Frank Keating

A friend organised a blithely bonny evening of boxing nostalgia last week in Herefordshire’s little Welsh border town of Leominster to honour one-time British and Empire welterweight champion Cliff Curvis, who has close connections with the area. It is 60 years since the Swansea stripling of 17 first answered the bell for his opening round as a paid fighter. The officers and gentry of the British Boxing Board were all there, and a general throng flocked down from the hills to pay tribute.

England’s cricketers are up on the High Veldt, not only taking on South Africa in the fourth Test match, but also their own demons as they strive to reinvigorate all the suddenly evaporated boastful optimism about giving the Australians a run for their money in the Ashes contest in the summer. As England fannied and faltered down in the Cape a week ago, the Aussies were looking as relentlessly unbeatable as ever in their home series against a talented Pakistan side. At the press of a Sky-TV button it was chastening to switch from England’s ham-handed, flat-footed exertions at Newlands to Australia’s noisily confident and vibrant strut at Sydney.

There is a calming domestic languor about new year sport. Pleasant. Like things used t’be. Olde tyme talk is of minnows and giant-slayers and the ‘magic’ of the Cup, and this weekend’s FA Cup third-round matches are bound to provide — as they have been doing for a century and beyond — a few memorable little asterisks on provincial calendars. Like it or lump it, the big-time Premiership dandies have to revert to their muddy roots.

With 2004’s multinational motley done, dusted and delivered, other activities can bloom. The jingo-jangle palaver and babel of the Olympics, European soccer, and the Ryder Cup are now consigned to musty files, and a happy new year is herald to less hyperbole and ballyhoo. The world athletics gala at Helsinki in August will work up a passing tizz as to who’s on drugs or not, and whether Kelly Holmes will be fit or bothered enough to make the starting line or, indeed, if Paula Radcliffe is ditto enough to make the Finnish finishing line.

‘Del Boy’ Trotter, television’s engagingly endurable (and perpetually replayed) comic Cockney character created by actor David Jason, forever dreams of putting Peckham on the top-notch international map. Didn’t the wide boy of Mandela Mansions once bid to stage the Miss World competition? ‘I can see it now, Rodney ...first Rome, then New York, and after Paris ...Peckham!’ Well, Del has been beaten to it by a real-life neighbour. Step forward Danny Williams, late of Peabody Buildings, Peckham, and since upgraded round the corner to a dolled-up, three-bed, end-of-terrace des res, who this Saturday night in Las Vegas challenges for the world heavyweight boxing championship. C’mon, my son, says the upstaged, but ever generous Del.

I fancy football’s most satisfying kick of the year has not been any particular jingo-jangle or hype-hype hooray on the pitch itself, but the cold-eyed gunslingers’ rivalry between two middle-aged obsessives — Sir Alex Ferguson and Monsieur Arsène Wenger, respectively the managers of Manchester United and Arsenal.

These days, I suppose, they would call it a gap year. In my case, it was nearer two. Idling around Africa with a rucksack, that is. Zimbabwe was called Southern Rhodesia then, and in 1961, in my early twenties, I chased a haughty blonde Virginia Veitch from London’s Earls Court, whose pa worked for Barclays in Harare (then Salisbury) and who, when I arrived with gormless grin — ‘Dwarling, ’tis me!’ — smartly sneered, ‘Get lost, punk.’ Africa was a large place to get lost in when you were a bum and broke.

This Saturday, 20 November, and next, Twickenham’s presumptuous clan gathers its travel-rugs round its knees and bays for colonials’ blood. Likewise, the hipflasks will warm cockles and loosen throats to raise the rafters for the boys in green, blue and red to strut the hard yards in Dublin, Edinburgh and Cardiff. While rugby’s autumn internationals will provide fun and a few telling pointers, the results, broadly, do not matter. With no World Cup to bother about till 2007, the domestic rugby season is focused on the ravishingly competitive Heineken Cup and, in the New Year, the age-old weekend-break traditions of the Six Nations tournament.

Six Jones boyos were picked for the Wales rugby union XV which played South Africa last Saturday — Adam, Dafydd, Duncan, Ryan, Stephen and Steve. BBC commentator Eddie Butler said the knack had been to identify them by their hair — ‘blond, dark or ginger’. Eddie’s a better man than me — five of them were in the scrum in which all eight of them seemed to be identical shaven-headed Magwitches auditioning for the scary Act 1 estuary scene in Great Expectations. Saturday’s six broke rugby’s record of surname surfeit, held since 1939 when a quintet named Davies took on Ireland in Belfast. Last week’s debutant, Ryan, was history’s 73rd Welsh rugby international called Jones.

Wise guys steer clear of soccer till the clocks go back. The long muddy slurp and slog of winter are now properly under way. Mind you, this time autumn’s warm-up lap has offered an instructive preamble if not, as we shall doubtless see by Easter, a necessarily telling one. In England, the cosmopolitan London strut of Arsenal and Chelsea heads the Premiership parade (in Scotland — yawn, yawn — it is already Celtic and Rangers ahead by a street).

Thirty years ago this very day took place what some sages nominate as the greatest single happening in the whole history of sports. Which I reckon is stretching it a bit. Just consider a few hundred other back-page occurrences — from Genesis Kid Cain v. Sugar Boy Abel to, well, last week’s Boston Red Sox resurrection which turned 0–3 to 4–3 in the Yankee Stadium. Nevertheless, it sure was some showstopper on 30 October 1974 when big, bad ‘unbeatable’ boxer George Foreman was rumbled in the jungle by Muhammad Ali. Where were you that dead of night when London closed down for a witching hour — to watch the epic live with me at the Dominion cinema, Tottenham Court Road?