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A great writer

Friday, 25th January 2008

There's a superb obituary in the Guardian by Mike Brearley of the great sports writer Dudley Doust, with whom Brearley collaborated on two wonderful books about the Ashes:

He was much more than a ghost (for example in our book on the tour of Australia in 1978-9, there were three chapters written solely by him, including a marvellous portrait of Derek Randall, From Rags to Riches. Cricket writer Scyld Berry says that this "is still the best reconstruction of an innings ever done. No one ever got inside the head of a batsman like that.")
I too was more than the ghostly figure who might provide some basis for a writer's perorations. It was a real partnership, in which he taught me, as he did many others, a lot about writing. I learned the difference between an academic essay and a good read. I learned how details - most stereotypically, what someone had for breakfast before a big game - could throw light on the person in unexpected ways.
Doust brought to English sports-writing techniques learned from Tom Wolfe and American journalism. He excelled as a portraitist. Later, in my work as a psychoanalyst, I realised that his approach fits in with a central notion of this field, that there is to a personality a sort of hologram or core that presents itself in all sorts of detailed ways.
Doust later also published books about Ian Botham, The Great All-Rounder (1980), a biography of Severiano Ballesteros (1982), and Peter Scudamore's Record Season (1989), along with a collection of pieces, Sports Beat (1992), in whose introduction Harry Carpenter wrote: "Doust is the Maigret of sports writers, gently but doggedly working on the case until the blinding light of revelation comes". In recent years, he wrote pithy letters to the newspapers, including one written after Conservative losses in local elections: "Sir, The Tories' problem is simply explained. Their message is getting through".

I have the books he wrote with Brearley, and his books on Botham, Seve and Peter Scudamore. They are on the shelf behind me as I write, and they are among the very best sports books I have ever read. I used to love reading his pieces in the Sunday Times when I was a kid.

(It's interesting how there are some interviewers one warms to and some one can't stand, however lauded they may be. The main chap at the Sunday Times at the moment, Paul Kimmage, gets all sorts of plaudits and a wonderful double page spread every week. But I loathe his pieces; he seems to think we are as interested in him as his subject, and is always at great pains to show how the sportsman or woman he is interviewed treats him as an equal.

Anyway, I'm sure he's a lovely chap.)