Congratulations to Duncan Hamilton

Duncan Hamilton, author of  ‘Provided You Don’t Kiss Me’, the brilliant and inciteful book on the great Brian Clough, has just won the William Hill sports’ writing award for the second time.

Kevin Mitchell, writing on the Guardian website, said this:

Hamilton won the gong two years ago with his book on Brian Clough, Provided You Don’t Kiss Me. Now he’s done it again. I can hear the gnashing of teeth around the best bars in town and beyond…

The mood was that Hamilton was a good force moving among us, a writer who looks at sport from a different angle. In an industry that sometimes values instant headlines above considered analysis, books such as this are a reminder that there is, indeed, another point of view.

We thought to celebrate we’d post up this excellent Q and A between Jack Fogg and Duncan Hamilton. We hope you enjoy it.

Part of what I found so rewarding about the book is the way you came at the subject, foregoing the conventional chronological structure of biography and instead delivering a series of thematically linked vignettes. Was there anything in particular that made you favour this unconventional approach?

Brian was such a complicated person that I wanted each chapter to be about a different piece of him. I thought themes were important and would enable me to place what he did in a context alongside his ideas and attitudes. I also hoped it would plant him more solidly in his era – socially as well as in a footballing sense. It meant that I could shove the landscape, and the time-frame, around like shifting scenery on a stage or cut from one place to another. It let me tell Brian’s story as I witnessed it, and do it in specific scenes too. Graham Greene placed novels into two categories. He thought that those written before cinema first began to dominate popular culture resembled landscape paintings; those after it were so influenced by movies that they were broken down scene-by-scene rather than told in one grand narrative sweep. I have to confess that, like Holden Caulfield, I’m not much interested in ‘all that David Copperfield kind of crap’ – unless it is germane to, or interlinks with, another aspect of the life. I like ideas, strong opinions and points of view, detail and colour, and I’m not over-keen on biography that runs along rigidly linear rails – especially when the subject is well known.

Were there any moments in the book you found difficult to write?

Only one part troubled me – the chapter about his alcoholism. I made a point of not reading any reviews until many months after Provided You Don’t Kiss Me’s publication. In fact, I still haven’t read a lot of them. But one of the truest couple of sentences about the book appeared in Jim White’s piece in the Daily Telegraph. He wrote: ‘In his life, he [Clough] was protected from exposure by the frightened silence of those around him. Hamilton is clearly ashamed of his part in the conspiracy.’ He’s right; I am. But, even now, I’m not sure whether or not my voice railing against it, or anyone else’s for that matter, could have kept Brian away from alcohol. He made drinking a necessary part of his life and then, of course, the drink insidiously took its hold of him and wouldn’t let go. The drink always wins, irrespective of who you are or what you do for a living, and that’s the point I most wanted to get across. It was nonetheless painful to write because I was recounting the slow disintegration of someone I cared about, and who had done so much for me. But it was a chapter I couldn’t avoid. I knew it would be impossible to delve into Brian’s life without referring to alcohol; it would have been like writing about Ishmael without mentioning Moby Dick.

There’s a whole host of players who played under Clough at Forest who have since gone on to have successful management careers in their own right: Martin O’Neill, Roy Keane, Trevor Francis to name a few. What, if anything, do you think Clough passed on to them, and do you see anything in their styles that mimics their mentor’s?

I think he passed on the need to know your own players. He had a kind of X-ray vision – a way of being able to see the psychological DNA of anyone he met, and it was critical in the decisions he made about who to lift up and who to slap down. If he was in a bad mood, he could turn a room into a cube of hoar frost. If he wanted you to feel better about yourself, he could make you believe that you’d easily walk through hoops of fire. I imagine he also taught future managers – those who came from other teams as well as his own – the importance of being your own boss and not letting others interfere (if he heard me say that he’d be whispering the words ‘shithouse directors’ in my ear).  Martin O’Neill is the most intelligent and articulate footballer – in fact, one of the most intelligent and articulate people – I’ve ever met. I suppose the obvious thing he learned was to appoint a number two he liked, could trust and respect. That’s why he hired John Robertson. And whenever I catch sight of Robbo on the field, I just wish he was still playing. I’m suddenly transported back to 1977–8 again with him chugging down the left wing, the ball fastened to his foot. Robbo seems as important to Martin as Peter Taylor was to Brian. Generally, I think the players he schooled and who went into management had the good sense to realise that he was a ‘one-off’. They couldn’t copy him wholesale. They had to take bits of his personality, and the way in which he used it, and then stitch them into their own individual approach. Brian drew a lot from his mentor Alan Brown; what he didn’t do was copy him so slavishly that he suppressed his own character.  

