SPECTATOR SPORT
Learning to love Big Ron
Simon Barnes
ONE of the rum things about life — per- haps most especially the sporting life — is that perfect ghastliness, if it is pursued for long enough, becomes in the end rather admirable. Initially provoking repugnance and hostility, perfect ghastliness eventually inspires something not very far short of affection.
This is emphatically the case with Big Ron. Ron Atkinson epitomised everything that was ghastly about the football manager of the late Seventies and the early Eighties, which was an awful lot of ghastliness to epitomise. Now, not much less than 20 years on, and in the middle of the latest managerial venture — with a club that had reached rock bottom and needed the con- ventional Big Ron miracle — he is almost entirely unchanged.
There is the same dressiness, the same sense of enormous self-esteem, the same rather laboured quips, the same self-con- scious actor's presence in post-match press conferences, but this time there is some- thing rather quaint about it all, something rather endearing and even rather admirable. There comes a point when con- sistency becomes pluck, and Atkinson has never been less than consistent.
And luck has come with him. At his new club, Sheffield Wednesday, last week, he brought on a substitute when a goal down, and within a minute the substitute had scored. This bout of managerial genius was later summed up by Atkinson as 'plan panic'. His team managed a late winner too. Atkinson reached his peak when he man- aged Manchester United in the early Eight- ies. In his pomp, he was a figure of unre- deemed ghastliness. But he never quite won them the championship they had been seeking for so many years.
What to hate most? Let us count the ways: the jewellery, perhaps; the suits; the ties; the champagne; the sideways I'm-not-bald hair- cut; the very public love affair, and the divorce; the headline: 'Our only crime was to fall in love'; the belief that he was a superior class of being; the admiration he inspired in people; the sycophancy he inspired among many in my own profession.
But all this can go hang now. Big Ron is still Big-Ronning about the place, and he lightens the sporting round. Perhaps the secret is that with consistency you begin to gather a few ironies about yourself. A cou- ple of years ago — he is now 58 — when discussing the England job, he insisted that he would only take it on if he could do so as a player-manager.
He has never stopped boasting about his prowess in club five-a-side games. At his previous club he claimed that he was the best five-a-side player in the club, but he added, That probably says something about the position we are in', which was bottom.
Atkinson has always been an actor. A previous colleague, Gordon Strachan, said, `In training this season he has been every- one from. Arnold Muhren to David Ginola' — these two being footballers of immense style, something Atkinson never was. He was a bulldozing centre-half for Cambridge United.
Atkinson is a performer, and the loud- mouthed, arrogant part he has chosen to play most of the time has, very slowly and gradually, acquired a kind of charm. Some- one once said that if he was recognised in the street, he would call the people back and tell them who he was. In fact, it was his wife who said this, and it was Atkinson who told the story.
At times, in his Manchester United days, it seemed that Atkinson loved football because it gave him the chance to be famous. Self-love was always strong in him, but that doesn't mean he failed to love football as well. Perhaps the comparative failure at Manchester United was a life- changing experience. Perhaps this was when Atkinson realised that his self-love was doomed in the end to be unrequited. And he still loves fame, but mainly, I think, because it gives him the chance to stay in football. He relishes every last chance that comes his way. So should we all.
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