In Chariots of Fire, Liddell is shown reading the passage from Isaiah ‘They shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk and not be faint’.12 The text he actually used was from Psalm 119.18: ‘Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things’. Those ‘wondrous things’ are the commandments, for the Psalm ends with the declaration: ‘Thy testimonies also are my delight and my counsellors.’ The Psalm was the springboard for Liddell to encourage worshippers to read and re-read the commandments because he also warned there ‘were many ways in which men might blind themselves to the truth’ of them. He then compared Christians – attempting to spread the Bible to the sceptical – to ‘Columbus and other discoverers and pioneers’ who had to ‘toil before they succeeded in their task’.
That evening the British Olympic Association held a reception for any athlete of any nation who wanted to attend. Liddell went out of courtesy. So did a Scottish female admirer – women always seemed drawn to Liddell – who had heard him speak in the Kirk. During the war she had been a motorcycle dispatch rider ‘all over England’. Now she wanted to dance ‘all over’ the ballroom floor with him. Her wish was unfulfilled; the man who wouldn’t run on a Sunday wouldn’t waltz on it either. The content of his sermon, as well as his refusal to dance, reaffirmed Liddell’s priority, which was the divinity classes about to start at the Scottish Congregational College.
The same critics who thought it ludicrous for Liddell not to run on a Sunday now thought it equally ludicrous for him to go to China after his studies were over. Couldn’t he tend to the poor and downtrodden of his own country instead? Weren’t there moral lessons to be taught in Glasgow’s Gorbals or London’s East End? Why didn’t he prolong his athletics career and exploit the publicity the Olympics guaranteed him to spread his message?
There was sense in these arguments. The end of the war had given the public a craving for the glamour and escapism of sport as never before. Wembley’s first FA Cup final, between Bolton Wanderers and West Ham United, drew three hundred thousand to a stadium with a 125,000 capacity. The centre forward David Jack, who scored the opening goal, was later transferred for £10,000, a world record sum large enough to buy a property on London’s Park Lane and employ a Downton Abbey-like staff to run it. In the era of the maximum wage for footballers, Jack was earning a basic £468 a year – plus several hundred more from undeclared bonuses. Britain’s highest salaried sportsman was cricketer Jack Hobbs, the prolific run-maker.13 Queues around the Test match grounds confirmed the idolization bestowed on him. As well as owning a sports goods shop, Hobbs endorsed tailored suits and armchairs, fountain pens and breakfast cereal, cigarettes and energy tonics. He annually banked about £1,500, which was £500 more than a doctor or provincial solicitor and £1,000 more than a headteacher.
In America the big-gun sportsmen were better off still. Sport is almost always in the midst of a golden era of one sort or another. Only the sobriety of hindsight either judges it as authentic or condemns it as a dud. Most golden eras turn out to have been tin underneath. But this one was exceptional and glittery, made for writers such as Grantland Rice. There was Babe Ruth, whom Rice described as ‘a bolt-heaving Jupiter’ because he put pitches where he liked, which was usually at the back of a stand or out of the stadium altogether. There was Bill Tilden with that cannonball serve booming off sheep-gut strings from a racket head sized only 65 square inches. Rice thought Tilden ‘the perfect tennis player’ and ‘one of the few invincible figures in sport’. There was the showman golfer Walter Hagen, who liked silk shirts, cashmere sweaters and fine wool plus-fours. And there was Jack Dempsey, whom Rice christened ‘the greatest fighting tornado’ and ‘the most spectacular champion of them all’. His press box colleague Paul Gallico also saluted Dempsey, thinking no more popular prize-fighter had ever lived. Like someone over-fed on caviar, Gallico retreated from sport, becoming a successful novelist instead, after losing his taste for it. His valediction remembered a ‘dizzy, spinning sports reel of athletes, events, records, personalities, drama and speed, a geared-up, whirling golden world’. That ‘golden world’ made those at the apex of it alchemists too. Tilden collected $25,000 per annum from writing syndicated columns alone. Hagen was paid $30,000 for an ambassadorial position at a golf and country club, which amounted to a heap of loose change compared with the monies Wilson Sports shovelled his way for designing equipment and then sliding it into his bag. Ruth never earned less than a basic $52,000 salary. Dempsey, who once adorned the cover of Time, became a million-dollar ex-champ and a folk hero after Gene Tunney pummelled him to pieces and he responded afterwards to his wife’s worried question of ‘What happened?’ with that unforgettable, off-the-cuff reply ‘Honey, I forgot to duck.’
