Fun & Games with Alistair Cooke by Alistair Cooke

Author:Alistair Cooke [Cooke, Alistair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61145-634-9
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

26

No One Like Henry [1979]

Everyone knows the special pleasure of discovering a new writer, even though the ‘new’ man may have been mouldering in his grave for centuries. The joy of discovering a new columnist is rarer. A columnist is of our own time and is not likely to have a point of view so far removed from the standard attitudes as to provide us—like, say, Sir Thomas Browne or Max Beerbohm—with an unexpected brand of common sense, quaintness or indignation.

But from time to time it happens. Some years ago, in San Francisco, I had just finished riffling through the two more or less compulsory New York magazines (the New Yorker and New York) and turned to the San Francisco Chronicle and came on a column by an unknown—unknown to me. His name was Charles McCabe. His piece was called ‘The Good and the Chic’. He, too, by some fluke of extrasensory perception, had in his hands the same two magazines. The New Yorker issue was eighteen months out of date but there were things in it that were permanently good. The New York issue was only two weeks old, but McCabe was already gripped by the fear that he was dangerously behind in knowing where to eat, what to read, what to think. The New Yorker, he concluded, was a good magazine; New York was chic, the epitome, he wrote, of ‘boutique journalism’. Since then, McCabe is the first item I turn to whenever I am out there.

It is so with Longhurst. When I took up golf, lamentably late in life, I plunged into the golfing literature for instruction and into golf journalism for entertainment. I was not entertained. Most of the reporting I would later recognize as the best required much more technical knowledge than I then possessed. Herbert Warren Wind impressed me with his subtle and accurate knowledge, which plainly I must try to acquire; but in the meantime, I was a kindergarten arithmetic student stumbling around in a text on astrophysics. Pat Ward-Thomas, too, offered tantalizing hints that in a year or two I might hope to appreciate why clover might require a hooded 5-iron or an innocent swale a lay-up. Of the others, Dan Jenkins was obviously having a lot of racy fun with locker-room know-how that was beyond me, and the American newspaper reporters seemed to be assembling and reassembling, week by week, a jigsaw puzzle of statistics.

But Longhurst wrote about the game as an entirely familiar exercise in human vanity. It is why, of all sports writers, he had for so many years the highest proportion of non-sporting readers. Izaak Walton on fishing, Dickens on lawyers, Mark Twain on steam-boating, Cardus on cricket: they have appealed for generations to people who know nothing about baiting a hook, filing a suit, taking a sounding or flighting a googly. Longhurst is of their breed. He is recognizable in the first few sentences as a sly, wry, rheumy-eyed observer of human beings who happened to choose golf to illustrate their fusses and follies.

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