FSOM: From wearing tuxedos at dinner parties to trips on America’s Cup yachts – what actually happens at sporting beneficiary dos?

FSOM is wondering whether it’s worth the money to get his tuxedo dry cleaned.

After all, it doesn’t get out much these days, apart from the odd trip to lurk about outside Pinewood and Shepperton studios to stalk the Broccoli family when there is a sniff of a new James Bond to be appointed.

That hasn’t worked so far, although it might not be fair to blame FSOM’s failure to land the role of 007 purely on his tux.

Not having been the beneficiary of a private school education, a season ticket holder at the Royal Opera House or a member of the Bryan Ferry Impersonators Society (although he has the pipes to belt out a mean version of Smoke Gets In Your Eyes) FSOM never really saw the need for a classic, gentleman’s penguin suit.

But as he beavered away as a provincial newspaper sports hack, the necessity to wear a tux became more commonplace.

Sporting dinners always required guests to suit up and don a tux and dicky bow.

Editors (who invariably possessed tuxedos to press the flesh at Chamber of Commerce dinners) were quite happy to sign off the hiring of a dinner suit to attend a sporting occasion, on expenses (alongside some of the other scams wrought which made the weekly ‘exies’ sheet look like a work of fantasy and would have got HMRC slavering at the mouth).

But as FSOM’s reputation rose, he attended an increasing number of sporting occasions to the point where it was economically worthwhile to invest in a tux which the editor steadfastly refused to pay for but the cost of which was creatively covered by expense claims for entertaining ‘contacts’ (a few rounds of drinks and a curry with a few mates on a Friday night) and justified in FSOM’s mind as the tux would only be worn when on company business.

(A quick diversionary tale on expenses, into which most journalists would invest more effort and brain power than they would into their weekly work. A brain-numbing tedious afternoon session of county championship cricket in a drowsy pre-Utilita Bowl press box at Hampshire’s old County Ground, prompted a journo from a national newspaper to prove the devil makes work for idle hands. His driveway was 20 metres long and he reversed his car out of it every day for 15 years. He calculated the total distance covered in reverse gear and decided that was mileage for which he had never claimed. For shits and giggles, he decided to whack in a claim. Perhaps the form passed across the desk of an editor foggy-eyed from the previous night’s shift, or amused by the audacity of such a claim, but he passed it. With the ed’s signature on the bottom of the claim form, the finance office saw no reason to refuse it and coughed up!).

The sort of events FSOM attended in his suave, sophisticated Tuxedo were almost exclusively designed to raise money for some sporting cause or another and the fact the tux now hangs in the wardrobe waiting like HMS Victory for a recall to sail into action in the Straits of Hormuz shows these events are going out of fashion faster than flared trousers.

And the fact that FSOM has hung up his tux, may be no bad thing.

Those events were amateur boxing dinner shows and cricketing fund-raising dinners, primarily for players’ benefits.

FSOM has always loved boxing but there is a lot that sticks in his craw.

From the Edwardian days of the foundation of the National Sorting Club in London, there is an element of condescension and patronising and boxing dinners that doesn’t sit well with a staunchly working-class son of a Southampton docker.

There is something unseemly and a little seedy about them as well-heeled gentlemen in formal dress sit down at table to a fine dinner, with the wine overflowing and the cigars pumping out smoke like a foundry, as they watch lads from council estates knock seven sacks of s*** out of each other for their entertainment.

The source of this particular form of entertainment was the formation of the National Sporting Club in 1891, founded by a group of aristocrats to give some semblance of respectability and authority to what had largely been an ungoverned and lawless activity.

THE NSC was primarily concerned with professional boxing, which was looked on with scorn by the amateurs who regarded themselves as the true protectors of the Noble Art of self Defence, but the NSC did provide some benefits, such as the foundation of Lonsdale Belts, awarded to British champions.

But the NSC set the template for boxing dinners to follow; well-fed and watered gentlemen, formally dressed in dinner suits, were required to remain silent during rounds, only opening their gobs to shovel food in, and members were often asked to ‘extinguish their havanas’ during bouts.

The boxing dinners FSOM attended in his tux differed in quality and setting of the NSC’s Mayfair gala events. Instead of crystal chandeliers and oak wainscoted chambers, FSOM’s dinners would have been guildhalls and town halls at the top end, to the club rooms of holiday caravan parks on the edge of the New Forest at the lower. Dinner was less likely to have been pate de fois gras followed by Tournedos de Rossini as soup in a basket with canned peaches and evaporated milk for pud.

The common denominator was that punters would pay through the nose for the experience which was of course the prime object of the exercise, to raise money for the club or local ABA. 

