SPECTATOR SPORT
'HIGH on the list of professional embar- rassments I have suffered is the time I was forced by a malfunctioning laptop to dictate copy to a deaf-mute copy-taker down a telephone line from Antigua that seemed awash with mushroom soup. In a voice that could have called the cattle home across the sands of Dee, I told half of St John's and all of the derisive and heckling press box: 'Stop, new para, open quotes. "My name is Ozymandias" — usual spelling Please, copy-taker — "king of kings. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Noth- ing beside remains." • Point, unquote, new para.'
The quote seemed such a good idea When I was writing the piece, Ozymandias being, to my mind, one of the most impor- tant figures in modern sport. Anyone who builds an empire in sport should be forced to gaze, like the traveller from an antique land, on the crumbled vainglory of the for- gotten past. Round the decay of that colos- sal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away. The landscape of Wigan is a different kind of desert: post-industrial, a town that remembers its past, not a place to lift a stranger's heart. Yet here, too, an empire was built and here too, inevitably, it lies half- sunk and shattered. It was a sporting empire, an eternal dynasty that lasted a decade and more; for in sport empires and their emper-
Summer sport
Simon Barnes
ors come and go at breakneck speed.
This weekend, the soi-disant Super League begins. Formerly the Rugby League division one, it comprises the elite teams of the winter sport of the North. But Rugby League is a summer sport now, because satellite television wished it so. And. Wigan has become the crassly named Wigan War- riors.
Rugby League has a 100-year tradition of excellence based on defiance: defiance of the South, of the once-treasured hypocrisies of the so-called amateurs of Rugby Union. Now it is a sport rolling over on its back to have its tummy tickled by television, and taking on every gimmick that man can devise. Wigan Warriors play Halifax Bluesox on Sunday, for example. Leeds Rhinos play Oldham Bears. The only club to keep its name is Wigan's antique rival, St Helens, always (but never official- ly) called the Saints.
The only good joke in the Super League is the addition of Paris Saint Germain. Here Rugby League, a plant that thrives on the stony grounds of the North, is strug- gling manfully in the lush, fertile soils of the South — a long way south of the M62 motorway, the road which is not so much Rugby League's main artery as its aorta.
Alas, poor Wigan: three million quid in debt, and considering an offer from Tesco for its sainted Central Park ground. They may yet abandon the heart of Wigan for a light-industrial desert with plenty of car- parking, and no soul to speak of. Wigan, who won the Cup a ridiculous eight times in a row — a record that will surely never be beaten — went out against the Saints a few weeks ago in their first appearance in the competition this year.
They have been unloading their best and most costly players, and after the Cup defeat they unshipped the mighty Va'iga Tuigamala for a million quid — sold, to add to the humiliation, back to Rugby Union. The club is rent by rows about money and potential benefactors: all this at a time when the sport is redefining itself as a new game, a summer sport. This second summer of Super League needs to be one of consolida- tion, but Wigan's empire now stands as a new monument to folly, the folly of believ- ing that you are immune to time. Time pass- es with dreadful speed for us all, but it pass- es fastest of all for the emperors of sport.
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