By Myles Palmer
______________________________________
I WAS thinking about courage last night.
I was thinking about Denis Law, Jurgen Klinsmann, Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Heller.
When I was 18 my hero was Denis Law, an impossibly brave footballer who scored in big games and missed the biggest game of all with a knee injury.
Klinsmann was fearless and is still bold enough to manage Germany while living in California with his wife and kids.
Nabokov was a supreme prose stylist who dared to write a poetic novel about Humbert Humbert, a warped middle-aged man who is infatuated with Lolita, a 12-year old nymphet, and takes her on a road trip round the USA.
The subject matter was so outrageous that the book, finished in 1954, was not published in the USA until 1958.
Groucho Marx said, “I plan to postpone reading Lolita for six years – until she’s eighteen.”
I thought Catch 22 was the a wild, daring, risky masterpiece, the best novel I had ever read.
Somewhere around that time somebody said that genius is a willingness to risk excess in pursuit of your obsessions.
WHICH BRINGS me to The Professor and his philosophy of attacking football.
He has beaten Palace 5-1 and Middlesbrough 7-1 and Inter 5-1 in Milan.
He also thrashed PSV 4-0 and Leverkusen 4-1
Arsene Wenger has given us defenders who play in central midfield, wingers who score dozens of goals, and left backs who play like wingers.
He is the most successful attacking coach since Johann Cruyff.
He plays to win every game and he invariably thinks he is equipped to win every game.
That takes a lot of nerve, a lot of bottle.
So Arsene Wenger is a man of courage.
He will attack Bayern more than most teams do in Munich.
I wonder whether he will ever change his style, his philosophy.
If he did change his style, what would make him change?
Bad results? The success of other teams?
Will Mourinho’s compact formula oblige Arsene to change his style?
Or will Arsene always say, “I think a coach can only be successful if he is true to himself and his own vision of how the game should be played.”
I started thinking about courage last night because I was reading about a comedian.
In Borders last week I picked up this book about a guy I knew nothing about. Never seen him on TV, never heard his albums, never even read an article about him.
But I wanted to read the book and see if Bill Hicks was my kind of guy.
American Scream – the Bill Hicks Story is by Cynthia True, who was Time Out New York’s comedy correspondent.
A film producer, John Magnuson, was asked to go and see Hicks play a theatre in San Francisco in 1991.
Magnuson produced three Lenny Bruce films in the Sixties and was his close friend .
He says that, like Bruce, Hicks can have some fun by taking a serious subject and tearing it apart. He says that both were satirists with a strong moral core.
He says, “They had completely separate styles but they did it in their own way. And that takes more than talent. It takes a lot of courage.”
That was what started me thinking about courage.
That show in San Francisco was a month after Clinton hit Baghdad with 22 cruise missiles. Six innocent Iraquis were killed at a cost of $66 million.
An assassination attempt on George Bush had been alleged. That was why the 22 cruise missiles were fired.
Hicks talked about the media coverage : “It was just a little story for two days. Isn’t that interesting?”
Although I had never heard of him, Hicks was popular in the UK and was once interviewed by Jonathan Ross, who asked him about his feelings on the electoral system generally.
Hicks said, “Well, I hope to overthrow the American government and replace it with a freely elected democracy.”
Bill Hicks had courage. He was my kind of guy.
And Arsene Wenger is also my kind of guy.
That’s why I wrote my book. For a sample of The Professor, click on Home below.
February 17th 2005.