WEEKEND COLUMNISTS Ronaldo, once the greatest footballer on earth, now has the belly of late-phase Elvis Presley. In spite of this, Corinthians in his native Brazil have just signed him. However, one of the last surviving fat men in sport will soon be squeezed out of the exit doors like so many other fatties this last decade. Their demise is sport’s loss.
A century ago, there were sporting legends who could have eaten today’s streamlined players as a pre-game snack. The Victorian cricketer W.G. Grace wielded his belly as proudly as his bat; his contemporary, the Chelsea goalkeeper William “Fatty” Foulke weighed 24 stones; and in baseball, Babe Ruth reportedly once limbered up for a Yankees game with four porterhouse steaks, eight hot dogs and eight sodas.
Few minded. In 1958, when Real Madrid were courting the great Hungarian footballer Ferenc Puskas, he told the club’s president: “Listen, this is all very well, but have you looked at me? I am 18 kilos overweight.” Real signed him regardless. In the 1970s, when a physical trainer approached the football manager Brian Clough and boasted that he could make his fittest player physically sick in 10 minutes, Clough replied: “The moment the league starts awarding two points for that, I’ll give you a job.”
As late as the 1990s English football featured pregnant-looking players such as Paul Gascoigne or Julian Dicks. Fans sang, “He’s fat, he’s round, he bounces on the ground,” and “Who ate all the pies?” Secretly, they liked sportsmen who looked like them. It’s no coincidence that the two most popular English cricketers since the 1970s have been Ian “Beefy” Botham, and Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff, now slimmer but who was nicknamed after the chunky caveman Fred Flintstone.
Admittedly, there always were puritans who persecuted fatties. When a woman chided the baseball player John Kruk for being a tubby smoker, he famously replied, “I ain’t an athlete, lady, I’m a ballplayer,” a response so good he later used it as the title of his autobiography. In 1995 Kruk retired, soon after telling a newspaper that he wanted to spend the rest of the year “eating at the Sizzler’s buffet”. Fat athletes were wobbling off stage.
Coaches had got hold of computers and were starting to measure more things. They followed Damon Runyon’s dictum: “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet it.” While the rest of us got fatter, athletes went the other way. Baseball players started using steroids. In football, Arsenal ditched its traditional pre-game meal of baked beans and Coca-Cola (not a joke). Even cricketers discovered the gym. In Basel during the 2008 European Football Championships, two leading managers had a quiet chat at a sponsor’s evening. The content: “How many kilometres do your full-backs run? And your central midfielders?”
Teams began blaming failures on lack of fitness. Brazil flopped at football’s 2006 World Cup with two strikers, Ronaldo and Adriano, who looked like blow-up doll replicas of themselves. No team of that stature will ever weigh that much again. To find fatties in sport today, you either have to admire the recent photos of Ronaldo or scour some obscure teams. The Bermudan cricketer Dwayne Leverock, an obese policeman, redeemed last year’s World Cup with a brilliant one-handed slip catch and subsequent earthshaking jig.
As that suggests, fat athletes have their uses. One day last February, when Ronaldo was still playing for AC Milan, Daniele Tognaccini, one of the club’s trainers mused about that.
Tognaccini was sitting at the pristine Milanello training ground listing Milan’s keenest runners. “Cafu, Kaká – he is the kilometre man – and Gattuso.” He risked a joke: “Ronaldo, no.” But then Tognaccini revealed a counter-intuitive truth about soccer: there was no correlation between running lots of kilometres and winning matches. He said: “Often, it’s better if you don’t run.”
Another Milan official in the room joked: “So Ronaldo is fantastic?”
“Yes,” said Tognaccini seriously. “Football is not a physical sport.”
The Oakland A’s reached the same insight about baseball. In the book Moneyball, Michael Lewis explains how the A’s signed fatties whom no other team wanted. None of them could “outrun the hot dog vendor in a 60-yard dash”, but that didn’t stop them hitting baseballs. Lewis concludes: “Titties are one of those things that just don’t matter in a ballplayer.”
They certainly haven’t stopped Ronaldo. The Milan Lab, after measuring everything measurable in football, concluded that the key quality in the game was not body-fat percentage but “sensory perception”: the ability to assess the field of play in an instant. “Ronaldo,” says the Lab’s director, Jean Pierre Meersseman, “can perceive a situation so fast and react to it, it’s just amazing.”
That is why fans of his favourite club, Flamengo, are now turning to black magic to punish him for joining Corinthians. The man’s better than an athlete. He’s a ballplayer.
