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Simon Barnes

‘I suppose the problem,’ observed the chief sportswriter of The Times once, when contemplating the crazy misconception that he merits the teasing of the inferior and the envious, ‘is that some people can’t come to terms with the idea that intelligent people like sport, and might want to read someone who tries to write about sport in an intelligent way.’ How true this is, how very, very true. I mean, it’s hardly as if there are incredibly bright and thoughtful writers like Hugh McIlvanney in the Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday’s Patrick Collins out there covering this turf, is it? It’s not as if Mike Atherton, Matthew Syed, Marina Hyde, Paul Hayward, Oliver Holt and others sate the appetite for smart and insightful sportswriting. ‘My attempts to do so have met,’ Mr Barnes went on, ‘with a bewildering hostility in some quarters.’

Bewildering indeed. To be a lone oasis of intellectualism in an arid wasteland of moronic cliché must be a grievous weight on the shoulders of this most engagingly unpompous of hacks. Yet, like Atlas, he bears his burden stoically and without complaint. ‘Occasionally I’ve come up with some high-faluting notion,’ said this Pseuds Corner fixture, ‘and somebody will say, “What if Private Eye got hold of it?” I say, “Well, fuck them. Let them get hold of it. I’m setting the bloody agenda here, not these guys.” ’

It’s that ‘occasionally’ I love. At his best, when writing about his Down’s Syndrome son and even every now and then about sport, Mr Barnes – an eerie doppelganger, with his lupine face and ponytail, for the Satanic character Bob in Twin Peaks – is very good indeed. At one iota less than his best, when presenting himself as what someone identified as a ‘posturing narcissist’ – well, suffice it to say that another hack once expressed bewilderment of his own on finding him using the words ‘unpretentious’ and ‘unselfconscious’ (of Amir Khan) with apparent admiration.

From the canon of Simon Barnes, you could pluck many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of examples to illustrate the massive range and power of his mind, or indeed his commitment to wearing his learning lightly. Sometimes, for example, he will restrict the Nietzsche references to no more than one a paragraph (I’m a Heidegger man myself, with the odd Hegelian twist). But space is short, so let us leave it to this all-time personal favourite to give the flavour. Roger Federer, Mr Barnes once declared, is ‘as myriad-minded as Shakespeare ever was’.

Sometimes, as the agenda-setter himself might be the very last to agree, there simply are no words.