Doing What Comes Naturally - 8 September 2000

This weekend we've come to the end of a two month orgy of sport starting with Wimbledon, a week's pause and then the British Open, and then we'd barely caught our breath and now out on New York City's Flushing Meadows the last major tennis tournament, the US Open, was played night and day for two weeks in a main stadium that makes Rome's Coliseum appear as cosy as the House of Commons.

And while in retrospect the human scene at Wimbledon warmly recalls the vicar's garden party, the huge crowd at New York's centre court vividly reminded me of nothing so much as the seething Roman plebs howling their pleasure at the devouring of Christians.

But no sooner do we sift through the memories of these festivals than the next stop is Sydney and the Olympics.

We were harshly reminded of the coming Olympics by a feature in the evening news about German athletes undergoing a new treatment for developing, of course, muscle which in the past few years has become a fetish of athletes in almost any sport you care to mention except, I suppose, chess.

But this German treatment is pretty rigorous. First, four men we saw - already strapping enough, I should say, to toss any heavyweight into the river - they went into a chamber whose atmosphere was heated to 78 degrees and after five minutes or so in there they emerged and obediently padded off into another chamber which is a cold chamber - at, the man said, minus 166 degrees.

They stayed there for three minutes exactly. Any longer, it says, the treatment is unnecessary since it would be done on a corpse.

This rather gruesome item came on top of a report that the Olympic committee is working on a new and more rigorous drug testing system since a warning bit of news this spring about the development of new muscle-building drugs that are very difficult to detect by present methods.

This urge to improve on God's work by speeding up the human process of growth springs from the desire to make or beat a record.

Well surely that urge has always been the driving force of most athletes? Yes, but until the past 20 years or so it was taken for granted that athletes performed more or less strenuous exercises by way of practice and then trusted to their bodies' natural endowment.

But there came a day when with bewildering suddenness records were being broken not by one man but by several.

When this topic has come up lately I find that most of us recall the famous scandal in, I think it was, the 1970s when during one Olympics a couple of women on the East German team were - not exactly strip-searched - they were asked to take off their clothes so the judges could see simply, well, if they were females.

There had to be a simple explanation of why they seemed to be winning everything.

That was when most of us, I think, first heard about steroids - anabolic steroids I hasten to say not the corticosteroids that are prescribed for various forms of arthritis.

The Greek word "anabolic" means building up growth. The anabolic steroids are in action, what you might call, quick fix metabolism which are intended rapidly to increase the growth of muscle.

Like most severe drugs they can have severe and damaging effects - not side effects but the main effect.

Do you remember butazolodine, the miracle painkiller of the 1960s? We'd see a footballer receive a brutal injury and 10 minutes later was back in combat. A crippling muscle spasm would vanish in an hour instead of a year. Marvellous.

"No wonder," a surgeon friend of mine remarked, "it's like killing a gnat with an atom bomb."

Well several years ago the International Olympic Committee declared anabolic steroids to be illegal.

Now they're busy looking into the ingenious ways sports doctors and pharmacologists have found of bypassing anabolics but still building muscle.

So what does more muscle contribute to the performance of any athlete? The simple answer is power.

And that has been the most conspicuous effect on most individual games - athletics, golf, tennis.

This aim has been assisted in both tennis and golf by the invention of revolutionary new equipment.

No less an authority than Rod Laver told me, some years ago, that today it was impossible to compare the best player of two different eras because the new balls, the new rackets especially, have helped ordinary players lift their games in a way never before possible.

What, I think, initiated the urge to succeed through power was the world rating system whereby we know once a week where this man or woman stands in a descending list of the best.

I don't know who started it but the Japanese developed the points system: your performance in so many tournaments which had most top players.

Thus Martina Hingis, although she hasn't won one of the majors for 18 months, is still number one.

In golf Tiger Woods, as everybody knows, number one. David Duval number two.

In women's golf, number one: a young woman who exactly matches Tiger's record over the last 18 months is Karrie Webb - as everybody doesn't know, since she's not an exotic Asian, Indian, African American with a lean athletic body.

