This article is taken from the March 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Prince Harry’s Spare has made J. R. Moehringer the most famous ghostwriter in the world. Long before he took on an aggrieved prince, however, Moehringer worked with tennis royalty in Andre Agassi, and their book Open remains perhaps the standout sports autobiography of the twenty-first century so far.

I’ve been lucky enough to ghost three major sporting figures myself: the rugby players Sam Warburton and Siya Kolisi (Open Side and Rise respectively) and the jockey Frankie Dettori with Leap of Faith. Along the way, I’ve learned that such books need to be five things if they’re to sing: five things which spell an appropriately spectral mnemonic.

GENUINE. Getting the voice right is arguably the most important part of the process. An autobiography in which yours, the ghost’s, voice intrudes has failed in its first purpose.

It’s not a question of mimicry, but of putting yourself in the subject’s head and shoes. It’s their book and not yours: their story, their voice, their name on the cover. Even when you’re credited, you should write it as though you’re anonymous (a conceit which Robert Harris takes to its logical conclusion in his thriller The Ghost: like the second Mrs de Winter, we never find out the ghost’s name).

You can only get the voice if you ask the right questions, get answers which resonate, and structure the narrative well. Knowing which questions to ask and when to ask them is harder than it seems. Memory’s a funny thing, and often things come out when people are not looking at them head on. Sometimes you just have to let people talk rather than plod through a chronology.

HONEST. Other people’s lives are endlessly fascinating to us and we want to be transported there, to see the world through their eyes and relive their experiences at a short, vicarious distance. Readers want to know they’re getting it straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were, and honesty is a key part of this. A book which constantly pulls its punches is unsatisfying for obvious reasons: the subjects are almost by definition alpha high achievers, so why not say what they really think?

Readers want to know they’re getting it straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were, and honesty is a key part of this

This doesn’t mean unflattering opinions of team-mates or opponents (though these can certainly be part of it). Rather, it means a deeper and more holistic commitment to finding the emotional truth behind every story, because every story has one. “I want to know what it’s like,” I said to Sam when we first met. “I want to know what it’s like to play in those enormous matches, to live with that kind of pressure, to deal with yet another shattering injury. Mentally, emotionally, physically, I want to know what it’s like to be you.”

OPEN. The counterpart to honesty. There was a reason Agassi chose the word “Open” for a book which among other things covered his use of crystal meth and a fractious relationship with his father. Readers also want to see behind the curtain: a sportsperson’s public face in the arena is only a small part of the reality. My subjects have revealed struggles with alcohol, coming to terms with near-death experiences, and more.

There was a time when sports autobiographies shied from these things: Lester Piggott’s, for example, was more or less a long list of owners, trainers, horses and courses with next to no insight into his complex, brilliant  psyche. If any one book changed this, it was the England cricketer Marcus Trescothick’s Coming Back To Me, which won William Hill Sports Book of the Year prize and was unsparing in its descriptions of the toll depression had taken on him. Now sportsmen and women are much more inclined to open their souls.

SUBJECTIVE. Autobiographies aren’t neutral books which cover all sides of a situation and seek input from several different sources. They are by their nature personal takes from a specific viewpoint. They are, to use a vogueish phrase, “my truth”, and sometimes that truth clashes with other people’s points of view: as the late Queen put it, “Some recollections may vary.”

That said, it’s a ghost’s responsibility to check objective facts wherever possible. There’s no reason that a subject can or should remember every last detail of hundreds, maybe thousands, of competitions. I spent hours on each project looking up old matches and races: when and where they took place, who was involved, what the results were. These are easy things to do, and they make the books demonstrably better and more accurate.

TENSE. One of the reasons people love sport is the drama which it constantly throws up. (This is, perhaps slightly tangentially, why great sports films are hard to pull off: how can you make the real thing any more dramatic than it already is?)

Capturing the almost unbearable tension of a big occasion is not just your job as a ghostwriter: it’s your privilege too. The Welsh team bus inching through ten-deep Cardiff crowds before a Six Nations title decider against England; Springbok rugby players ready to go out and play a World Cup Final which would bring a divided country together even if only for 80 minutes; a jockey before his comeback Derby after years in the wilderness. These were some of my favourite bits to write, because these are the reasons that sport does what it does to us.