Jonathan Rendall: A Man Out of Time

Jonathan Rendall: A Man Out of Time

By Garry White

Journalist Kevin Mitchell made the following observation in a heartfelt 2013 obituary in The Guardian newspaper for his former colleague Jonathan Rendall, “Those who had forgotten about, or lost contact with, this charming and hugely insecure man in the barren years of his ebbing love affair with words, were ritually sympathetic, but his death moved fewer colleagues than it might have done, given how good he was,” he wrote. I had been one of them, although, unlike Mitchell, I had never actually met him. Yet, Rendall had such a personal way of writing that you felt as though you knew him. Perhaps, above all else, that is the greatest barometer of the writer’s art. To make you feel that somewhere at some dilapidated boozer or distant race track, you could have run into him and immediately hit it off; mutually misunderstood kindred spirits that I have always thought we were. 

Boxing writing was Rendall’s trade, but he was equally eloquent when writing about drink [the alcoholic variety] and gambling. In fact, the seedier the subject the better, as few people could so assuredly navigate these dark netherworlds as Rendall. 

But mostly, while he was here, I ignored or forgot about him. Only later, like some faux-art dealer, have I picked up his work again, as though it were an obscure Van Gogh left discarded in an empty attic. In the case of Rendall, the artist is dead, but the words remain undimmed and perhaps more crystal among their background of cold finality. Yet, also in the manner of Van Gogh, my all-too-late adulation is utterly useless to him. As a teenager, I was obsessed with the early rock n roll music of Eddie Cochran. The man that gave us ‘C’mon Everybody’, ‘Three Steps to Heaven’ and ‘Summertime Blues’ died at the tragically young age of 21 in a road accident long before I was born, and as I hoovered up every album right through to scratchy early studio recording’s I was continually struck by the sad thought that eventually, I would reach the end. That there would be nothing new left; that Cochran would slip from my enduring present to someone exclusively trapped in the past.

I first discovered Rendall in the late 90s as part of my regular lunchtime visits to the library across the road from my office. This daily ritual created the one bit of respite from the stupefying boredom of working at the provincial offices of a large global bank. I am still in the same industry [perhaps the ultimate oxymoron] now, and I am sure Rendall would have chastised me for such unforgivable pragmatism; my ultimate surrender in what, in his novel Twelve Grand he would refer to as ‘the silent war’.

I sat and read the famous first line of his seminal This Bloody Mary Is the Last Thing I Own, and I was instantly hooked. At the time I would have been about 21 years old and the 80s and early/mid-90s world that he described was still very relatable to my present. Yes, SKY television had begun to really take off, but newspapers were still king and the internet a relatively distant thing for most. At that same library, I recall the elderly librarian setting up an email address for me, so primitive was my understanding of the new technological revolution. Anyway, I was happier with print, and I still am. Perhaps it is just another pointlessly stubborn battle in an already lost war with modernity.

I loved the bits on the Albert Hall in the 80s and the descriptions of the suited pressman banging out late copy on their ringside typewriters; the chapter on the elderly Jack ‘Kid’ Berg and how he couldn’t separate present from past, culminating in him fronting up some wannabe gangsters in the New York ghetto. But best of all were the passages on Colin ‘Sweet C’ McMillan and his unconventional trainer Howard Rainey. Along with Rendall cast in the role of McMillan’s unofficial advisor, they made for an appealing trio as the book recounted the grubby yet strangely intoxicating world, they operated in. It was a place of rundown snooker clubs and street corner boozers that could have been lifted straight from old episodes of the television series Minder.

A year or so later, I watched the Channel 4 programme The Gambler and revelled in the protagonist’s series of mishaps at the table, slot machine, and track. The premise was that Rendall had been given a year to gamble twelve grand, and whatever he won, he could keep. The story commenced at his rundown house in the Suffolk countryside and followed him to a slot-machine arcade in Lowestoft, where he tried to convince viewers that he was engaging in essential preparation for his upcoming gambling tour -in a later newspaper piece he not surprisingly chastised the production company for the ludicrousness of this scenario. Later, Rendall finds his way to Macau and Australia, via the Cheltenham Gold Cup and an unsuccessful ‘lump-on’ bet before heading to a country racetrack in the US and a final inevitable fling in Las Vegas. 