She's an Australian, a slip of a girl, not pretty, not glamorous - therefore not a candidate for world renown in this success-infected world. It's outstanding success that people flock to see not beautiful or skilled playing.

At the last of the four major golf tournaments, the American PGA, the other week, the New York Times took a survey and found that just on 50% of the crowd in attendance knew absolutely nothing about golf, had never been to a tournament before, and for some never-discovered reason enjoyed standing eight deep beyond the ropes to peek at Mr Woods bending over a ball 50 yards away rather than stay home in a comfortable armchair and see which weapon he was taking and spot the beads of sweat on his forehead.

Individual success is equated with strength - muscular power. So innocents go to watch a man drive a ball 320 yards, which has little to do with being supreme at golf.

In tennis the men's game has become a scene of muscle men slugging away from the baseline.

In the women's game, the arrival of the terrifying Williams sisters. Neither of them is a graceful or subtle player but they can serve at a man's speed of 115/120 miles an hour.

They slam dunk impossible cross court shots beyond the quick reach of an ordinary human being.

I want to say at once that the sisters and Tiger happen to have splendid bodies which they've trained to whipcord perfection by dedicated, hour after hour, daily exercise - no drugs.

The same with Pete Sampras. There was a sad, revealing interview with him a week or two ago.

He said that during the year 1997/8 he gave 16 hours a day and many sleepless nights to become the best in one particular category - to be the first tennis player to be rated number one in the world six years in succession. He yearned for this more than for any grand slam title.

He confessed, the other day, that the whole year was a nightmare. He developed nervous tics, constant insomnia, his hair came out in clumps - all to be the best, better than the next man.

Today he's engaged to be married. He sees the prospect of a life above and beyond the net cord. "I think," he said wistfully, "I have matured somewhat." Glory be.

Before the British Open at St Andrews Tiger Woods spent a month or so watching television tapes of previous championships at St Andrews. When he wasn't doing that he was practising, practising for hours on end with his coach. Any time left over he gave to eating and sleeping.

This is called, in the trade, dedication. To the cool outsider it's known as total obsession.

But for the less than greatly gifted there is no drug to improve cunning, subtlety, touch, and as more and more young athletes dedicate their lives to the religion of their game there are fewer and fewer professional athletes who are great - not quite the best - by the possession of these other qualities.

In all the furore about the intrusion of drugs - and without drugs the overwhelming of the old game by muscle - there emerged, this week, a voice of sanity, of wisdom you might say.

It came from a 19-year-old girl, of all improbable sages - Martina Hingis - who was asked first about drugs and then about the urge to win every grand slam which she has not been doing since the bounding, pounding arrival of Williams sisters.

She said, simply: "I'm scared of that stuff. I don't want to die when I'm 30."

She does not aspire to put on gobs of muscle to be like anybody but herself. She will, she said, do the best she can with her leanness. She might have added with her speed and her cunning.

If it doesn't overpower the power girls, so be it. "My life is nice right now," she says.

The tournament physician had a comment on Hingis's remarks: "They need to be written in stone and presented like a mantra to all young athletes in our enhancement-crazed culture." So they should.

In the meantime I find myself all the more grateful to have seen, not necessarily the best, the greatest or the strongest players, but down the years the most engaging ones who lived by Martina Hingis's mantra.

First among all great equals, Bobby Jones - an amateur, a weekend golfer. A modest entrant to 20 major tournaments, he won 13 came second in five. Walked the tough, rough courses of Scotland with a slow smile and played the game with more magic and more grace than anyone before or since.

In tennis the incomparably graceful Baron von Cramm.

And today the effect of the power mongers has been to make me, for one, cherish all the more the subtle, easy touch play of Freddie Couples in golf, Martina Hingis and the engaging Tim Henman in tennis, and all those not great but simply very good players who, as Ethel Merman sang and Irving Berlin wrote and Martina Hingis said: go on "doing what comes naturally".

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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