Liddell was never interested in chasing money or acquiring possessions. Surviving on a peppercorn stipend was no hardship to him. He didn’t mind the sort of impecuniousness that made the Morningside Church mice look like millionaires. Throughout his life he’d never earn more than £300 per year. The makers of Liddell’s track-shoes rushed out a line advertisement in the Athletic News and Cyclists Journal to proclaim that a hand-made pair of spikes, similar to his own, started at 17 shillings and sixpence, which was almost half the average working man’s weekly wage.14 Liddell made no financial gain from these shoes. As an amateur, he could not advertise a product even tangentially connected to his sport without infringing his status. The AAA would have banned him immediately. Only ex-athletes beat the drum for Phosferine and Wills Salts, supposedly remedies for everything from constipation to insomnia. Nor would Liddell – as others did – navigate around the regulations by accepting sly payments, which could be speciously dressed as travel and subsistence expenses.
He was even less interested in being a celebrity – at least for its own sake. He’d found himself one nonetheless. Letters and telegrams piled up. He couldn’t walk through Edinburgh without being pointed at because his photograph was still appearing in the newspapers, and in the city’s cinemas that strip of Pathé News film from Paris was shown, as if on an endless loop, half a dozen times every day for more than a fortnight. There have always been personalities who hide only where the press and the photographers are certain to find them and plunge into fame, letting its rip-tide carry them away. Liddell wasn’t one of them. Fame was only worthwhile because it made him much more likely to be listened to. He wasn’t one of those Bible-bashing preachers who, the good book in tow, had to wander peripatetically in search of audiences. The audiences came to him. The problem was finding meeting halls big enough to accommodate them.
Liddell could have gone anywhere, especially to the United States. The Americans were fascinated with the ostensibly quirky but morally unimpeachable Flying Parson, a tag that stuck to him even in small-town newspapers. ‘Runs for Six Days a Week.15 Worships on the Seventh’ proclaimed one headline, inferring he was ‘God’s Runner’. Another said he could ‘preach’ as well as he could ‘run’.16 The Literary Digest reported what was being said about him elsewhere: that he was ‘possibly the most prominent representative of the muscular school of Christianity in modern times’ and that he constantly demonstrated that it was ‘quite possible for one to be both muscularly and spiritually strong’.17
America was bruised from the beating it had taken in the 100, 400 and 800 metres in Paris. It sought revenge and wanted Liddell, Douglas Lowe and Harold Abrahams to sail over, compete again in Pennsylvania and then undertake an East Coast tour, the highlight being a showdown in San Francisco. Liddell, it was proposed, could break away when he chose and give a sermon or lecture wherever he liked. He would get more invitations than could possibly be accepted, through the cachet of being an Olympic champion and also because he needed no introduction. After Paris, Johnny Weissmuller had toured Europe and swum against all-comers in stunts to foster good will. Why couldn’t Liddell do likewise, using staged events to promote his beliefs? His character was also an advantage in attracting Mr and Mrs Middle America. He was wholesome, squeaky clean. Unli
ke Ruth and Hagen, he didn’t have ‘whisky fingers’ and he wasn’t as randy as a dog. Unlike Dempsey, he hadn’t been accused of evading the war draft.
There was no shortage of offers to sift through.18 He could have written an instruction book about athletics with Tom McKerchar. He could have put his name to newspaper columns or opinion pieces on topics both sporting and spiritual. Edinburgh University was willing to accommodate him in a capacity of his choosing. There were businesses – banks and insurance companies – that wanted him as a figurehead. ‘He declined several attractive and lucrative offers,’ said a friend. Simply allowing organizations to add his name to their letterhead would have earned Liddell twice Hobbs’s salary at least. With ads, written work and paid appearances, he could have quadrupled it. Hobbs was so shy he could barely look at himself in the mirror and declined parts in films because of it. The camera took to Liddell. Those close-up Pathé shots of him in Paris are evidence of his impact on screen.
