Ken Jones: Dr Frankenstein world could learn from Charles

It seems impossible these days to come across a story about sport that does not reflect the time in which we live. If it is not about some scandal or another, it is about greed, double-dealing, expediency, disloyalty, cheating, corporate politics, managed news and all kinds of strife.

You name it and the sports pages have it. The trick is to sleep as late as possible because when you wake up there is more of the same.

Periodically, there are calls for sanity. But the very use of the word proclaims there is something generically insane about sport. And perhaps there is. The pathetic attempts of administrators to cope with it suggest the panic of Dr Frankenstein trying to find the knobs to control the creature he has loosed on the world. It is not just the dodgy economics, the growing suspicion that a period of explosive growth will not last. If growth has been fine for many investors and sports performers, it implies that the games people play matter less than the money they make.

In newspapers and across the airwaves, reporters concentrate on the enormous salaries now paid to footballers. That does not mean simply, as some journalists suggest, that the rich players all become complacent. It does mean that many work longer and harder and so may wear out sooner.

A generation ago, the sporting life, the sporting pace was more leisurely. Footballers were criminally underpaid but they maintained an unabated passion for the game. It was a passion to win, to prove certain points. To those men, sport was no small sliver of the consciousness; it dominated them.

Earlier this week, I had the privilege of attendance when John Charles was made a Freeman of Swansea. Correctly announced as one of the greatest footballers produced in these islands, to my mind one of the 10 best worldwide of all time, Charles has the added distinction of an impeccable disciplinary record, never sent off or cautioned despite the battering he frequently took during his peak years in the colours of Juventus.

I was watching Charles. I was watching him sit there on a stage, staring straight ahead, and I had it all figured out for myself. This is a fellow, I was thinking to myself, who is not listening to the plaudits. This is a fellow going back to his schooldays in Swansea, to the park where he learned to play; to Leeds where he was a first-teamer at 17, to when he became the youngest to be capped by Wales; to being voted, after one season in Italy, the most valuable player in Europe.

When it was time to acknowledge the honour bestowed by his native city Charles, still a huge man with no outward sign of frailty, rose slowly, hands thrust into the pockets of his jacket. Overcome by emotion, he managed only one word. "Sorry," he said before sitting down to wipe the tears from his eyes. For a moment there was silence. Then the thunderclap of a standing ovation.

With that one word Charles had made a statement about himself, about his life in the game, expressing an uncomplicated appreciation of the good things that have happened to him, and a capacity for honest, unquestioning gratitude. If someone had bothered to ask Charles why he should thank anybody for his chance in football, probably he would have frowned thoughtfully and answered something like this: "Maybe I don't have to, but just the same I'm grateful for the opportunities that came my way."

Players today with their fancy lifestyles, their agents and salaries often out of all proportion to ability, their technicolour lifestyles, choreographed celebrations, and pathetic outbursts, pandered to by television presenters and chat show hosts, what would they know about the humility Charles displayed this week in the place of his birth?

In a recently shown documentary, Jack Charlton recalled playing with Charles for Leeds. "He was half the team," Charlton said. "He could win matches on his own."

Unfortunately, evidence of Charles' prowess, the skill and power that brought 93 goals in 155 league games for Juventus, helping them to three scudettos in four years in addition to two Italian Cups is confined to fuzzy black and white images.

At the mention of his name, his deeds, his remarkable temperament, people shake their heads quizzically. They must be told. Above all, they must be told that Charles, a giant of the game, a giant of his people, radiates a quality few of today's sporting heroes would even begin to understand. Dignity.