[dr. johnson] meet david campese

Click on Wiki pic to see Johnson in his glory

Dr. Samuel Johnson bestrode the literary world like a colossus and is known by centuries of educated people. David Campese was an Australian Rugby Union winger, known by a few generations of rugby lovers.

Johnson was extraordinary for his ordinariness. After all, what did he bring to the pool of world knowledge? The Hegelian dialectic? Existentialism? Did his work eventually blight nations around the world like a Marx?

Henry Herbert, 10th Earl of Pembroke, said of him in 1775, quoted in Boswell:

Dr. Johnson's sayings would not appear so extraordinary were it not for his bow-wow way.

This is to misunderstand what he did. He took snippets of truth, simplified them and expressed them. So did Dickens. So did Monty Python. Many put these latter into the genius class.

People are down on Johnson, not for his ability but for his willingness to accept the entourage, the Boswellian praise - surely not sycophancy because it was at least deserved. He lived the life of one of the greats. He would have driven a Rolls.

People won't forgive him his lack of humility. After all, Walter Scott had this humility in full measure, writing in 1826:

The Big Bow-Wow strain I can do like any now going … The exquisite touch which renders … commonplace things interesting … is denied to me.

Once Johnson turned to a party of literary ladies who were deeply in awe of the colossus of letters, noticed their reticence and addressed them:

Ladies, I am tame. You may stroke me.

Don't we put extraordinary conditions on our heroes? Not only must they be genii but they must be self-effacing, doing their work unpaid, giving selflessly to the young and leading the exemplary life of a saint.

It's the Unwritten Law of heroism and is almost as important in our minds as the genius itself.

Take David Campese and many who remember him admit his genius on the field, as long as they're not English and you don't mention 1991. You may mention the Lions of 1989. One never knew what was coming next. The Penguin Book of Australian Sporting Anecdotes [1996] quoted Nick Farr-Jones, the Australian half-back as saying:

He [Campese] is the sort of player whose brain doesn't always know where his legs are carrying him.

Bob Dwyer, the coach said:

We all know there's a loose wire between Campo's brain and his mouth.

Campese himself said:

It's always good to be a big mouth as long as you can back it up on the field - and I'm lucky I can do that.

The book put it:

David Campese had a long career making acidic comments about anyone who had a difference of opinion with the mercurial winger. It was not surprising that one of the chapters in his biting autobiography, On a Wing and a Prayer, was entitled The Loner.

Wiki dislikes the article on him and additionally posts:

The neutrality of this article is disputed.

By their own lights, both these men were great. The reason grandparents don't extol their virtues to their grandchildren is that they both broke the Unwritten Law. They'd both stepped over the line into the realm of self-regard and became caricatures of themselves, like Chesterton in his ridiculous cloak, hat and cane.

But does that make them any less the genii they were? I'm still big rap for both - I think they were both extraordinary men, the like we will not see again for a long time.

Oh I clean forgot to include a Johnson quote:

Every man has the right to utter what he thinks truth and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.