Parts of the tour are still absolute gold dust even from the distance of nearly a quarter of a century: Rendall winning a last-ditch bet at a rural hayseed track and celebrating with the elderly locals, waking up in New York hungover and confused to find that someone had stolen one of his shoes as he becomes increasingly more incensed and hurt by the abject pointlessness of the crime. Then there was that final 24-hour drink-fuelled bender in Vegas where he gladly let all notion of time and responsibility slip through his fingers like discarded gambling chips. And most tellingly the up-close study of his facial contortions as he watches his runner at first lose, then win, and ultimately fade to total defeat at Cheltenham. It is a masterclass in what Rendall would classify as the ‘gamblers ascetic’ or what those in the trade would more prosaically call ‘riding the betting shop pony.’

He was new and different and interesting, but also in many ways a man out of time – perhaps, both literally and figuratively. It was these contradictions that made him so fascinating as a narrator. You sensed in all his work that Rendall was perpetually disappointed with the modern world and its sporting embodiment; its championing of cold professional pragmatism over unbridled artistic flair. Everything it seemed had been reduced to percentages and the puritanical adherence to restrictive coaching manuals. Moreover, the feeling that the corporate machine and the populace’s unquestioning devotion to it had knocked the guts out of everything; that there was little authenticity left out there. That even those that claimed to be ‘authentic’ were little more than plastic facsimiles of what they purported to be. Kevin Mitchell summed this up perfectly in an interview with Declan Ryan for a piece on Rendall in Boxing News, ‘I think if he could he would have transported himself back to the 1920s or 30s, he would have been safe then, with like-minded souls around him,’ said Mitchell. 

For his part, Rendall perfectly summed up this ethos in an early 2000s piece titled ‘The Great Unknown’, that appeared in the Observer Sports Monthly supplement, on the near-forgotten snooker maverick and perennial outsider Patsy Houlihan. Of the Deptford snooker and pool hustler Rendall wrote: ‘He invented the romantic and selfless idea of the gunslinging fast player, the player of pure panache – romantic and selfless because the selfish thing to do would be to play pragmatically like all the rest.’ It would be hard to find a better sentence written by any sportswriter anywhere

When it came to gambling, Rendall himself knew that typically, professional gamblers are often little more than glorified accountants and maths wizards. They are a world away from the romantic riverboat and silver pistols image and are instead by necessity number crunchers with a heavy eye for detail and analysis. To be a professional gambler may sound appealing, but the reality is that it is probably more of a drudge than the customary 9-5 sufferance at the office and one without a pension to fall back on. Rendall’s gung-ho version of drunken abandon was altogether more appealing, although by its nature impossibly precarious. The twin toxins of gambling and drinking making as they do a heady cocktail, and one destined to end in the gutter – but I think it was the checking-out that appealed to Rendall, the refusal to play by the standard rules of conformity, and instead explore the artists need for a heightened experience. 

And it was these twin vices of booze and gambling where we really understood each other. The old poker legend Nick ‘The Greek’ Dandalos once famously commented that ‘The next best thing to gambling and winning is gambling and losing,’ but he was wrong. The reality is that only gambling and drinking as a collective surpass one or the other for sheer abandoned pleasure, often of the only fleeting variety. The drunken tracing of a roulette ball as it begins to slow, drop, and bounce towards a section of the wheel that you have partially covered and then the agonising nano-second wait to see where it finally comes to rest; followed by the resulting euphoria or despair as handed out dismissively by the gambling gods. Or the painful turning of complacent pleasure into abject despair that I experienced as I watched a lump-on bet on AC Milan fold into nothing against a resurgent Liverpool in the 2005 Champions League final. Gambling when you peel it back to the kernel is little more than a souped-up microcosm of life. Yet deep down, I think Rendall also knew that the whole shooting match was little more than a corporate charade. The house always won, but like Don Quixote, he would keep tilting at it in the impossible hope of sending it all crashing down.

