story" is published.

This is not to decry sports books. Far from it, words or pictures can still capture the values, and even the movements, of real talent, more permanently than television or the Internet.

Erwin Roth, a publisher in Salzburg, has made his life's work studying and publishing the still pictures that reveal the beauty, drama and emotions of men and women striving to be the best they can be.

Roth's collection of sporting photographs as art goes back 30 years, and his anniversary work, "Sport Highlights," covers any activity you can imagination. He has one favorite photograph from more than 15,000 pages on the subject.

It isn't soccer, but it is startling. It freezes the exact instant that the Austrian ski jumper Klaus Tuchscherer found himself airborne with only one ski attached.

It happened at Lahti, Finland, in 1978. Tuchscherer is clad in red against the perfect clear blue sky. His right ski has just become detached and is floating between his legs, his arms are spread out like the wings of an eagle, his facial expression is caught in that moment, that gasp of realization that catastrophe is imminent.

Those of us who have worked with photographers across the gamut of sports grow to appreciate how they, with their special sense of timing and their eye for the unexpected, can teach us more than we often suspect is there in the moment.

The photographer who captured what Roth captions "Unpleasant Surprise in Midair," is Rainer Martini from Germany. "Martini has succeeded in unique fashion in capturing the emotional reaction of the athlete," enthuses the publisher. "Tuchscherer can sense what is happening here. He could not see it after all."

Fifty years after the peak performance of Johnny Haynes, 20 years after Klaus Tuchscherer survived his midair "surprise," we are able to relive their performance on the printed page. We are also, at our leisure, able to prolong more than the instantaneous thrill that draws us to sports in the first place.

An ability to plot another man's path by passing the perfect ball, a split-second adjustment in flying without a parachute or landing gear, are gifts that few people possess but millions can admire, if only we can remember them.

Books help.

"He was my hero," says Alan Mullery, a player who followed Haynes at Fulham and into the England team. "The word 'great' rolls off the tongue quite easily these days, but Johnny Haynes really was. I think he had extrasensory powers, he could lay a ball within six inches of a colleague.

He will never leave my memory."

(Copyright 2008)