My Sporting Heritage

Whenever I have attended a live sporting event, I have left the ground disappointed – if not early. Apart from one cricket match at Lords back in 1996, when a full-figured lady streaker ran across the pitch in my direction, nothing exciting has ever happened. Admittedly, I have attended very few events (not being a sports fan) and I may have been unlucky that they were all dull. Nevertheless, I am not prepared to kiss any more frogs – especially after last week’s rugby match between the Sharks and the Saracens, teams with names so misleadingly scintillating that they probably contravene the Trades Description Act.

Despite all this, I am partial to watching the occasional game of rugby on TV, thereby eliminating the inconveniences of driving and queuing, the inferior quality of refreshments, the high cost of tickets and – not least – the poor view of the action (supposing there is any). Perhaps the faint but lingering interest I have in the game is a legacy of my education at a boarding school in Plymouth, where participation was mandatory for all boys in possession of four functioning limbs. I was neither an accomplished nor enthusiastic player but I did have an uncle who played for Plymouth Albion. Let’s just put my attachment down to nostalgia, a feeling that has dominated the last few days especially, since I have been on a trip, with my partner, to Plymouth, the city I left in 1966 and have visited only rarely since.

A lot has changed there – as one might expect. For one thing, the old school is gone, its land sold to developers long ago. This saved my partner from the ritual of having to go and see it although, in fairness, she was indulgent when listening to my commentary on other landmarks. These included places such as the outdoor pools where I swam as a child, the shelter on the prom where I first kissed a girl, the hall where I danced to Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps and the pub where I bought my first (illegal) pint. Her tolerance of my nostalgia was exemplary, though it may have been enhanced by the fact that the sun was shining and the feel-good factor was high. The city’s extensive and varied seafront, from the Mayflower Steps at the Barbican, westwards around the Hoe, to the former Royal Naval stronghold at Mount Wise, looked at its best. And there was decent espresso where once there had been only Nescafé; sourdough where once there was only Wonderloaf.

Since Elizabethan times, the local economy has been dominated by the Royal Navy but, now that the “Senior Service” is shrunk to a fraction of the size it used to be, some fundamental changes are manifest. Admiralty land and buildings have been sold off, enabling the development of housing where once the industrial/military complex hogged all the best sea-facing locations. Not that sea-facing locations mattered to me as a schoolboy: I was more impressed by the futuristic architecture of the city’s central area, re-fashioned in the 1950s after the war-time bombings. The wide boulevards, lined with the clean contemporary temples of retail, intersected by the broad Armada Way running south to the war monument on the Hoe, all seemed perfect to me. Nowadays the shops, having to adapt to new ways of doing business, are under strain and some of them are looking less than glamorous. Nevertheless, the original street-plan remains harmoniously intact and, as such, lives up to the confident, optimistic vision of the future that inspired it and that appealed so much to my youthful idealism.

Overall, with encouraging signs of a revival of economic fortune based on tourism and higher education, the old place certainly has a lot more to interest me than just nostalgia.