Ken Jones: Reward for eighth place: fancy health farms and a royal audience

The rough old sport of boxing and its chroniclers almost needed smelling salts in April 1959 when the Swedish heavyweight, Ingemar Johansson, showed up in New York to fight Floyd Patterson for the world championship accompanied by a retinue that included his parents, his sister, his brother and his brother's fiancée, and – most reprehensible of all, in conventional opinion – his own fiancée, a stunning blonde named Birgit Lundgren.

Scorning in his work the ancient and widely held precept of spartan preparation, Johansson proceeded to stiff Patterson in the third round. Fortunately for traditionalists in boxing circles, Patterson – who conformed to the tenet of self-denial by living far from his wife when in training – recovered from this quite unexpected mishap to defeat Johansson in two subsequent contests, both well inside the distance.

I bring this up merely as a pointer to the presently fashionable and probably ongoing practice of turning sport into a family affair, presumably on the basis that a contented sports performer is more likely to be a happy one.

For example, Sven Goran Eriksson recently announced that he is in favour of taking the wives and girlfriends of England's footballers to future championships, a policy that will doubtless appeal to his partner, Nancy Dell'Olio, who, by all accounts, is a keen traveller. "The Germans did it in the World Cup, and they reached the final," Eriksson said, as though that fact alone explains why Rudi Völler's team was gradually transformed from a pretty modest bunch into potential winners.

A big buzz word today is bonding. David Beckham is all for it. No wonder. This week, the England squad and staff members, along with their partners, have been spending time in a fancy £200-a-night health farm, enjoying various therapeutic treatments and dining out in the West End of London. Heaven knows what all that cost. As for a trip to meet the Queen, they finished eighth in the World Cup, for goodness sake.

I'm on dodgy ground here, but let's get on with it. When I left home to begin what turned out to be a notably modest career in football, I was given two pieces of advice by my father, himself a former professional footballer who had been through the mill while remaining a devoted family man. Coming from a committed socialist, his first recommendation was taken as automatic. It was to join the Players' Union, as it was then known. The second concerned the remote possibility that a girl would find me interesting. "If so, don't let her sit with the other wives and girlfriends," he said. Why, I asked. "Because they talk among themselves, and it can lead to trouble," he replied.

Allowing for a vast improvement in working conditions, the enormous amount of money available to star footballers, and their independence, maybe Eriksson is right to nourish family life in the cause of team spirit. However, to this befuddled mind anyway – and calling on long experience – this sort of thing can be self-defeating.

Toilers who accompanied the England squad to the 1970 World Cup in Mexico were astonished to discover that four players, including Bobby Moore, would have their wives staying close by for the group games in Guadalajara. Since Alf Ramsey had arranged for his wife to be in Mexico, he was in no position to discourage their presence.

There was nothing to suggest that the players' wives were having a lively time; inevitably, however, unsubstantiated stories of late-night partying soon got around, although, surprisingly, they did not reach Ramsey's ears until after England were eliminated by West Germany in the quarter-finals. It was only then that he heard about one of the players sneaking from the team's hotel to check up on his spouse.

On the weekend before they played through to the 1974 World Cup final against West Germany, the Dutch players were briefly reunited with their partners. There was, of course, a great deal of sniggering along with the bemused reaction of old-timers who were left wondering what the game had come to, and where it was likely to end up if this sort of thing became widespread.

I now qualify as an old-timer, and looking around at the events of this week, I'm no less bemused than those guys were 28 years ago. Times have changed, maybe for the worse, maybe for the better. But health farms, five-star dining, limos there and back? Beats me.