MIGHTY Boro picked up their first trophy of the season as Gareth Southgate lifted the coveted Evening Gazette Sports Award glassware for Team of the Year earlier this week. And rightly so. For middleweight Boro to make it to the final of the UEFA Cup in such dramatic Hollywood- scripted fashion was a brilliant achievement of seismic significance that will live in Teesside legend for generations. We can never understate just how fantastic reaching Eindhoven was.
But winning the award was far from a foregone conclusion. There really were serious rivals for the prize. There is an arrogant assumption that just because the cash fuelled football juggernaut has a media monopoly and puts more bums on seats than the rest of competitive sport put together, that somehow it is intrinsically the best and most important, as if athletic excellence can be measured purely in economic terms.
In fact, some of the people up for these awards - people you have never heard of - demonstrate a steely dedication, a bravery, a willingness to make sacrifices and a 'professionalism' in their voluntary training regimes that should shame many of the bench-warming millionaire mercenaries who bring the game into disrepute with their half-hearted and aloof attitude.
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The ceremony at the Tall Trees, with the BBC Radio Cleveland's Paul Addison in the Gary Lineker MC role, was an eye-opening celebration of sport at every level and across all disciplines and although I go every year it never ceases to amaze me the extraordinary lengths that ordinary people are willing to go to dedicate their entire lives to the pursuit of sporting glory.
And we are not talking about those soccer superstars who train two hours a day then pick up £20,000 for one 90 minute sluggish shift on Saturday before going out on the lash with a posse of hangers-on, acting the Big I Am in pubs and torching high denomination notes before roasting stupid star-struck teenagers while the camera rolls.
No, we are talking about people from humble backgrounds who put in a bloody hard days graft in an office, factory or shop but somehow sandwich it between a dawn run and an evening of technical training to get a sprint start, or a javelin release, or an oarstroke down to a fine art. Every day. People who sacrifice nights drinking and clubbing, holidays, flash cars and plasma screen TVs and who eschew all the normal trappings of indulgent modern life to channel all their money and all their energy into being as best as they possibly can at their chosen discipline.
And these are ordinary people from the estates of Teesside who instead of taking ridiculous piles of cash out of their sport instead put almost every penny they have in. People who pay to play. Who call on friends, proud club-mates and ever supportive families to finance essential equipment, fund a warm weather training camp in Spain or transport and hotels to compete in a ranking event in Bristol or Brugge. People who are grateful for the chance to compete at the highest level knowing their almost certainly their only return will be the satisfaction of success in their own sphere and maybe a picture board appearance on Question of Sport if they do come good and reach their goals. I have a huge amount of respect for these people.
It is always hard to judge different disciplines and levels of competition against each other but I think we managed it better than the BBC. In their bloated populist affair the night before there was a travesty as an armchair audience of millions with almost no knowledge of sport except the small screen sport and the tabloids weighed in with their votes. Who is really most deserving of recognition, a 17-year-old table tennis player who has exploded on the global circuit, wins almost every game he plays and has the Chinese scared stiff he will take gold in Beijing or a World Cup stowaway who has made half-a-dozen starts for a Premiership club?
That said Boro deserved to win the Team of the Year gong without a doubt. Last season was quiet spectacular in almost every respect, with the lows of relegation worries and Red Book book shotting acting as counterpoint to a football fairytale of staggering proportions. Winning through to the UEFA Cup final involved meeting and beating some of the best teams in Europe and to do it in such pulsating fashion - twice - was electrifying.
You might expect Boro to sweep the board every year but they don't. In fact, they rarely are even involved in the event. This was the first year they have entered en masse, possibly because they have recognised the vast cultural differences between televised professional sport and the more hand-to-mouth grass roots variety, but their participation is very welcome. It makes the awards more truely comprehensive and raises the profile but also highlights the sacrifices made by those competing in the less glamorous disciplines.
Boro beat the revived Billingham Bombers ice hockey outfit and Great Ayton crickets club for their award - but it was close. Bombers bounced back from a spell in the doldrums to win the English National Ice Hockey League and beat a host of big name semi-pro clubs to make the semi-final of the English Cup, with the players paying travelling expense to places like Fife and Basingstoke out of their own pockets. It is the equivilent of Pools getting promoted and making the semi-finals of the FA Cup. Tiny Great Ayton saw off the big boys to win the North Yorkshire /South Durham league with batting and bowling record tumbling almost every week and winning every game bar two that were halted by rain when they were on top.
Boro lost out in two other categories. Stewart Downing probably had a strong case to be Sports Person of the Year after being central to Boro's knockout frenzy and becoming the first Middlesbrough-born Boro player to feature in the World Cup for 40 years but he was just pipped by Teesside cyclist and former Olympic medallist Chris Newton who brought Commonwealth Games gold to the table.
And Lee Cattermole missed out on the Young Sports Person of the Year - won last year by the ping pong prodigy snubbed on the Beeb, Paul Drinkall - despite breaking into Boro's first team and featuring in the Premiership and UEFA Cup to rave reviews and also becoming the club's youngest ever captain as he took the armband when a promising side of academy graduates narrowly went down at Fulham.
He was edged out by 16-year-old Stockton swimmer Jessica Dickon. She arrived late having just jetted in direct from the European short course championships in Helsinki clutching a medal and beaming after shattering the British 200m fly record. She declined a celebratory bender. She was due back in the pool at six in the morning to train.
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