Thrilling as the race was, last week’s Cheltenham Gold Cup will leave an even more remarkable legacy: the winning jockey, Sam Waley-Cohen, did it as an amateur. Being a jockey isn’t his day job — he is the CEO of a dental business — and he races for love, not money.
It’s not supposed to happen these days. According to the logic of professionalism, it is impossible to compete at the highest level, let alone win, unless you sacrifice all else. The word amateur has gone from being an accolade to a term of abuse. When coaches get seriously angry they call you ‘amateurish’, meaning sloppy and inept. When they are impressed they call you ‘a real pro’. The Gold Cup was a delicious snub to that simplistic view of excellence.
In 13 years as a professional cricketer, I was often told to give up distractions, to narrow my life, to pursue one professional goal and only one. The idea that you could have another job — or even other passions — and still play at your best was out of fashion.
But my experience suggested otherwise. Though I never won cricket’s equivalent of the Gold Cup, my two best seasons were 2003, when I was writing a book, and 1997, when I was studying for my Tripos exams at Cambridge. The writing helped the batting. I was less anxious, freer, more instinctive — more amateur, if you like. By contrast, one winter in Australia I gave up all distractions apart from batting. The results were striking: I didn’t get any runs.
There is no doubt that professionalism has made sportsmen fitter and stronger. I’m not recommending blindly turning back the clock to a Corinthian ideal. But we should worry that the mantra of professionalism is too inflexible. Professional monofocus might suit Geoff Boycott, but many top performers need more balance to play at their best. Look at Mr Waley-Cohen, who gets up at 5.30 a.m. to train, before returning to London in time for a day’s work. I suspect his day job helps him to race so brilliantly just as much as the early training sessions — as Anthony Trollope (no mean horseman himself) rose early to write his novels before clocking on at the Post Office.
My point is pragmatic, not philosophical. Professionalism has adopted a one-size-fits-all approach: be like Tiger Woods (who used to wake house-guests by using his gym at 5 a.m.) or else ‘you don’t want it enough’. Wrong. Working too narrowly — to the exclusion of all else — often leads you to perform worse, not better. Having a job away from sport can help you to avoid that.
When I was captain of Middlesex, the administrators asked me for an inspirational quote for the team handbook. I chose the World Cup-winning coach Felipe Scolari: ‘My priority is to ensure that players feel more amateur than professional. Thirty years ago, the effort was the other way. Now there is so much professionalism, we have to revert to urging players to like the game, love it, do it with joy.’
It lasted only a year, our flirtation with joy. When I picked up the following season’s handbook, I saw that all the other quotes survived, but Scolari’s had been cut — not debated, just silently excised.
At one club ‘strategy’ meeting, we discussed a gifted but underperforming young spin-bowler. The prevailing wisdom was that he should spend all winter on a strength programme in a gym. But being a spin bowler is not about strength. It is about skill and, above all, nerve and confidence. I suggested he should get a job, entirely away from cricket. He might come back rejuvenated and rediscover his love for the sport. My idea was laughed at as a ‘relic of amateurism’.
Instead, the gym prevailed. The spinner followed the strength programme but didn’t bowl any better and was soon released from the club. The following season, now with a job and playing amateur club cricket, I bumped into him. ‘I wish you could pick me now — I’ve never bowled better.’ Freed from the professional system, he had found his voice, but too late.
Contempt for amateurism creeps into a much broader argument. The ascent of ultra-professionalism means we increasingly confuse self-sacrifice with excellence. Sitting at your desk is not the same thing as doing a good job, any more than hanging around the training ground makes you a good cricketer. Nor, surely, does slavishly following the Westminster gossip make you a more effective politician. And yet it’s harder than ever, in the post-Expenses era, for a politician to escape censure for having a second career.
It is only a short jump from ultra- professionalism to puritanical censoriousness. When John Prescott was photographed playing croquet in the garden of Dorneywood, his grace-and-favour house, he was promptly hounded out of it. But who is to say that the Deputy Prime Minister had not been discussing urgent matters of state, and, between croquets, was remarking on the strength of the Norwegian krone against the euro? OK, perhaps it’s not the perfect example. But you get the point.
Because Margaret Thatcher was a successful prime minister, and only slept five hours a night and hated holidays, we assume too easily that the success was linked to the self-sacrifice. But one colleague says that at 12 inches’ distance, point blank in the crush of the voting lobby, you saw an exhausted woman. He believes she burnt herself out and her judgment slipped.
The questionable logic here is that the right amount of work is to work every second. Not content with forbidding us from having other jobs, ultra-professionalism wants us to give up other interests, too. But where would Sir John Major have been without access to the cricket scores, or Harold Macmillan without his beloved Jane Austen before Prime Minister’s Questions?
The Gold Cup invites us to revisit the possibility that excellence can be reached by many different paths, not solely by total professionalism. It was once conventional wisdom that no human being would ever run a mile in under four minutes. The man who broke the barrier was Roger Bannister, a medical student, not a professional runner. A photograph taken the following day shows Bannister outside St. Mary’s hospital, raised aloft by his fellow students, the remarkable and the quotidian rubbing shoulders.
I hope Mr Waley-Cohen’s colleagues took a similar photo at his office on the Monday morning after the Gold Cup. It should be on the desk of every coach and CEO, inscribed with the words of Felipe Scolari.