Funny occupation, though, sports writing. People have been known to go a bit mad in the cause, and it’s hardly surprising, given the artificiality of the lifestyle and the demands of the work. Also, one’s status is very hard to get into perspective: sport is big and important, but does that make a sports writer big and important, too? There are people who can’t quite cope with this question. While I was doing the job myself, I wrote a deranged sports writer character into a comic novel: a man who said things like, ‘Seve Ballesteros gave me this sombrero’ and ‘I taught Jack Charlton how to fish’ - and colleagues who read it said they definitely recognised the type. My fictional sports writer’s entire family was emotionally scarred by his confusion. On his deathbed, when the phone rang, he rallied himself to say, with his final breath, ‘If that’s bloody Alex Ferguson again, tell him to - [cough, cough] - sod off.’
Why is sports writing a kind of byword for alienation? Well, it’s a pretty lonely job. But, looking at it from the outside, you might imagine that what would nag at the professional sports writer was simply the essential triviality of the subject. ‘Perhaps I’m wasting my life on something that doesn’t matter,’ he would think, on sleepless nights. ‘After all, if all sport stopped tomorrow, nothing bad would happen, would it? God gave me gifts and I am using them to monitor the growing animosity between the French-born manager of a very successful north London football club and the Spanish-born manager of a different very successful football club, based on Merseyside - an animosity which may be of no interest whatsoever by this time next year.’
But, astonishingly, this is not a problem. No one involved in sports journalism worries that sport isn’t worth writing about, or entertains for a moment the ‘if all sport stopped tomorrow’ scenario with which I personally entertained myself on many a long break-neck drive back down the M6 (while also light-headedly debating whether to stop for motorway service food or just carry on risking a blackout at the wheel). The world-without-sport was my favourite fantasy on those journeys. I liked to picture football stadiums dug over for allotments, and so on. I liked to imagine how the complete cessation of sport would release an enormous amount of weekend time for men (in particular) to spend reading improving novels, growing courgettes as thick as your wrist, or taking their children on lovely long walks beside canals.
It would make an interesting dystopian novel, too - this world without sport. So easy to imagine: a future, library-quiet world in which suppressed sports followers had to pursue their faith underground, with secret meetings, always begun with a ritual hushed singing of ‘Football’s Coming Home’. What a market in illegal relics there would be. When the Goldstone ground in Brighton was deconsecrated (or whatever the word is) in 1997, the true followers of Brighton and Hove Albion dug up bits of the pitch to keep as little shrines, and there was an item in the local paper about a man who was keeping the centre spot alive in a bucket - I remember hoping he realised he had to repaint the spot as it grew, otherwise he would end up with just a bit of grass. And now I come to think of it, there had been another item in the local paper about a woman with a damp patch on her wall that miraculously resembled the boxer Chris Eubank, who lives in Hove. The headline said, ‘I’ve Got Chris Eubank Coming Through My Wall.’ Imagine the power of that in a world from which all sport had been banned. A small basement flat in Hove would become an object of clandestine pilgrimage. Alternatively, however (and looking on the bright side), perhaps no one would recognise the Miracle of the Damp Patch Eubank in this brave new world, and the wall would be painted over.
But even if you accept that sport has huge significance in itself, surely a sports writer will still anxiously ask himself: what is the value of writing about it? How much is there to say, really? Isn’t some of the day-to-day business of sport too unimportant to deal with? And what of that mainstay of sports writing, the match report? What is the point of writing a 600-word first-hand next-day report of, say, a quarter-final match at Wimbledon? For one thing, you can’t possibly do justice to the action. And for another, at the same time as you are writing your piece, millions of tennis fans are actually watching it for themselves on television - and they are doing this with the additional benefits (unavailable to the poor mug sitting in the press box) of continuous commentary, regular analysis, pertinent running statistics and instant, slowmotion replays.
I pick on Wimbledon for three reasons. First, because it was my first assignment as an accredited sports writer: i.e. working from a press room, and sitting in a press seat. (Or, rather, not sitting in a press seat, because there were three allocated desks for each paper in the old Wimbledon press room, and The Times had six writers, so I ended up, on my first day, writing miserably in a smokers’ enclosure in the press canteen.) The second reason is that tennis is famously quite hard to bring to life on the page. It is noticeable that, whereas there are many great books about boxing, horse-racing, football, cricket, baseball and golf, there are few even halfway readable books about tennis. And third, tennis was the first sport I ever tried to read about in a newspaper before I was called to the profession; and the experiment was so profoundly unsatisfactory that it put me off trying again.
