Jamie Wood
Steve Martin
Son of Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood and coowner of well-known Mayfair gallery Scream, which is moving on to pastures new in Eastcastle Street this month
CEO of M&C Saatchi Sports and Entertainment in Golden Square, and a man who – by his own admission – spends all day talking about sport
Greatest sportsman: Muhammad Ali
Greatest sportsman: Seve Ballesteros
‘I watched Ali fight Ken Norton with my Dad when I was four years old,’ says Wood, with a nostalgic glint in his eye. ‘It was the first boxing match I’d seen and I was amazed by Ali – he was captivating. He seemed bigger than big that day, and he still does.’ Wood says that a large part of the three-times world heavyweight champion’s appeal was his personality, and ‘especially the way that he got into his opponent’s head before a fight.’ Adds Jamie: ‘Using mind-games and fast-talking he would wind people up to get them to fight angrily. He would win the fight before he even went into the ring.’
‘Seve was really coming into his own when I was growing up, and as I’d started playing golf when I was ten, he became my sporting idol,’ says Martin. ‘He joined the European tour in 1974 and over twenty years he won fifty titles in the tour, a record which hasn’t been beaten to this day.’ Martin, who says he is most likely to stroll into Mayfair in pursuit of one of Savile Row’s long-established tailors or for lunch at Cecconi’s, achieved every schoolboy dream in the early 1980s when he met his hero after a tournament. Better than that, the golfer handed him his ball as he walked from the 18th hole. ‘Seve was both flamboyant and seriously successful,’ says Martin, with a smile. ‘No one had seen anything like him.’