Frank Keating on the single most important object in myriad sports, so frequently overlooked Etched as it is so vividly in the memory, it could easily be, oh, just a handful of Christmas mornings ago. In fact I was four, and next week fully 60 Christmases have gone since then. If not a reindeer hoof on the roof, sheer excitement had woken me that wartime midwinter at dead of night. At the bottom of my bed was a brand new blown-up saddle-shiny leather-fragrant football. From Ma and Pa Happy Christmas. It remains a family legend how, overwhelmed in childish delight, I proceeded to wake the whole household and frighten the dogs and neighbours by joyously, bashingly, slippering my prize around the bedroom’s four walls and ceiling like a demented squash player. Cricket bats and tennis rackets, golf clubs and billiard cues were to come later … but there is nothing like the first time, and that cheap leather football for a four-year-old’s Christmas probably had a significance that helped change his life well, its memory still gleams as he chunters on at 64. So some sort of diamond jubilee celebration in homage is overdue if not to that particular ball of 1941 but, you might say, to a whole load of balls through history. Veneration, even for the fact is that the very object most utterly and crucially central to games-playing has been wantonly ignored, taken for granted, for centuries. No patrician poet, to my knowledge, has ever pronounced lofty paeans to the awesome marvel of The Ball; and generations of plebby penny-a-line sporting hacks have forever been shy of addressing this consummately fundamental sporting nub and influence by its straightforward four-letter noun. Instead it is passed off as the leather, the sphere, the orange, the orb, the globe, the pill, the pigskin, the bladder, the”thing” … In cricket, the noble ball has been aka’d the cherry, the turnip, even the crimson rambler; in tennis the fuzz or the fur; in golf, the pea, the pellet, the puck, the bead, the aspirin, even the dimpled onion. Hymns have been sung and hosannas heaped upon every aspect of games and games-players, their culture, kit and equipment except the most paramount kernel, core and be-all that they handle and hit and hoof and head and harry and hunt down. So here’s to the beauty of The Ball. Last week in Ahmedabad when Mark Ramprakash hit Anil Kumble for six, a spectator caught the ball and with cheery mischief threw it onwards and clean out of the arena. Play was held up for some minutes, leaving the Test stars like so many impotent heel-kicking nose-picking extras and commentator Sanjay Manjrekar sagely remarked:”No ball to play with equals no game to play.” Which is the timeless verity. All of 114 winters ago, for instance, for the London Cup final of 1887 the Casuals and Old Westminsters were both stripped for action at 2.15pm at Crystal Palace but those 22 and the attendant throng had to wait for well over an hour as an exhaustive search of the Sydenham district failed to produce a proper blown-up leather football. No ball = no game. QED. The ball was invented before the wheel. It was an artefact of prehistory as soon as man first lifted himself on to his two hind legs, the better to throw, catch, kick, or hit with a stick. So”play ball” was on the agenda aeons before Christopher Columbus, on his second voyage, saw Indians in Haiti play a game with”perfectly rounded globes” fashioned and dried out of”miraculous” gum from a tree. Which heralded the rubber ball’s influence on modern sport the more so when Charles Goodyear’s United States invention of vulcanisation in 1839 coincided with Victorian Britain’s eruptive codification of a myriad games. The first rubber bladders exclusively for balls were made in Leeds in 1870. That first ball of mine, stitched leather panels enclosing a separate rubber inner tube, had a gap (to extricate the nozzle for inflation) laced by a criss-cross leather thong that could rip across your forehead if you headed the ball incorrectly.”Stan’s crosses always ensured the lace was facing away from me,” was how England centre-forward Tom Lawton described the genius of Stanley Matthews. In the first two FA Cup finals I listened to on the wireless, Derby County’s win in 1946 and Charlton Athletic’s in 1947, the ball burst. They may have been more reliable by 1953 but they were still different, and when