The secret to being a sporting great is not really trying | Harry Pearson

Chrissie Evert and Ed Moses are perfect examples of the importance of nonchalance in the shaping of heroic statusWhen I was a younger man I often accompanied Chrissie Evert to her bedroom. In many ways I'd like to leave it right there and go on to talk about the fact that while male sprinters wear leotards and shorts that come down practically to the knee, their female counterparts sport bikini briefs and crop-tops, and speculate on whether this is because women's thighs and bellies are naturally more aerodynamic than those of men, or whether there is some other reason for it. However, honour ? and the threat of legal action ? compels me to explain that in those days, when I was forced by cruel fate to work for a living, I was a receptionist in a luxury West End hotel and escorting guests to their rooms was my job.The lifts in the hotel were mirrored. This meant that you could not stand in them for long without catching sight of yourself in the harsh light of a dozen spot beams. For most of us that is bad enough in normal circumstances, but let me tell you that when you are standing next to somebody like Ms Evert it is enough to make you contemplate wearing a bag over your head for the rest of your days.There she was, the winner of 18 grand slam titles, poised, athletic, exuding health and besides her a strange, spindly, blotch-skinned creature who ? even freshly groomed and in his smartest clothes ? looked like somebody who was wearing a ketchup-stained Red Dwarf T-shirt, comfort-fit jeans his mum had ironed a crease down the front of and holding two carrier bags bulging with non-League football programmes ? which was more or less the look I favoured when off duty, obviously.A decade or so later, when I had somehow managed to con a number of apparently intelligent people into paying me good money to witter on about nothing in particular, I was sent to Monaco to talk to Ed Moses. I can't recall much of what the great 400m hurdler said (I'm sure he feels the same about me), but I vividly remember watching him walk across the hotel lobby, sit down on a chair and fold his right leg over his left, because seeing the man in motion, so fluent and languid it was as if his joints were liquid, was like being jabbed in the eye by one of my own gawky elbows.After Moses left I realised something else about him: that when he strolled across the marble floor he did so in total silence, whereas whenever I crossed it I was accompanied by the noise of my feet ? an arrhythmic symphony of slaps, claps and rubbery squeals of the sort you might expect to hear coming from behind the walls of a Yokohama love hotel when the fleet is in.I had watched film of Moses before setting off and looking back realised that without the clock ticking in the corner it was impossible to judge how fast he was going. His movements were so graceful everything he did appeared to happen in slow motion. This memory mush came slopping into my brain bucket at Gateshead Stadium on Saturday afternoon as I watched the long-jumpers warming up at the Diamond League meeting. At one point the Australian Fabrice Lapierre took four leisurely paces down the runway, dipped his hips as he hit the board and sprang 16 feet, sailing through the air at a height that would have easily cleared a farm gate. An hour or so later he won the competition with a jump of 8.20 metres, but that seemed altogether less amazing.When I mentioned this to the friend I was with he directed me to look at some film of the Olympic gold medal winning high jumper Stefan Holm springing effortlessly over a series of 1.6m high hurdles. I just did. It's like watching a roe deer vaulting hedges. It's far more extraordinary than the footage of him clearing 2.36m in Athens. Ernest Hemingway said that he had spent his time as a sportswriter in Chicago in the 1920s looking for "the unnoticed things that made emotions, such as the way an outfielder tossed his glove without looking back to where it fell".I've often thought that a measure of a sportsperson's ability is to be found in that nonchalance too: in the way a good footballer will make a long pass and spin away from it confident that he or she knows where it has gone; a fighter carry on a conversation with you while absent-mindedly yet rhythmically pummelling a speedball (when I mentioned this to the amiable Liverpudlian super-middleweight Robin Reid once he dismissed it with a shrug ? "It's a just a knack," he said. "You could learn it." Yeah, right); or a slip fielder hurl the ball into the air in celebration with none of the fear the rest of us might have that, unwatched, it is more or less certain to come down straight on our heads.Sometimes with sports people the truth of their greatness it is not to be found in what they can do when they are straining every fibre, but what they can do with seemingly no effort whatsoever.Slipless In Settle ? A Slow Turn Around Northern Cricket by Harry Pearson is published by Little Brown TennisAthleticsBoxingCricketHarry Pearsonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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