Having rushed his tux to the dry cleaners to get out the tomato soup which had leaked from the basket. FSOM would quickly don it again to attend a cricket dinner the following week.

Back in the not-too distant past, professional cricket was a parlous existence for most, jobbing county players. While top international player were well provided for, the vast majority of players could only rely in six months work, and at the end of the summer, counties discharged their duties and players were left to fend for themselves for the winter.

The more well-heeled could go and work for daddy’s property development company or go back to the family farm, others would find job in warm comfortable offices, at companies run by the fans who watched and applauded them during the summer.

There was one Hampshire player who worked as a deckchair attendant on Bournemouth beach either side of the season, while those unlucky enough to not find a job, signed on the old rock n’ roll.

The ray of hope for many players was the dangled promised of a benefit year. Ten years service with a club entitled a player to a benefit, where he could raise as much money as he could with a series of fund-raising events.

These events could take place throughout the year and also included his right to choose a one-day match or day’s play where he could trouser the gate receipts.

Some of the more entrepreneurial and innovative arranged shooting parties, trips on America’s Cup yachts, you name it and they would organise it with the intention of prising spondulicks from all-too willing hands.

None of these required a tux (unless one considered oneself a ‘boulevardier’ and showed up in one), but the main underpinning of the benefit year were the various dinners.

The ECB did have some nefarious rules around dinners; they had to be held within the county you played for – although former Hampshire skipper Mark Nicholas managed to arrange on in the House of Commons (FSOM wasn’t invited to that one, for some reason) and you were limited to the number you could hold. Although cross-border raids were verboten, a player was allowed to organise one dinner in London, on the basis that the capital contained enough fans and supporters of clubs from the shires.

For Hampshire players, that meant big events in Southampton, Portsmouth, Bournemouth, Winchester and Basingstoke and that’s where the beneficiaries made their big money.

Benefit dinners were an opportunity for chaps, mainly from the local business community, to spend the evening talking shop and flashing the cash to impress; owners of German high performance car dealerships. property developers, marketing company heads, estate agent johnnies and other captains of industry  who attached themselves to professional sportsmen almost umbilically.

Again, it stuck in the craw with FSOM that well-heeled chaps (bear in mind that ladies were as rare as rocking horse droppings at these events) with either huge expense accounts or clever accountants who could write the cost of the evening’s outlay against tax for their business 

It would cost a three-figure sum even back in the 90s just for the privilege of sitting down at the table for a standard Rotary or Lions Club fare. Add in wine at a mark up which would embarrass a usurer and you were looking at serios money for an evening out.

The real fun and frolics would start at the auction of cricket memorabilia, that’s when the boys came out to play and to show who had the fattest wallet and biggest cojones.

You could spot a player whose benefit year it was, he would be the one taking a dozen bats in to the opposition dressing room when the overseas touring team were in town, and blessed was he if the touring team in the year of his benefit were the Aussies.

Autographed bats were the favourite auction item and FSOM witnessed some fetch four – and even five – figure sums as bidders fired by red wine and post-dinner licquers bid ridiculous amounts for a trophy to stick on the wall of their BMW or Audi dealership.

Of course, the lucky beneficiary wasn’t complaining and why would he, as a bumper benefit year was often his retirement pension.

The Holy Grail of cricket memorabilia was something signed by Sir Donald Bradman, who was still alive at that time. It could be bat, cap, shirt, or even table napkin that some relative of the beneficiary had obtained while on holiday Down Under and popped into Kensington Park Adelaide for The Don to stick his John Hancock on.

A Bradman-endorsed curio was a licence to print money.

Thankfully, those day have largely disappeared. Cricket is now a decently paid sport. Perhaps not Premier League football standards, but certainly well rewarded.

And, of course, cricketers can ply their trade throughout the year now with a winter in franchise cricket.

Not every county player will have the Delhi Capitals or Chennai Super Kings bidding seven-figure sums for his services in the Indian Premier League, or making big bucks in the the Big Bash league, but there are enough T20-Twenty franchise set-ups in Pakistan, the Caribbean, New Zealand and elsewhere – even in the USA! – for county players to pack their coffins and head off to sunnier climes instead of spending the winter lopping hedges or digging ditches.

Amateur boxing will always be in need of finance, even if it is no longer a basket case of a ragged orphan with its hand out for a few coppers. Clubs are much more astute when it comes to attracting sponsorship and the national body does its bit in distributing lottery funding.

Cricket benefit years still exist, although they are more likely to be charity orientated, with players – now buffered from post-retirement penury – donating the lion’s share of the money raised to good causes.

The fact they no longer have to face patronising and condescension has get to be a good thing.

And it will also good new for the moths who will likely be snacking on FSOM’s tuxedo.