David Foot: A tribute

ROB STEEN pays tribute to David Foot, who died on Tuesday at the age of 92

So that's two dreadful casualties this season in the typing world. First it was the rock ‘n’ roller, Martin “Scoop” Johnson; yesterday it was the soul man, David “Footie” Foot.

If I was ever asked to nominate a patron saint of journalism, the agonies of deliberation would last almost as long as it takes a Jofra Archer yorker to flatten a couple of toes. Being a democratic if not altogether disinterested judge, I’d insist on a couple of Guardian mates: Duncan Campbell, not only a lifelong scourge of the wrong and the wronged but the chap who captured Julie Christie’s heart, and Footie.

Huw Richards captured Footie’s heart, not to say his head, body and soul, in The Routledge Handbook of Sports Journalism: “If there is a unifying argument [in his work] beyond a plea for human understanding, it is his contention that cricket, which is regularly cited as exposing personality, just as often conceals it.”

An affectionate, twinkle-eyed West Countryman, Footie was, for me, the least imperfect of sportswriters. A wordsmith, truth junkie and dramatist par excellence, he was also a man of principle with an acute sense of proportion and a keen eye for the rum, the ridiculous and the ruinous.

Typist extraordinaire aside, his working guises also included newshound, theatre critic, sports reporter, feature writer, columnist, memoirist, historian and biographer. He palled around with Peter O’Toole and Viv Richards, but ask anyone who knew the man beneath the byline to sum up his most endearing trait in a single word and the runaway winner would unquestionably be “humility”.

Which is why he was either the first or the second journalist my 30-year-old self pinned against a wall (strictly figuratively) and demanded that they spill the beans about precisely what it took to earn one’s corn doing something one would never tire of. That someone so gentle and self-effacing had succeeded in ploughing such a fruitful farrow in so cruel, ruthless and dodgy a trade could not have been more inspirational.

^{David Foot with Victoria Hughes, whose story he ghost-wrote}

St Footie of Westbury-on-Trym rolls off the tongue as smoothly as one of those unpretentiously exquisite sentences or phrases. Instead of hailing him as one of the nation’s greatest fast bowlers, many prefer to portray Andy Caddick as one of English cricket’s most unfathomable underachievers; Forever seeking the good, Footie focused on the beauty of his approach to the crease, sweet of action with the purring smoothness of a Rolls-Royce.

How apt, since the hack and the batsman both personified effortless elegance, that Zaheer Abbas should have inspired my favourite slice of Footiness:

Far away in Pakistan Zaheer is, at the age of 35, demonstrating once more the receding art of pure batsmanship. ‘See you back in England,’ he waves. I edge uneasily past the armed police – one of whom stops me taking some innocuous holiday cine film as if I were a fugitive from a le Carré novel – and I know indisputably in my heart that the bat is mightier than the gun. 

Foot’s county reports, his bread-and-butter, were novellas. In the Cambridge Companion to Cricket, I tried to do him justice. “Compressing the myriad aspects of a day’s play into 400 words can be trying at best, but the artistry always shines through. Never in his immaculately crafted musings does one derive a sense of snobbery or nostalgic longing, both surpassingly rare traits. If you didn’t know the following extract was written in 1993, you could just as easily guess at 1953:

Van Troost went in last when Somerset batted a second time and was top scorer. He spurned caution or the niceties of the game. The flying Dutchman generally thought of as the county’s fastest bowler, really belongs to the halls when he goes to the wicket. He backs to square-leg and still, with that phenomenal stretch of his, manages somehow to reach the ball. He hit two sixes off Martin and, seemingly with blows from the base of his bat, reached 35 before succumbing to a catch at long-off.

But while Footie the writer was a joybringer, it was his non-literary qualities that made him a soul man. He had no ego, and thus never craved the bright lights of the picture byline, the guest slot on TMS or Sky Sports, the status of a chief correspondent or even a staff job. Being happily married to a highly respected Justice of the Peace certainly helped.

Then there was his unusual depth, of intelligence, clarity, empathy and compassion. Not for him the antics of the show pony or the cheap laughs of mockery. The subjects of his greatest contributions to our appreciation and understanding of humanity, his books, were troubled titans such as Walter Hammond and Harold Gimblett. The latter committed suicide; the former plummeted from England’s greatest-ever Batsman to exile and death in apartheid South Africa, benighted, unknighted and largely forgotten.

^{Foot alongside former Gloucestershire wicketkeeper Andy Wilson}

Footie’s formidable powers of understatement can never have been tested more strenuously than when Hammond made an ill-advised comeback for Gloucestershire in 1951:

His stay at the crease, following the warmest of romantic welcomes as he strolled to the wicket, was brief and cruelly misplaced. He kept playing and missing; the coordination had gone. Up in the stands, the members and his once doting fans fidgeted. The Somerset slow bowler Horace Hazell, who had always idolised Hammond, swore that he tried to encourage him with half-volleys ... England’s great batsman and captain had made a serious mistake in agreeing to play. When mercifully he was out, the big crowd, still palpably affectionate, was silent and only wished he had left them with merely his wondrous memories.

I once asked Footie what motivated him. “I’ve been told I have a suicide complex,” he giggled gingerly, almost guiltily.

Most of my books have either been about people who committed suicide or been on the point of killing themselves, which may suggest a slightly warped personality. I hope not, but ... I’m writing about someone I’m desperately interested in, someone with a complicated life. I’m fairly complicated myself. If there was a war, even though I’m a pacifist, I’d be one of the first to sign on. I wouldn’t have the courage to be a conscientious objector. I’d like to think I am [compassionate]. I think that’s the nicest compliment anyone can pay me. And that perhaps comes from my background ... We might have had the wireless on but nobody ever spoke at our dinner table. I never learned the art of conversation. Which is probably why I write.

In the summer of 1998, Footie briefly shelved that lifelong aversion to the spotlight, not only consenting to be one of the subjects of a book I was writing but wasting a couple of hours on his least favourite activity: talking about himself.

As we sat in the sun at Cheltenham College watching Gloucestershire, his second-favourite sporting team after Somerset, he revealed that his one remaining ambition was to write an anti-war play. He also admitted that, at 70, he was beginning to forget words. It was like hearing Sir Paul McCartney confess to a sudden inability to distinguish between a bass and a piano.

That Footie kept on keeping on for another decade, long past the deadline for economic necessity, tells you everything you need to know about his agelessness, his professionalism and his devotion: to journalism, to cricket and, above all, to a better world.   

The final words belong to another soul man, if not a cricket fan, Curtis Mayfield:

Everybody gather round and listen to my song
I've only got one
We who are young, should now take a stand
Don't run from the burdens of women and men
Continue to give, continue to live
For what you know is right
Most of your life can be out of sight
Withdraw from the darkness and look to the light
Where everyone's free
At least that's the way it’s supposed to be
We just keep on keeping on
We just keep on keeping on

^{Images courtesy of Stephen Chalke}

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