By and large, fans feel a certain affection for fat players. There’s
something humanising about the extra poundage; it makes a player look
more like one of us, perhaps because it hints at what we would look
like if we were out there on the pitch, our team’s shirt proudly
stretched over our stomachs. Steve McMahon and Jan Molby were two
noticeably porky players whose podginess helped win a place in fans’
hearts. I remember Molby used to be greeted by affectionate chants of
‘Sumo’—at least, until he was done for drunk driving, when the chant
was replaced by the song ‘He’s fat, he’s round, his car is in the
pound, Jan Molby, Jan Molby...’
The drink/fatness link was no coincidence. Back when I used to write
match reports, if a player looked—to use a favourite euphemism of the
milieu— ‘chunky’, your working hypothesis was that they were hitting
the bottle. That was on the Occam’s-razor principle that booze was the
likeliest place for them to be getting the extra calories. The point
being that for a professional athlete in training for an aerobically
intensive sport, it takes a phenomenal calorie intake to put on weight.
Either they’re eating cake after training all day every day, or they’re
on the sauce.
Nobody says that Ronaldo is on the sauce. In fact, he cheekily said
that the President of Brazil was on the sauce, when President Silva had
the temerity to ask the national team’s coach ‘Is Ronaldo fat?’ (‘It’s
as much a lie that I am fat as it must be that he drinks a lot’, was
Ronaldo’s not-totally-unambiguous response.) Ronaldo says that his own
chunkiness is down to the fact that he has been off training with an
injury for a couple of months. This may be so; but the truth is he if
anything looks a bit thinner than he has done playing for Real Madrid
in the last couple of seasons. I think he’s a bit porky for no other
reason that he likes his pies. I also think there is something noble
about a professional athlete’s managing to put on weight like that, and
that we should celebrate Ronaldo’s heroic, principled, against-all-odds
fatness.
The trouble is that he looks so glum. His head appears to be elsewhere.
It’s that, I think, which Brazilians mind, much more than the weight
issue. We fans love a fattie. A distracted, depressed, half-hearted
fattie, not so much.
In baseball, the greatest and most beloved player in the history of the sport was pretty chubby. I refer of course to Babe Ruth.
More recently, the Yankees had a pitcher named David Wells who was pretty fat, and he was also very popular in New York.
Posted by: Martin Schneider | 19 June 2006 at 05:53 PM