Frank Keating: Goodbye to 'the Gipper'

"The Gipper" became a worldwide reference this week; it has even seemed to be woven imperishably into the official US state mourning for the late President Ronald Reagan. The Gipper, of course, was George Gipp, the US football folk hero who died at 25 and whom Reagan portrayed in the 1940 movie about another legendary football figure killed in his prime, Knute Rockne. "Win just one for the Gipper" had been the dying Gipp's last exhortation for the famed Notre Dame college team.

You might think there is hope yet for the BBC's Alan Green because, before Hollywood, Reagan began as a sports commentator, graduating from a radio station in Davenport, Iowa, to the state capital Des Moines where for five years his job was to read the tickertape agency reports clacking by the minute into the office and simultaneously turn them into dramatic and colourful gabble for the microphone as if he was actually at the game (which is how Ashes cricket commentaries began in the 1920s).

Reagan was 26 when he went as a reporter to a Chicago Cubs training camp in Los Angeles, for fun took a screen test for Warner Brothers and was at once cast in the first of his 50 Hollywood movies, Love is in the Air - as a sports commentator.

I read somewhere that the good old ham's favourite part had been in The Winning Team (1952), a baseball biopic on the fabled Cardinals pitcher Grover "Ol' Pete" Alexander - in which Hollywood concentrated just about exclusively on Grover's besotted love affair with Doris Day and not (as was the case, alas, in real life) alcohol and adultery. At any rate, not quite what you would call a Presidential role.

Truth out there after 36 years

Next week an important book is published. It is already odds-on to be sports book of the year. Some would say the sports book of 36 years; well, we have been waiting that long for the truth. With any luck, Basil D'Oliveira: Cricket and Conspiracy (Little, Brown, £16.99), by the political writer and cricket lover Peter Oborne, will at last reveal much of the smug, sordid establishment machinations which contrived and covered up that 1968 cause celebre forever known as "the Dolly affair".

There have been other books and investigations down the years, but many of the cast have now gone and can no longer shrilly plead innocence or deny their devious involvement. So we just might learn next week, as the veil is lifted on long-ago blackmail and bribery, intrigue and deceit, which of the Marylebone mandarins and Long Room grandees collaborated to a fuller or lesser degree - among them Alec Douglas-Home, Lord Cobham, Gubby Allen, Billy Griffith, Colin Cowdrey, Fleet Street's EW Swanton and the "only-obeying-orders" Lord's archivists and secretaries who conveniently "lost" for so many years the relevant and damning official minutes and correspondence.

As you would expect, true-great hero Dolly himself has survived the lot of them. He is 73 this year, and he will be the still-handsome old man poring over the book's intriguing content at its London launch on Thursday.

Who's the shaven loser?

No wonder Tim Henman lost at Queen's on Wednesday. He had shaved and was no longer the dashing designer-stubbled daredevil Parisian boulevardier. If he funks reverting to stubble for Wimbers it will be certain curtains there for Timbo, you see. I noticed this week the soccer choirboy Michael Owen sporting the rakish unshaven chin. If he has a clean scrape on Sunday, will England be sunk in Lisbon? Nor does Gary Neville ever play well after a shave.

The Samson syndrome applies to cricket as well: Matt Hoggard swings the ball far more curvily when stubbled, Steve Harmison began hauling in victims in Biblical style only when he decided on being an hairy man. But I'm afraid, whether or not he gives his razor a whirl of a morning, neither an Esau nor Jacob chin ever seems to alter Ashley Giles's wicket-taking potency. Perhaps he should go for a full-set WG and be done with it?