As Mark Twain once said to all aspiring writers,”Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.” But what happens when some wretched specimen, sawmill-fodder to his core, is offered a pile of cash to write his auto-biography?
Impossible, you say. Why would we be interested in hearing the thoughts of someone who left school at 15 and who sweats and grunts for a living?
Yet walk into any bookshop and there is a shelf bulging with such offerings. All have titles that are a permutation of “in my own words”, one of the great ironies of publishing if one looks behind the curtain where ghost-writers pound away, manacled to word processors and clutching the “Oxford Dictionary of Awful Puns”.
Somewhere along the line the myth that writers are, by definition, interesting people has been grafted to the myth that celebrities are, by definition, interesting people — and the result, in all its 700-page splendour (a literary form of crotch-rot) is the autobiography of the sportsman.
Expecting a footballer to express in writing a series of engaging anecdotes, bound together by an inevitable message of moral upliftment and hope for the future, is like expecting the pope to crunch his mobile into fifth gear and grease Michael Schumacher on the final corner at Imola, taking victory in a blur of white robes and flailing rosaries. It’s just not worth waiting for. Yet agents and publishers persist. About five years ago a young South African star (I drop no names, unlike some of the desperate bio-graphers around) was being interviewed over the phone by a colleague of mine.
Standard stuff — favourite colour, favourite film, the usual banalities that fill the nebulous rear-ends of magazines. The young star was barely verbal, let alone literate, but the telling moment came when he was asked his favourite food. There was a sniff, a pause, then a yell.
“Mommy!” he called into the depths of his ancestral home, “Mommy, what’s my favourite food?” “Chicken!” came the reply. Another sniff. “Chicken,” said the star.
Two months later his auto-biography appeared. There were plenty of pictures, and the font was very large — Which is not to say that some sportobiographies aren’t entertaining. Champion cyclist Lance Armstrong, for instance, has become the Norman Mailer of sweaty undies.
Likewise, every so often a rangy loner climbs a mountain, runs out of rope and oxygen, has to eat his Sherpa (cooked over a cigarette lighter), uses up the entire fuel budget of the Nepalese air force as he is helicoptered to safety, and then writes a book called “I Fought Death and Won”.
These accounts are intended as disturbing insights into the dark spaces of the human mind but invariably come across like rough drafts of Biggles novels, which makes them far more interesting than if they had been well written.
Of course, the real question is, why should we read books by sportsmen when they don’t read books by real authors?
In another “favourites” quiz, a senior member of the South African cricket team announced that the last book he’d read was Janet and John in grade three. He was serious, and proud of the fact.
Surely the handlers of our national team must cringe when players, asked what their favourite novel is, name Sports Illustrated? Or are the administrators too busy enjoying the earthy realism and bold narrative structure of Archie at Riverdale High?
The Art of War, a book almost as boring as the people who read it, has managed to qualify as a sports tome. Long the instruction manual of businessmen — who have used its pseudo-mystical, hyper-macho claptrap as justification for the spiritual decrepitude their profession requires — it now lies on the gold-plated bedside tables of golfers the world over.
At least this tome was written by an Oriental gent well into his career (as, er, a military artiste). Which is more than can be said of the new breed of autobiography, appearing between three weeks and a month into the career of a young star.
One can understand camel jockeys writing their memoirs when they turn nine (their careers are effectively over) but the story of cricketer Paul Adams’s life hit the shelves when that life had barely spanned 18 years.
Can we expect a sequel? “The First Quarter Century”?
I’m off to write my memoirs.