But throughout The Gambler television series, I had no idea that the man on the screen was the same one that had illuminated my lunchtimes with tales of Jack ‘Kid’ Berg and a meeting with an irretrievably broken ‘Kid’ Chocolate in Havana. The connection had completely eluded me until nearly 20 years later. 

One morning on the train to work, I was suddenly struck with the thought: ‘I wonder what happened to the bloke from the tv series The Gambler’? I didn’t know his name, but after a few Google searches, I located an obituary that steadily rounded out two decades’ worth of blurred lines. The Eureka moment that joined the series to This Bloody Mary proved to be a catalyst for my own reacquaintance with both writing and boxing – twin passions that I had bitterly discarded in the 90s.

That lunchtime, I rushed to Waterstones and found ‘the book’. Over the next day or two, I read it from front to back and have probably read it in its entirety at least half-a-dozen times since. Rendall’s evocation of his entry into journalism and the captivating prose that he used to describe the sometimes gaudy and often shabby world of boxing had me hooked again. In the mid-90s, not long before I read it for the first time, I had my own dreams of entering the same world. But I had convinced myself that disappointing A-Level grades and the failure to land a university place to study journalism were impenetrable barriers. In retrospect, I focused too hard on all the things I couldn’t do that I didn’t have, rather than their more appealing opposites. I did a meek little stint helping out at a local paper, and then I walked away. I still wrote stories in my head, but they were never imprinted on a keyboard or paper and were left instead to fade into nothingness. 

Yet, now imbued with Rendall’s words rattling uncontrolled through my memory, I picked up a pen and wrote something for the first time since a piece for a university application on the aftermath of Benn vs McClellan in 1995. I sent it to a little blog, and they politely published it to their readership of about five people. But it gave me the confidence to write more and thus over the intervening six or seven years I have now seen my work grace the printed pages of Boxing Monthly, Boxing News, and Wisden among others – publications that I always admired and thus can barely conceive that I can witness my name on by-lines in any of them.

And if anyone asks me why I write, I always say it was down to Jonathan Rendall. That chance encounter on a train, three years after his tragically young death, when I found his words again. We never met, so I don’t know if he would like that story or not, but I have a feeling that any writer would. If we commend our thoughts on the public world of print, then ultimately, we must want people to read them and to either learn or take inspiration from them. None of us want to be ignored!

And that’s not the end of Rendall. In the intervening years, I have undertaken a similar journey that I travelled with Eddie Cochran back in the early 90s, this time hunting every news article and book that carries the writer’s name. One day, I will reach the end, but in the manner of T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding, the temptation will be to start again from the beginning. A journey through boxing, booze, and gambling via the wonderfully unreliable staging posts of This Bloody Mary, Twelve Grand [Rendall’s novel on which The Gambler TV series was based], Garden Hopping [the story of Rendall’s adoption and reacquaintance with his birth mother] and a thousand newspaper articles; from fight week despatches to drunken tall tales from his Observer Food column.

And it doesn’t matter how unreliable a guide Rendall proves to be. For example, Herol Graham who features heavily in Rendall’s books and columns recently claimed to never have met him; others also question whether he did actually manage to track down Kid Chocolate in his famous interview or was it instead just another figment of the artists’ imagination. Many of the tales in his short-lived drinking columns were no doubt at least eighty per cent fantasy, but their mixture of wit and poignancy still marks them as some of my favourites of his work. Could he get away with it now in a world where the internet shares everything with everybody? Probably not. 

But Jonathan Rendall is too good a writer to be forgotten or ignored. If you have stayed with me through to the end of this self-indulgent stream of consciousness, then please go out and find him or take the opportunity to reacquaint yourself. You won’t be disappointed!