The City captain who played for the love of the gameUpdated: December 20th, 2006
Amid the outcry over agent Willie McKay’s £100,000 payment demand I came across a reference to former City captain Max Woosnam on the bluemoon talkboard.
Woosnam (picture) joined City in 1920 as a 27-year-old, playing 96 games at centre half before a broken leg forced him to retire from football two years later.
Not only was he City’s only ever amateur captain, but he also holds claim to being Britain’s greatest sporting all-rounder.
He captained England at football, won both Wimbledon and an Olympic gold medal at doubles tennis, excelled at squash and shooting and once scored 144 not out in a schooboy match against the MCC at Lords.
What Woosnam did in his spare time was equally remarkable. He once made a 147-break at snooker and beat an incensed Charlie Chaplin at table tennis using a butter knife.
But maybe the most remarkable thing of all was that most of his sporting achievements were performed while he was holding down a regular job.
Now it’s easy to romanticise amateurism, a system set up by the wealthy and privileged and designed to stop working people making a decent living from their sports.
Indeed, history is littered with injustices and hypocrisy carried out in the name of keeping a sport ‘amateur’.
One victim was another great sporting all-rounder, Jim Thorpe, who excelled in athletics, baseball, basketball and American football.
Thorpe was stripped of the gold medals he won at the 1912 Olympics for the decathalon and pentathalon after it was found he had earned a small amount of money playing semi-professional baseball a few years earlier.
Woosnam, who was educated at Winchester public school and Cambridge University, would hardly have shared the worries of his City team-mates about making a living outside the game. After his sporting career he ended up on the board of chemical giant ICI.
But in an age where workmanlike players such as Joey Barton quibble about contracts worth a hundred times a workman’s wage, the idea of a footballer playing for the love of the game is refreshing indeed.
There’s more information about Woosnam at Wikipedia and in this Telegraph book review. A photo of him as a younger man can be found at Getty Images by typing his name into the search box.