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When I was in my young teens I used to go and watch Chelsea play soccer. They weren't the team I supported but they were the nearest playing in the top - the major, I guess - league. In that gone forever, innocent, pre-tv age of the 1950's it was all so different. You could just show up, pay a few pe nnies and watch the current sports page heroes.
Not that Chelsea had many. They were never championship contenders. Year on year saw them soft -shoe shuffling on the relegation trap door - the door whose ever approaching giving way would consign them to the lower leagues - bush, I guess - of semi-oblivion. Somehow they always earned a reprieve. Other teams would take the fall. And this survival in the big time was overwhelmingly due to just two players - Roy Bentley and Ken Armstrong. Bentley was authentic 22-carat class. Selected for England many times, he was as complete a leader of a forward line as I have ever seen. He was playmaker and finisher; a genuinely charismatic super-star. Ken Armstrong, by contrast, was all pragmatism. He was the sort of player that anyone who has ever played a team game halfways seriously will appreciate. Operating in Soccer's midfield engine room, Armstrong was always on hand. He was there available to receive a pass from a team-mate under pressure; there to get in a saving tackle; there making a casually inevitable - because quietly anticipated - interception. Simple, functional, obvious passes came from him all day long - passes, mind you, rather the more obvious after he had made them. Not many of his got cut off. Bentley, rightly, represented his country many times. Armstrong did not. The unassuming apparent matter-of-factness in his game caused him to blend in with the scenery. Anonymity, you could almost say, was his greatest asset. The occasional spectator might easily watch Chelsea and not be aware of his presence - let alone his influence. That was certainly true of the English selectors. Then they had a crisis. Before the biggest international fixture (then) in their calendar - against the 'auld enemy' Scotland - their squad was laid waste by injuries. They were forced to pick less a 'B' than, to their way of thinking, a 'C' team It necessarily had to include five or so journeyman pros from the Ken Armstrong mould, himself included. The game took place. Playing the neat, functional game that was their stock in trade, the 'C' team took Scotland apart to win by the baseball-like score of 7-2. And, come the next selection round, found themselves right back out on the street again. The glamor boys were back in the frame. Ken Armstrong only won that single England shirt. Fade out….fade in. A decade later I was living in L.A. One day shopping in a mall I saw a kid of about eleven wearing a Green bay shirt with the name Kramer running across the shoulders. I remember smiling and thinking 'cute'. Later, back home, I decided to change my mind. Since I didn't believe the boy's own name was Kramer or that he lived in Wisconsin, the shirt suddenly seemed a cheap shot. This was the era of Lombardi's all-conquering Packers and - hugely admirable though they were, so-so though the Rams might be - it just seemed too easy, too soft to hitch your allegiance to the smart-money flavor of the month stand-outs. All the world loves a winner, huh? Well, maybe….. Didn't loyalty begin nearer home? And Jerry Kramer. How did he feel? Was he flattered or was he, putting it politely, irked that his name was being taken in vain. Or was it in vain? Had some merchandising deal been struck? Was he irking all the way to the bank? See one, you see millions. Now I saw a Unitas or a Gabriel or a Meredith every time I turned around. And another decade on, back in London where the living is easier when you're broke, I saw as many more shirts bearing the names of the currently equivalent soccer icons. Only not quite equivalent. Now, when the majority of supporter shirts were being worn by adults, many of the names were those of more esoteric, more 'in' players. Why, in an earlier age, I might have seen 'ARMSTRONG' covering some fan's acned shoulder blades. That's right I don't like this worldwide custom. It's not so cute. What it is is "Look at me! I could have been a contender. I'm streetwise and macho. I'm savvy and good." The shirt isn't about the team whose badge is emblazoned on the front; it isn't primarily about respect for the player whose name it bears or loyalty to the team. It's all about the wearer. And about big bucks, of course. The largely cash-strapped clubs - all commercial enterprises, of course - foster this phenomenon of a God-given revenue source. They change the design of their actual shirts on a regular basis to promote sales from their Club Shops. They know the fashion-conscious fan wouldn't be seen dead (brain, naturally, apart) in last season's uniform. Rip-off prices are asked and gotten for garments tackily stitched together in Third World sweatshops. Recently Manchester United, the club most widely, most distantly, most couch-potatoedly supported in the world - they even have fans in Green Bay - had their knuckles severely rapped by the Law for price-fixing. But, the shirts apart, there seems to be a fit. The Commercial Directors want the bread: the fans want the hand-me-down, pre-fabricated ego-strut. Don't misunderstand. I'm a fan. I watch every home game of my local side - now approximately to the top league what Chelsea were half a century back - and a number of their games on the road. I'm no Frederic Exley obsessive but I cheer the good plays, yell at the referee. I wear a small enamel badge - the Charlton emblem - on my jacket collar. But I don't pretend I'm Buck Rogers or Dick Tracy or Tarzan. I wouldn't even pretend to be Ken Armstrong. I guess what I am saying is that to go into a store and buy a shirt and pay another small fortune to have it customized with a name comes not only too (expensively) cheap, it comes too easy. Ken Armstrong, who died young, got just that one England shirt. The hard way. He got it through a playing lifetime of craft and guts and running himself into the ground on match days and all the training days. He got it by gambling he could parlay his skills into a career. The eleven year-old Jerry Kramers in the mall, the be-shirted fans, I sit among, just haven't paid their dues. Only occasionally am I tempted. Some weekends, after Charlton have filed a nightmare performance, I think I will buy a club shirt after all. I'll have them put a '13' on the back. The name above it will be Nessus. No,he's not the new Lithuanian sensation. You could look it up.* *It's a classical story about a poison shirt. Nessus was the poisoner and Hercules was the poisonee. |
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