Brian Viner: Ronaldo's rotundity should give all true supporters plenty of food for thought

Saturday, 17 June 2006

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Fat, formerly a feminist issue, is now a Brazilian one. The coverage given in the British media to Wayne Rooney's metatarsal these last few weeks is by all accounts dwarfed by the amount of attention Ronaldo's blubber has received in Brazil. Even President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has, as it were, weighed in. Never mind the national debt, the most pressing question on his mind last week was: "Is Ronaldo fat?"

The answer, of course, was yes. El Fenomeno turned up at Brazil's training camp looking more like El Fatso, and his lethargic performance in the team's opening World Cup match against Croatia surprised nobody. But I write in celebration of Ronaldo, not condemnation. For by scoffing too many doughnuts or whatever, by getting fatter rather than fitter, he has effectively shown that - give or take an ability to juggle a football 20 times on each foot before volleying it through a hoop 30 yards away - he's just like the rest of us.

It is for this uncomplicated reason that the fattest sportsmen have always been the most popular. Even on the oche it's not those who struggle to touch their toes whom the crowds adore, but the real blobs, such as Jocky Wilson and more recently Andy Fordham, who struggle to touch their knees. And in more strenuous sports we feel admiration, even awe, for the guys with the six packs, but affection, even affinity, for the guys with the Party Sevens.

If they manage to overcome a tendency to lardiness, like Andrew Flintoff, then so much the better. But if they stay lardy, like John Daly, then we love them anyway. Indeed, golf exemplifies this phenomenon better than most sports. In the fit corner, Tiger Woods and Nick Faldo; in the fat corner, Daly and Darren Clarke. The first two have an incomparably greater tally of major championships, but the latter pair have a much greater claim on our affections.

It was ever thus. At the turn of the last century, the popularity of the decidedly corpulent W G Grace, cricketer, was almost matched by that of Bill "Fatty" Foulke, footballer.

Foulke, the tallest man to play football for England until Peter Crouch loped along, remains by some distance the heaviest. He played in goal for Sheffield United, and weighed 22 stone in an era when goalkeepers didn't have to stay on their lines while penalties were being taken. Many a penalty-taker was understandably put off by the sight of Foulke wobbling dangerously towards him, although he failed to save the one he gave away in the 1898-99 season by picking up the Liverpool centre-forward George Allan, turning him upside down, and standing him on his head in the mud. Needless to say, Fatty was the most popular player of his age.

Take also the American baseball legend, George Herman "Babe" Ruth. Actually, you'd struggle to take him except with a large truck and a tow rope. Every year the Babe would report for spring training massively overweight, after spending the winter indulging his prodigious appetite for food (and women).

But it didn't stop him hitting home runs, and it certainly did nothing to diminish his lustre. The great American sportswriter Red Smith once elaborated on a quote by the Babe's New York Yankees team-mate Waite Hoyt that even "if he had never played ball, if you had never heard of him and passed him on Broadway, you'd turn around and look". Smith added: "Looking, you would have seen a barrel swaddled in a wrap-around camel-hair topcoat with a flat camel-hair cap on the round head." Yet this barrel was the most popular American sportsman not only of his age, but probably of any age.

Of course, there are those who consider it an unforgivable dereliction of duty for a professional sportsman to get fat. Mark Ramprakash told me recently that he was incensed when his Surrey team-mate Jimmy Ormond turned up at least a stone overweight after six weeks out injured, and I understood why. But a bit of blubber doesn't always inhibit a sportsman's capacity for doing his job. To stick with cricket, the immensely popular Colin Milburn scored runs at the same enthusiastic pace as he consumed sandwiches, ditto Mike Gatting and Inzamam-ul-Haq. And while Jan Molby might have sprayed more than a few crumbs round Anfield, he also sprayed some sublime passes. Nor did an impressive girth stop Tommy "The Flying Pig" Lawrence from making some fabulous saves a couple of decades earlier on the very same greensward.

Sometimes, in fact, a bit of porkiness can help. When the golfer Craig Stadler shed a couple of stone in 2001, he also shed form. "I lost almost six inches on my waist and was playing horrible," said the man fondly known as The Walrus. "I put back 10 or 12 pounds to see if it would help, and I started playing well again... so I put on another 10 or 12."

That's probably not a quote we're ever likely to hear from Ronaldo, but I hope he knows that the way to the sporting public's heart is often through the stomach.

Who I like this week...

The Ukraine and Chelsea striker Andrei Shevchenko, who was properly gutted by his country's 4-0 hammering by Spain on Wednesday, but at least gets defeat in proportion. He knows better than anyone that football, even during the World Cup, is not even close to being a matter of life and death. And had the scoreline been reversed, Shevchenko would have been quick to correct anyone who branded him a hero. In 1986, when he was nine, he watched volunteers from his town driving off to the blazing Chernobyl nuclear plant, where they picked up radioactive debris to prevent further radiation poisoning. They knew they would die, and within days, they did. Shevchenko's charitable foundation ensures that those "true heroes" will never be forgotten.

And who I don't

Sven Goran Eriksson, whose deficiencies have been well and truly rumbled not by the England team's poverty of imagination, because that's more the players' fault than his, but by Michael Owen's painful lack of form and the coach's own admission that young Theo Walcott isn't quite ready for World Cup football. Surely, in his heart of hearts, Sven must know that he made a major blunder by a) taking Walcott and b) not taking Jermain Defoe or Darren Bent. I sincerely hope I'll end up eating my words on an open sandwich with some gravadlax and dill, but I bet I don't.

b.viner@independent.co.uk