A while ago, an advertisement for Nescafe Golden Mix featured a man standing in an amphitheater in front of everyone he had ever met in his life. Eighty thousand people are divided into categories: family, ex-girlfriends, co-workers, etc. They all stand up and are told to sit down if they haven’t spoken to them in years or if they don’t remember their name. Until he was left with the ones who were truly special to him. This close circle shares a Nescafe. No disrespect to the popular instant coffee, but after all this effort you’d hope there would at least be a cafeteria.
“Guys can literally sit down and chant the names of former athletes and have the best time.” This was a tweet from someone named EM Hudson on July 15, 2021, from somewhere in the United States. It was retweeted 49,000 times and received almost 300,000 likes.
I often get labeled as someone who gets a lot of airtime doing this. But I think about this a lot – not the players who define your love, but the ones who play only a temporary role in your experience – the supporting players, the extras, the ones who have to sit right at the beginning of your story. his own personal Nescafe ad.
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These might just be a football sticker or a grainy image telling you how to approach the 17th at Sawgrass in PGA Tour Golf on the Amiga. They were on your TV or live in front of you for just one play, one run, one jump. You may have never seen them play, but somehow they sit inside your brain.
These individuals who dedicate their lives to this can mean everything to someone else, they can be the top elite; But to you, whether because of their era, their sport, or sheer luck, they are sometimes literally just a name.
It’s tempting to prove the point by going on to write a list of people who evoke a small sense of nostalgia – which, truth be told, is exactly what I tried to present until it was pointed out to me that a random selection of sports stars did not. It pretty much meets the quality threshold the Guardian aims for: “While you’re here, you’ve browsed the list of ’90s tennis players, now give us a monthly direct debit.”
But with a little act of rebellion… Steve Backley, Mick Hill, Hughie Teape, Yvonne Murray. It’s so liberating. The list you write today may be completely different from the one you write tomorrow. Michel Vonk, John Stockton, Imran Sherwani.
The joy of someone’s name takes you back to a simpler time. Tab Ramos, Olga Korbut, Tim Witherspoon… I never saw the man box, couldn’t pick him out in a crowd of one – but I remember vividly the commercial for his 1986 fight with Frank Bruno. The name Witherspoon flashes on my parents’ old TV – Witherspoon Witherspoon Witherspoon – standing on its little legs, turning into a dot when you turn it off.
Mats Wilander, Craig Hooper, Conchita Martínez, Brian Whittle. Brian Whittle – to this day, and for many years, I remain convinced that he was part of the 4x400m relay in Tokyo in 1991. But it wasn’t. Roger Black, Derek Redmond, John Regis, Kriss Akabusi. Great run by Akabusi. Defeating world champion Antonio Pettigrew. What a great comment from David Coleman. So where was Whittle? A lost thirty years of imagining him standing proudly with a Union Jack wrapped around his slender torso.
Katarina Witt, Barry Horowitz, Judy Simpson, Vasyl Rats – many more misrememberings. Rats – One of the heroes of the World’s Greatest Goals VHS tapes (“Confusing Barnes”) for his amazing strike in that amazing match against Belgium in 1986. But it wasn’t like that. It was against France. Igor Belanov scored the goal against the Belgians. “What a goal!” Gerry Harrison is crying. I wonder how many of my early sports memories were completely fabricated or at least contained major factual errors.
Jahangir Khan, Gareth Chilcott, Bill Werbeniuk. Tony Allcock. I’m sitting at my grandparents’ house, dying of boredom, trying to steal as much Cheddar as possible from the pack without being noticed, I walk back into the living room to watch something on TV and it’s a western or bowl. The referee holds up two small red coins, a crowd applauds, seconds turn into minutes, hours.
Jonty Rhodes, Fuzzy Zoeller, Adrian Moorhouse. Bernie Kosar. In the early 90’s I used to watch American Football every Sunday night at a friend’s house down the road. Since it was very late, we recorded it on video and watched it a week late. There was literally no way to find the scores; Even writing this today seems ridiculous. Every week I would drink hot chocolate that burned my mouth while watching Gary Imlach and Mick Luckhurst talk during games. He was almost healed the following Sunday; I’m not sure I tasted any between 1991-1993. Some family friends once gave me a Cleveland Browns hat and that was my team. Kosar was our playmaker; In my opinion, he threw his gun and was only able to throw it 20 yards.
Ato Boldon, Dennis Mitchell, Carl Lewis; they always stand next to Linford Christie. Alberto Tomba – The only name I can remember from David Vine, cowbells and Ski Sunday. Eddie Hemmings, John Emburey, Phil Edmonds – burly spinners who looked like very old men slowly wandering around the cricket field before I even came close to understanding what spin bowling was. Searle brothers – “Abbagnales are exhausting” – Petr Korda, Tessa Sanderson, Javier Sotomayor.
And all those Panini stickers. John Chiedozie, Bob Bolder, Glenn Pennyfather, Ian Culverhouse. None of the above represent sports heroes to me, but without them there is no one for my heroes to play with, nor even a context for them to exist. And for that, they are welcome around me to drink a very strange Nescafe whenever they want.