One of the best books about sport is in fact three books: the memoirs of Bill Veeck, sports hustler extraordinaire. Veeck owned the Chicago White Sox for two memorable periods, and between times tried his hands at virtually every type of sports promotion possible.
When it came to stunts and strokes, Veeck was a genetically-modified Fianna Failler. He could pull anything and he would try anything.
Growing up, he worked for the Cubs and sold box seats to the Capone brothers. He used to tell the story that he thought $100 bills were called C notes because only Al and Ralph Capone had them. I was reading the second volume of Veeck's memoirs last week when I began confusing him with his heir, Juan Antonio Samaranch. Early in The Hustlers Handbook, Veeck sets out to define the essential character of hustling.
"A promoter works out a quid pro quo," says Bill, "a hustler gets a free ride and makes it seem like he's doing you a favour . . . When travelling, a promoter will travel on a line where he can work out an exchange. A hustler travels on a magic carpet and says (shouts, cries, coos) `Come fly with me'."
They're playing our song Juan!
By way of illustration, Veeck tells the story of the Nellie Fox Presentation. Once, in Chicago, Veeck discovered that his beer suppliers were cutting up grumpy, and the concession trucks were having difficulty squeezing through the narrow path under the ball park. The solution was bringing the trucks in through an enlarged exit gate, a change which required a lot of unattractive building work.
Building work in mid season would deface the park and maybe cause a lack of confidence among punters, so Veeck came up with a wheeze. He let it be known that he would be honouring one of his athletes in the very near future with an incredibly large gift. The athlete would be a farmboy called Nellie Fox, the award would be "for being Nellie" and the gift would be so large as to require the expansion of the exit gate and the construction of some pathways.
Veeck, having made the announcement, needed to find something big enough to justify his building work and comical enough not to cost too much. He hit on the solution. Knowing that Nellie lived on a landlocked farm in Pennsylvania, Veeck leased the presentation gift for a mere 24 hours and on the night, in front of a packed house, he wheeled a giant yacht through a great big hole in the wall and down the pathways which the beertrucks would be using.
There was nothing Nellie Fox could have had less use for than a yacht, and he gladly accepted Veeck's offer of a few acres of land in Pennsylvania which Veeck had been trying to offload anyway. The yacht went back to its owner. The crowds went home happy. Imagine. I read all this just after I read Juan Antonio Samaranch's claim during the week that the Sydney Olympics would be 100 per cent clean. Breathtaking chutzpah. A veritable catamaran of whimsy. When it comes to knocking big holes in the wall to satisfy business partners and then driving gleaming tubs through them to keep the fans happy, Samaranch has nothing to learn.
As is well known, the Olympics Games have a problem. People in general believe that it is as hard to stage a clean games as it is to smuggle a brown bag full of cash through a room full of city planners. This built-in level of cynicism doesn't quite stop people from watching the Games, but it inhibits the full enjoyment of the spectacle. The cynicism is so widespread that the motto of the Games might as well be "Higher, Faster, Stronger. Sure they're all at it!" This sense of soiled goods affects the sponsors, who want two things. They want the big stars - Please Juan, no bloodletting, no ugly building work - and they want the audience.
Poor Juan, the aged, jaded, former fascist, is left to, as the song says, do the hustle. The announcement this week that the combined testing powers of French and Australian teams can be used in tandem as an effective test for the presence of EPO in an athlete's system is a welcome move surely. I, for one, didn't believe that the IOC would have the guts to impose such a test, and I retain niggling suspicions they will find some way either of not using the tests or of using them but announcing their use at the Games is a mere trial.
Then out comes Juan and announces that, Ta-da!, the Games will be 100 per cent clean. When the existing urine tests can't even catch a slow-learning steroid user? When there is no test for Human Growth Hormone? When even the EPO-related business of red blood cells has been developed to the extent that synthetic EPO itself is becoming slightly passe among cutting edge users? And the Offaly hurlers are past it! Look at that boo-tiful yacht folks! Just look!
Yet the Games will be 100 per cent clean? As was, apparently, last month's Tour de France, a revivalist spectacle which includes not just the healed but also the repented.
We can, however, learn from this year's tour and cycling in general. Urine tests from this year's peddlers were frozen and will be unfrozen again when they can be reliably tested for EPO. Juan, whose C note-toting Olympic partners are bankrolling the whole Sydney extravaganza, should dragoon them into financing a mass freezing of Olympic samples. Just the medallists, say, and every competitor will know that the samples can be thawed and tested some time in the next five years.
We proposed this a few weeks ago as a form of Olympic passport for the Irish team going to Sydney. The response was ringing silence. We have as much chance of catching the big fish in Sydney as we do of winning a big yacht at the ball park.
By the way, the last part of Bill Veeck's memoirs is called 30 Tons A Day. a title which refers to the amount of horseshit Veeck had to shift from the paddocks every day while he owned Suffolk Downs Racetrack.
Thirty tons a day? That's nothing, says Juan, nada, and he jets away into the sunset on his magic carpet, his face thoughtful as he tots the bonus frequent flier miles he gets, just for being Juan.
How's our oul Juan? As ever. Game ball. Do The Hustle!
