It is important to do it well, yes, but it is not everything in life," said Eriksson. Owen, who scored a brilliant hat trick and, at 22, retains the demeanour of a successful but modest sixth-former, echoed his boss's sentiments.David Beckham, who struck a glorious free kick to ensure England's eventually squeaky qualification against Greece and was immediately deified, unfortunately came quickly enough to represent as much the extremities of hype as supreme achievement, a process that reached a bitter conclusion when his club, Manchester United, dropped him from a series of vital games. Beckham's hopes of winning the World Footballer of the Year trophy also perished, as he came in behind Real Madrid's Portuguese star Luis Figo On the same day, Owen was voted Europe's best player. It was hard not to see this as a restatement of merit over mere celebrity.In rugby, England's out-half Wilkinson's progress to the top of his game paralleled, both in substance and style, that of Owen.
Self-effacing but as hard as tungsten in his tackling and his spirit, and prodigiously accurate with his mortar-shell kicking, Wilkinson guided England into the rugby elite in a series of mould-breaking victories over Southern Hemisphere giants Australia and South Africa.When MacArthur made her landfall after her superb circumnavigation of the world in the great single-handed race, France greeted her ecstatically. She was the maid not of Orleans but the sea, and it could be argued that her deeds dwarfed those of any of her rivals in the voting for the BBC's Personality of the Year Award. But if she felt any chagrin as Beckham, dressed in a suit so reminiscent of Al Capone's Chicago some feared that his real mission might be to bump off Sir Alex Ferguson, she hardly showed. But then, why would she? Who knew better than her what she had done when she touched her vessel at the quayside in Britannia and fought to both staunch the tears and find her land legs?Steve Waugh, Australia's cricket captain, led his team to a crushing victory in the Ashes, but when his job was done he showed no inclination to apply the boot to an English team that had earlier been talked into the belief that it was ready to take on the champions of the world. What he did say, under prompting, was that maybe it was time that England started to pick out the good young players, and then put a little trust in them.Tiger Woods won his fourth straight major at Augusta, where he had taken his first four years earlier, an achievement that much of white, Country Club America first deemed a freak, then slowly accepted for what it was – the calling card of a sportsman of the ages.
He was one who, helpfully for the purposes of this piece, could handle himself as well in defeat as victory.It is perhaps not too patriotic to stress the point, but perhaps the single most dramatic slaying of hype and its close companion hubris, came in a boxing ring in Las Vegas. There, Barrera beat Naseem Hamed with an intensity and skill that laid bare years of the over-statement that accompanied the vast majority of the opponent's victories. Barrera had said for years that he would expose Hamed's claims to greatness, and when the moment came the Mexican was quite masterful in his execution.HBO, the American television company that held Hamed's contract and for several years had been trying to establish him as a super-star in the North American market, reached the end of its patience. It said that for too long Hamed had been paid high-risk money for low-risk fights, and now their interest in him went no further than his willingness to take a Barrera re-match. So far it has yet to be arranged.If Barrera was the essence of merit over questionable celebrity, the champion of Wimbledon, Goran Ivanisevic, was – as he had been for most of his life – in a category all of his own. His achievement, complete with blazing eyes and psychological self-examination that might have intrigued and amused old Sigmund Freud, was to remind the world of the joy of an ambition fulfiled after a lifetime of trying. He shared it with everybody and, in such a year, it was a precious gift..