LOCKER ROOM:Tottenham have long had a certain aura, but some flaw in their character has repeatedly undone them in recent times, writes Tom Humphries
THIS COLUMN will eventually be about Tottenham Hotspur. I have seen how the column ends and if you plough through the powdery guff heaped at the front there will be, thrown in toward the end, some incredibly acute observations about Spurs being a metaphor for modern football. These observations are so startlingly perceptive and so on the button that it would be irresponsible to just begin a column with them. So . . .
I awoke the other morning through a gauze of dreamy semi-consciousness and beneath a looming mountain of work and convinced myself I had the flu - not that spluttering, snotty, common-cold type of thing most of you people pass off as flu these days, but the real, chilled-marrow, two-weeks-off-school flu I used to get.
Except in my doziness the other morning I felt I was a young fella again and nobly suffering from this real flu and was reading, for the first time, Jack London's Call of the Wild.
As a very sick 11-year-old I had Call of the Wild on the floor beside the bed as the read of choice between shivers and sweats. Why? One of those parental gifts "with a message"? There are plenty of people in the world colder than you are now, Sonny Jim.
Anyway, Jack London sparked a brief, boyish obsession. I consumed everything there was to consume about Alaska and the Klondike and all places cold and shivery.
Indeed, later in life one of my major triumphs as a sportswriter was persuading the Sports Editor to let me go to Alaska for a week to cover a sleigh race. I stayed in the Anchorage Hilton. Gold rush, my ass.
Anyway, the other morning (Brace yourself, Bridie, this paragraph may cause palpitations) I lay naked and cold but sweaty neath the eiderdown as memories of the Klondike segued into another favourite mental game I play when I am bored: the game I call "Times and Places In History Where SportsWriters Would Be Even Less Useful Than They Are Now".
The game is premised on there being no such thing as an anxious crowd that would part like the Red Sea upon hearing the words, "Let me through, I'm a sportswriter."
If a plane-load of people came down in the Andes and the survivors were forced into cannibalism those who would get eaten first would be the disc jockeys and the sportswriters.
At the storming of the Bastille the sportswriter is the one saying, "Non, non! You go ahead, mes amis. I'll mind the buffet and come in and get the post-storming quotes from the winners and the losers. D'accord?"
And as for the Gold Rush? We wouldn't have got past Soapy Smith.
Just about every prospector started the trek toward the Klondike in the town of Dyea rather than in its neighbour Skagway because in Skagway there was a man called Soapy Smith who would steal all your gear with his cunning swindles. Soapy ran the town.
(When I get a year off and €125 million I am going to make a movie about Soapy Smith, once described as "the most gentlemanly crook that ever scuttled a ship or cut a throat". Soapy is believed by many to have ordered the murder by Edward O'Kelly of Robert Ford, aka "the dirty little coward who shot Mr Howard, he laid poor Jesse in his grave" - Mr Howard was the alias Jesse James was using at the time Ford shot him in the back of the head.)
Anyway sports hacks would have opted for Skagway every time. For the mileage.
Those that were spared by Soapy would perish on the Chilkoot Pass, a place where an NUJ card bought precisely nothing in terms of privileges.
The Chilkoot Pass should in this current chilly economic climate be a metaphor for almost everything. The pass came at the end of a bleak and treacherous 33-mile trek and rose 1,000 feet in its last half mile.
There is a famous photograph of this section that shows a long, black line of hunched prospectors queueing like ants to climb the so-called Golden Staircase, 1,500 steps carved out of snow and ice and leading to the top of the pass.
This section was too steep for pack horses so you hid all your belongings (including the ton of food you were legally required to bring to avoid famine in the Klondike) down at the bottom of the pass and climbed up in that long black line bearing as much of your gear on your back as you could. You cached that at the top and then slid down the hill sitting on your shovel and began again. And again. And again. Many just went home after their first ride on the shovel. They made lives for themselves as sportswriters and disc jockeys.
The Chilkoot Pass is how football should be. All struggle. Many climbs up the mountain and many slides back down the mountain. No sugar-daddy syndrome like we see at Chelsea or Manchester City.
Spurs, once an elegant and serious club, have now abandoned all pretence at Continental sophistication after a long series of flirtations with men like Ossie Ardiles, Christian Gross, Jacques Santini, Martin Jol and Juande Ramos and have handed the club over to a man, 'Arry Redknapp, hewn out of the geezer tradition of El Tel Venables. They are sliding down the mountain on their shovel.
Perhaps they will have begun the next climb toward the top of the pass from the valley of next year's championship. If so it would be poignant but it would be meet and just.
Daniel Levy's stewardship of the club has been as thuggish and dopy as that of any of his recent predecessors. How is it you need a certain Fifa badge to coach a football team but no qualifications or guarantees at all to own one? Levy has, in cahoots with the director of football, Damien Comolli, a bright man with an unclear role, presided over the asset stripping of his own first team and ushered out (certainly in terms of Jol, Chris Hughton, Ramos and Gus Poyet) some of the smartest men in football. The solution is Redknapp, whose respectable tenure at Portsmouth was preceded by periods of mixed attainment that included guiding Southampton and Bournemouth to relegation. He is a punt.
It is a pity to find Spurs in such a position. They have always been one of those clubs with a distinct character of their own and despite long periods without success they have always given off an aura of being prepared for success when it came but perhaps a little too desperate to get it.
I can still remember the surprise I felt when they got relegated about 30 years ago. They just always have had the feel of a top-flight club.
Back then they promptly sold Pat Jennings to Arsenal but somehow they got back up the next year. Not long afterwards they purchased Ardiles and Ricardo Villa, a sensational thing to do at the time.
That little glitch in their character, the need to gamble, the desire to skip around Chilkoot Pass, keeps undoing them though.
They run back and forth from the arms of crafty geezers (Venables, Gerry Francis, 'Arry, Alan Sugar, etc) to slick Continentals for whom they lack the patience. They look around at Arsenal and Chelsea and the ache they feel must be pitiful.
Spurs have always been a pleasing club to observe, White Hart Lane a decent place to visit. It would be nice if they accepted that they aren't going to be part of the distant gold rush but that the style with which they climb the steps counts for something.