His Cambridge chums, though recognizing the offer as futile, offered to pull strings for him, each of them golden. He could affiliate himself with the light blue of the university. There’d be additional perks. He could train with Alec Nelson, assisting him to school the next Olympic champions. On a Sunday he could preach in the yellow candlelight of King’s College Chapel, amid what the future poet laureate John Betjeman described as the ‘shadowy silence of canopied Renaissance stalls’.19 In return Liddell would be a glorified public relations executive, though the public the university wanted him to woo was pressed between the pages of Who’s Who and Debrett’s. He could butter up distinguished visitors at formal functions or casual soirées. The arrangement would be mutually beneficial. The university could bask in the kudos of an association with the country’s favourite Olympian. The champion could relax because the bonds tying him were silk-made and slack. This was an Arcadia that most would have murdered for. If he preferred, Noel-Baker, now a professor at the University of London, could solicit openings elsewhere.
A lesser figure would not only have given in to temptation, but also convinced himself that it was the right thing to do. Excuses weren’t in hard-to-reach places. Each would have been viewed as plausible too. Liddell could have said he wanted to absorb himself more fully in study before breaking into the wider world. He could have said there were urgent missionary tasks to be undertaken in his own backyard. And, most convincingly of all, he could have said that winning one gold medal had given him the ambition to try to win another. Liddell never contemplated it. He wasn’t for sale at any price. Liddell told one congregation that ‘the greatest danger was victory’,20 which he further defined as ‘bringing a man up to a level above the strength of his character’. He appealed to another to ‘keep sport free from anything that tends to lower its purity and value’ and to ‘engage in it’ for ‘the sport’s sake alone’. He revealed to a third that no cheering from athletics crowds had given as much pleasure as his religion. The kernel of each speech was the same. He wouldn’t allow himself to become swollen-headed. He wouldn’t use sport to make money or advance a career. Athletics was essentially over for him now.
His friends from the Olympics team settled into congenial lives. Douglas Lowe, with his natural legal bent, became a barrister. Arthur Marshall became an aviator, creating his own company, and earned a knighthood. Harold Abrahams became a journalist, an author, a BBC broadcaster and then a sports administrator. Guy Butler became a journalist and author too. Henry Stallard became what he’d always intended to be – an ophthalmic surgeon. And Philip Noel-Baker became everything – Labour MP, Cabinet minister, life peer, lecturer at Yale and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. The rosy path wasn’t to Liddell’s liking. He had promises to keep. He’d sworn his allegiance to missionary work in China. His obligation was to join his family, who were everything to him. He’d initially wanted to do so without delay; only D. P. Thomson’s intervention changed his mind.21 Thomson persuaded him to study theology and combine it with evangelistic appeals to the ‘youth of the country’, arguing that the opportunity ‘might never come again’.
There were those who thought that he should postpone his journey for another reason: simply to live a little. Liddell was asked why he was so willing to give up everything the Olympics now offered him. ‘Because I believe God made me for China,’22 he always replied.
Liddell had settled for a modest post. He’d agreed to teach science and take sports lessons at the Anglo-Chinese College in Tientsin, the city where his father had been reassigned after Siaochang. Most athletes quit after seeing the moment of their greatness flicker, afraid of a vertiginous decline. Liddell was about to retire at least four years before his prime for the sake of the country to which he’d become devoted.
This seemed perfectly logical to him and perfectly illogical to those who didn’t understand his faith.
Part Two
Higher
CHAPTER SEVEN
Goodbye to All That
THE OLYMPIC FLAG hadn’t been lowered from the pole when speculation began about Amsterdam in 1928. The newspapers, which had questioned whether Eric Liddell was a quarter-miler at all, now predicted that no one in the foreseeable future would beat him over the distance. Suddenly he was the Invincible Flying Parson.