Looking back over his career path, Clough’s period in charge of Division 3 side Brighton and Hove Albion, a move he made the season after winning the Division 1 Championship with Derby, seems as much an aberration as his infamous forty-four days at Leeds. What do you think drove him there and do you think the relative lack of success he had there (12 wins in 32 games) dented his confidence?

I’d say that what drove him there – and Peter too – was nothing short of blind panic. I think Brian felt there’d be demonstrations of such raw hostility against the board at Derby that the directors would capitulate and he’d be swept back into the manager’s office like an exiled king returning to save his people. When it didn’t happen, he had to find a job. When he got to Brighton, he knew he’d made a terrible mistake. For one thing, it was a long way from the East Midlands and the commuting early on depressed him dreadfully. For another, he missed the glitz of the First Division, which is why he vanished occasionally to big sporting events or concerts. At least he liked the sea air… I’m not convinced, though, that Brighton damaged his self-belief. I’m sure he saw it as merely a brief stop-over before something far better came along. As it turned out, the club that came to his rescue was Leeds, which even now seems an utterly bizarre thing to have happened bearing in mind he’d tipped torrents of abuse on them for half a dozen years or more. The experience at Elland Road did affect him grievously. He’d failed at Brighton. He’d failed at Leeds. He couldn’t afford to fail at Forest. If he had done, we might not be talking about him now.

Clough was as famous for his sayings – I certainly wouldn’t say I’m the best manager in the business, but I’m in the top one; They say Rome wasn’t built in a day, but I wasn’t on that particular job; If God had wanted us to play football in the clouds, he’d have put grass up there – as he was for his managerial brilliance. Do you have a personal favourite?

I have two favourite lines. The first is one we used in a column for the Nottingham Evening Post. Forest had a player called Brian Rice, a talented and very skilful Scotsman who had a pole-like physique and skin the colour of alabaster. Brian said: ‘I’m not saying he’s thin and pale, but the maid in our hotel remade his bed without realising he was still in it.’ The second is his response to the question about whether he’d ever like to be president of Nottingham Forest: ‘I’m a big head, not a figurehead.’ He had particular catchphrases he’d bang out as well, such as ‘Sit next to me, son. You’re so ugly you’ll make me look like Victor Mature,’ and ‘That was such a blatant penalty – it was two penalties.’

Many people have commented about how Provided You Don’t Kiss Me has restored Peter Taylor to his rightful standing, going some way to bringing him out from under Clough’s long shadow. Did you have that intention when you first set out to write the book or was it something you came to in the process?

I believe history hasn’t given Peter the credit he deserves; and not just for his genius in regard to talent-spotting and the ability to read a match. He could also say ‘no’ to Brian, and he often acted as a conduit between him and the players. If Brian had gone off in a rage, Peter could always chip in, ‘What he really meant was…’ and give a calmly rational explanation. Sometimes it defused difficult situations. It’s also worth mentioning again how much of a father-like figure Peter became during Brian’s formative years as a professional. He had what we all need at some stage of our lives; someone who is more experienced to lean on and learn from. The other thing about him was his sense of humour. He was an extraordinarily funny man. He didn’t like bathing in vast pools of light, which was a shame because he could have done stand-up comedy. When I started the book, I wanted to stress how significant Peter had been; that, in fact, Nottingham Forest’s glory days in the late Seventies and early Eighties were achieved on a tandem bicycle – both Brian and Peter pedalling hard. If I were in charge of Forest, I’d have the good grace to decide which part of the ground to name after Peter.

Finally, can you talk a little about what you’re working on at the moment?

Again, it’s Nottingham-based. I’m working on a biography of the fast bowler Harold Larwood, who has always fascinated me. In fact, I’ve just come back from five weeks in Australia, where he emigrated in the Fifties. The book won’t be firmly linear in approach either – though there are cardinal points that need to be placed in order. At some stage, I want to return to the 20,000 words I’ve already written of a crime novel set in Yorkshire, a small book about books (almost finished) and I’m gathering together notes for another football book I’m keen to do. I also want to write a book about stammering: how you cope with it, the scars it leaves and the famous people who overcame it. As a boy, I could barely utter two sentences coherently, which explains why I adored reading so much. You don’t stammer in your head. It doesn’t explain why I had the quite delusional notion at one stage of wanting to become a radio commentator on Sports Report. Mind you, I think my stammer was one of the reasons – perhaps the principal one – that Brian was so patient with me when I first interviewed him. Later on, he told me that one of Eric Morecambe’s golden rules was ‘Don’t tell jokes about people who stammer; it’s cruel and the jokes aren’t funny.’ Wagging his finger at me as he said it, Brian acted as if Eric was actually in the room with us. I so wish he had been.

If your interest in the book has been piqued by this Q and A, why not get yourself a copy, and celebrate the amazing sports’ writing of a two-time William Hill winner.