Hungary resplendently beat England 6-3 at Wembley, Ferenc Puskas said:”We would have scored 12 if your English ball hadn’t been as heavy as a block of wet wood.” Perhaps that was more English tactics than English footballs a few years ago the celebrated Port Vale ancient Roy Sproson recalled how his Potteries minnows had beaten the strutting cup-holders Blackpool only a year later:”On the Friday we’d filled a bucket with water and compressed the match-ball into it for a day. After lunch on Saturday, out it comes, dry the surface and put a coat of dubbin on so it looks all right, even though it feels like a cannonball. Then for the kick-in we give Blackpool a few old balls, dry and light and pumped up like balloons. So the game starts and they can hardly kick the match-ball off the deck … ergo Vale Park’s most famous day.” A rugby ball as a best-remembered Christmas present can be even more pointedly inspirational than my 1941 soccer ball. Gareth Edwards remembers Christmas morning playing with his neighbour Huw Davies on Colbren Square’s icy pavement, and his first wondrous leather rugby ball:”Commentating to ourselves:’Two minutes to go … England leading … it’s a penalty to Wales …’ I can see Huw now, measuring back his step, looking up at the lamppost goal … and see as well Mrs Davies now in the end house also holding her breath … waiting for the inevitable landing in her garden, and knowing it only had to touch her front door and whoop! she’d angrily take the ball in and I’d never see it again, Christmas or no Christmas.” The rugby ball has an antique line prehistory played with an inflated pig’s bladder, and any butcher will tell you that is basically oval in shape.
The ball, of course, is fundamental to a myriad aspects of cricket. Seam, shine, spin, new ball, old ball, out-of-shape ball, lost ball … In 1990 when English cricket changed the Reader ball for the Duke, 179 360 championship runs were scored compared with 154 232 the summer before. The new ball has been deemed to have won or lost the Ashes countless times Headingley 1964, for instance, Australia on the run at 178/7 to spinners Fred Titmus and Norman Gifford, when Ted Dexter takes the new ball and gives it to Fred Trueman, who gormlessly tries to bounce out the tail. Result: 105 for the eighth wicket, 89 for the ninth, Trueman dropped and no Ashes for England.
Or, from major to minor, take Essex chasing the second XI championship in 1973 against Middlesex at Chingford. Big Middlesex hitter Sam Black begins tonking into the gardens, on to the roads and over the trees. Soon he’s lost all seven balls,until a watching schoolboy offers them his grotty old relic, gouged and soft as a sponge. Result: Black at once bowled by a shooter, and young Graham Gooch “it swung every which way but mostly just shot along the deck” who had hitherto taken 0/57 ends with 7/70 and Essex are 1973’s second XI champions. The ball in golf, of course, has been responsible for even more subtle twists and turns, and never more profound than the furious century-long argument about the US big ball and Europe’s”small”, a difference only between a diameter of 1,62in (Europe) and 1,68 (US), which was resolved only in, nicely, 1968. I fondly remember once asking the late golfing eminence, Pat Ward-Thomas, what dia-meter were the golf balls he had famously made out of string and scraps and spare rubber slices for his exercise-yard games as a PoW in Stalag Luft III.”Naturally, 1,62in, ol’ boy,” he replied, almost affronted.
“New balls, please!” is summer’s cosy mantra. But the only serious poet I can find specifically to laud the ball was the US billiards player Walker Gibson (born 1919) whose subjects were, of course, ivory “Painted, polished, here these spheres / Rehearse their civilised careers / Trapped in geometric toil / Exhibit impact and recoil / Politely, in a farce of force.”
More melodically put than high-flown James Joyce when he returned to Dublin in 1909 to watch France’s first rugby international at Lansdowne Road, after which at tea time in the Hibernian hotel he told Ireland’s Ulsterman captain and try-scorer Fred Gardiner that he hadn’t that afternoon been playing with”a ball”, which was round “nor even with an oval, which suggests a plane configuration; but with a prolate spheroid.” Exclaimed Gardiner at the revelation:”Jaysus, James, so that’s what I scored with.”