While the Games were still hot in the memory, A. B. George began touring the provinces like a repertory actor.1 He put together a lantern show about Paris, the advertisements promising black and white slides and ‘expert’ commentary and insight. The hypocritical George endorsed Liddell as being ‘capable of anything’. He made no mention of the pre-Games ridicule of both his chances and his running style.
As well as Liddell’s gold medal, George offered further evidence of his infallibility over the 400 metres.2 He’d seen him run again, only eight days later, at Stamford Bridge. The United States squad stopped over for an exhibition against the British Empire. Without Liddell, Britain had lost both relays to them in Paris. In the 4×100 metres, the quartet took silver because the still-fatigued Harold Abrahams ran the first leg sluggishly and the final baton change was botched. In the 4×400 metres the team claimed bronze; though, in a peculiar move, Guy Butler, far faster than his compatriots, ran the third leg rather than the anchor.3 ‘With him,’ Butler said of Liddell, ‘we’d most certainly [have got] gold.’
Liddell had proved one point in Paris. Now he proved another in the 4×400 metres in London. To counter him the Americans added his adversary, Horatio Fitch, curiously excluded from the Olympic relay team too. Liddell considered this race to be ‘at least as good’ as the Olympic final. Others thought it was better. Charley Paddock had watched Liddell ‘run the legs off’ Fitch in Paris.4 ‘No athlete ever came closer to being inspired by competition,’ he said of him. ‘He spread-eagled the field.’ But what Paddock witnessed at Stamford Bridge he regarded as ‘the most phenomenal quarter anyone ever saw’.
Olympic fever set the turnstiles clicking. More than forty thousand came, though twice as many would claim to have seen Liddell’s stupendous run after the attention it attracted.
In another Stoke-like performance, Liddell estimated that Fitch was ‘ten yards’ in front of him at the change-over.5 ‘It seemed an impossible start to give a man who only a week earlier had broken the world’s record,’ he said. Liddell began to chase Fitch down. In Paddock’s telling, he caught up on the final curve before going ‘gloriously mad’, out-sprinting him to the tape in 47.7 seconds as his ‘native bagpipes’ played him home. The 10 yards lost to Fitch at the start were no handicap to Liddell, who was 10 yards in front of him at the end. All Fitch saw was Liddell’s back. The first-hand accounts of the race – especially Paddock’s – suggest that all Fitch felt was the whoosh of a side-draught as Liddell passed him in the next lane. ‘Englishmen and Americans alike went crazy,’ said Paddock. The Daily Mail announced it as a ‘piece of running that electrified everybody’. Even Liddell admitted: ‘For a long time I thought I could never close the gap.6 The effect of being behind gradually
helped me get on terms and he cracked just before the finish.’
Liddell wrecked Fitch physically and psychologically. The Athletic News and Cyclists Journal published a front-page photograph taken at the tape. Liddell seems under no strain at all. Fitch, his legs about to buckle, looks breathless and haunted. Liddell didn’t gloat or grandstand. Knowing how depressed Fitch must be, he sought instead to soften the defeat for him. ‘Probably he was feeling the effects of Paris even more than I was,’ he said.7 Liddell never mentioned the non-stop ceremonial hoopla of his own hectic week, which rendered him so exhausted that he’d travelled to London from Edinburgh less than twenty-four hours before the competition. Paddock could scarcely believe Liddell’s stamina. ‘He had enough wind left next morning to preach a long sermon in a London church,’ he remembered. To those watching him, it seemed Liddell’s jokey reply to questions about ‘the secret’ of his 400 metres success wasn’t altogether tongue-in-cheek. ‘I run the first 200 metres as hard as I can. Then, for the second 200 metres, with God’s help, I run harder,’ he’d said. He’d run so hard that, afterwards, the Americans contemplated the obvious. If Liddell was too quick for them after only a handful of 400-metre races, what else would he achieve with practice? Wyndham Halswelle’s win in the London Olympics had come at twenty-six years old – the same age Liddell would be when the 1928 Games began. Liddell, fitter and speedier, could have strolled to Amsterdam, no one threatening him.
For the Glory Page 13