Abstract
When the sportswriter Frank Keating died quietly one January night 18 months ago, it unleashed a torrent of grief, affection and wonder. The reasons for this lie within this 300-page collection of his work – mini-whirligigs of time, Frank Time, bobbing along between the glossy covers.
I got to know Keating a little – and liked him an awful lot – after working alongside him at Wisden Cricket Monthly and The Guardian. He was a huge presence and a shining talent, I was one step up from making the tea, but rank never mattered to Keating. For such a sociable man, he had tremendous empathy for those who didn't breeze through life with the same ease. I would bump into him occasionally at work parties where he would recognise a terrified soul, give you a prickly kiss and an affectionate m'dear, fill up your glass and rattle on kindly and most encouragingly until you had courage enough to look up from the floor.
And so it was with his writing. Alongside the greatness, the warmth, which shines through this lovely anthology that Matthew Engel, his friend and Guardian colleague, has put together. Almost from beginning to end, there is empathy: for winners, for losers, for young whipper-snappers with shining talents, for rheumy old men whose fame has long gone, for put-upon crowds dealing with intemperate weather, for well-oiled football fans celebrating in Roman fountains. Sympathy even for the man who, perhaps until Lance Armstrong was unmasked at last, was considered the biggest cheat of them all: Ben Johnson.
“Poor old fast-footed, slow-witted Ben,” Keating wrote at the Seoul Olympics in 1988, “carrying the can for his greedy little cadre of ‘advisers’ – as well as for those cheats, who must be numbered in the tens of thousands, who call themselves athletes from all over the world, east and west.”
This compassion meant sportsmen and women weren't afraid to be themselves when Keating, his pad and pencil plonked down in front of them, accompanied by a jolly bottle of red or three. He would tease titbits by the warmth of his personality and if the odd theatrical curlicue was added here or there, nobody ever complained.
For almost as much as Keating loved sport and the people who perched on top of a horse or stood for hours at slip, he loved the game of sticking together words on a page.
You can imagine the grin on his face when during an interview with Alec Stock in 1975, he drifted into an aside and bashed out the following on his old typewriter.
“And sure, it's hard to twig that under the lazy Mendip green of cidrous Midsomer Norton, Radstock, Peasedown or Stratton-on-the-Fosse there are men with black-speckled faces and lamps champed to their foreheads, pickaxe pixies deep down under Camelot; sweaty, swearing, hewing black and white men 2,000 feet below the docile, chewing black and white Friesians.”
Yet alongside those ravishing adjectives and that famous imagery, he could also pare it back, like in this lovely paragraph on Alec Bedser. “The great big boy walked to Woking station with his great big cricket bag. He took the tube from Waterloo to Baker Street, then a bus to Lord's. Wally Hammond gruffed ‘Good Luck’.”
What did come as a surprise, though it shouldn't have, is the breadth of his knowledge. Reading through this book from its unrecognisable first entry, a sensible hockey report from 1962 – “they pitilessly cut all my florid flam about autumn leaves and Windsor Castle” – through to his last column for the Observer on December 2, 2012, you see how much he had learned and stored away in that special-edition brain, ready to pull out artlessly when the time came.
He was lucky in that he never felt the need to catch every press conference or follow up every lead, and that The Guardian sensibly let him tread his own path. On the 1981 tour of India, he told readers of the time he took himself off to have his fortune told by a beaky Dolores Perira in Bangalore, and on the same tour he crept out before breakfast to the convent of the Sisters of Charity, where he coaxed Mother Teresa into practising cricket shots.
Occasionally Keating got cross, particularly with money-grabbing administrators and blazered old farts. He hated the Atlanta Olympics and got no pleasure from watching over-coached little gymnasts perform like poodles. But the anger soon faded.
Keating's son Paddy writes at the back of the book: “Dad often told us as kids that it was more important to be the happiest than the best … But Dad was lucky enough to be both the happiest and the best.”
This is a wonderful book. Keating was a wonderful man. And, oh, what a writer!