This occurred in 1991, when Andre Agassi made his first real mark at Wimbledon. He had competed there once before, in 1987, and was knocked out in the first round by Henri Leconte - but, to be fair, most Wimbledon watchers have no recollection of this. Anyway, hoping to find expert background information about this phenomenal player who, seemingly from nowhere, was making it to the quarter-finals in 1991, I opened the sports pages and was simply bewildered by the cool, haughty, longdistance, from-our-own-correspondent-in-Bechuanaland attitude I found there - especially as the precious who-is-this-bloke-then background info I sought was not on offer, either. I was quite perplexed. I had gone to the paper to enhance my appreciation of an interesting sportsman. I felt I had been prepared to meet sports journalism halfway. What I found was a toffee-nosed dismissal of him, based on his haircut and his eye-catching two-tiered shorts. Most confusingly of all, the tennis writers evidently believed that their mere physical presence on the spot conferred an almost divine authority on their accounts of proceedings - and on their judgements concerning Agassi’s ‘silly trousers’, too.
This was extremely odd. Weren’t these chaps aware that a lot of people watched Wimbledon at home? Had no one ever mentioned it to them? It was as if they loftily surveyed those neat grassy oblongs in south-west London from a balcony somewhere, and had no idea what all those little TV cameras and commentary boxes were for. ‘You may have heard a few rumours about this chap Agassi,’ was the tenor of the reports - transmitted, one imagined, by way of a humble cockney telegraph operator in a pith-helmet, kneeling on the floor of a makeshift tent, while the writer paced about and dictated, pipe in hand. ‘Well, take no notice of those jungle drums, dear readers. This comically dressed young man will never achieve the stature of Ivan Lendl.’
In short, the air of complacent self-importance was a bit shocking. But I was glad, when I started having to give thought to all this in the summer of 1997, that I could remember those unfavourable first impressions. Because it took no time at all to discover where at least some of these sports writers’ extraordinary sense of entitlement came from. First of all, there is the accreditation business, which makes a sports writer shake his head at the jostling, holiday-mood crowds and think, ‘You may be here to enjoy this; I am here to understand it. You are here for the Pimm’s and strawberries; I am here to work.’ (Which is fair enough, actually.) But more importantly, from the professional point of view, there is the wonderful, deeply unfair, but utterly incontrovertible fact that sport sells newspapers, which means that anyone who writes about sport for a newspaper is conscious of the fact that he has already - without necessarily writing a single word that’s worth reading - won the double rollover jackpot in the lottery of life.
To join the sport department was, simply, to join the winning team. And my main reaction when I realised this was: why had no one ever told me this before? Why was I 42 before I found out? For twenty arduous and quite inky years, as an editor and a writer, I had toiled in the fields of literary criticism and arts features, thinking it was a life worth leading. And now, completely unexpectedly, by simply having the word ‘Sportswriter’ embossed on my new Times business card, I had received the biggest hike in status of my entire career.
I had never known what I was missing, you see. I had loved those windowless, dusty, demoralised and half-starved books and arts departments. I had run a couple of them myself, and had assumed it was normal to live in a constant state of flinching apprehension that one’s meagre page allocation - and indeed one’s meagre office space, and meagre job - would at any moment be savagely halved, or subsumed into lifestyle, or snatched away completely. In my youth I had edited a single, measly, once-a-month arts page on a weekly newspaper which, every single time, the editor would neglect to include in the page-plan. ‘Don’t forget my arts page, Peter,’ I would remind him, helpfully, from the doorway, when I noticed him working on the schedule, with ball-point and ruler. ‘All right, all right, don’t go on about it,’ he would say, shooing me away with the back of his hand. But it was always the same. ‘You forgot my arts page, Peter,’ I would have to point out when the plan arrived, and he would silently clench his jaw, and get up from his desk, roll his eyes, and then personally lumber around the news room gathering back all the page plans that had been distributed - and all the time I knew he was cursing me, but he was also cursing the arts.
But now here I was on the winning team on a newspaper, and it was wonderful. No one forgot to include the sports pages. Goodbye Doncaster Rovers; hello Real Madrid. Not only that, though. Suddenly, I was on the winning team in the culture as a whole as well. Having a job that involves reading long books with a pencil counts for relatively little these days in the uk, I find, even if you read them before they are in the shops. Getting free tickets to the FA Cup final, the British Grand Prix, as well as (oh yes) the World Darts Championship at Frimley Green, on the other hand, makes you a kind of god. On the rare occasions when sports writers interface with non-journalists, therefore, the experience does absolutely nothing to help keep things real for them, ego-wise. To a vast number of people (who admittedly don’t think about it very deeply), sports writing is simply the best job in the world. ‘Ooh, can I carry your suitcase?’ people always say. Or sometimes it’s the variant: ‘Can I come with you - in your suitcase?’ For some reason, luggage is always mentioned, which is one of those baffling facts in life that it’s just not worth stopping to question. So I was never judgemental about the suitcase-carrying offer. I just wish I’d had the nerve occasionally to laugh politely and then say, ‘Blimey, absolutely, suitcase, what a brilliant idea, it’s that blue one actually; listen, I’m off to Stoke on Saturday, you couldn’t do the driving as well?’
The symbiosis of sport and newspapers is actually quite a lovely thing to behold. The wonderful thing is, despite the fact that a fan can watch sport on telly till his eyes fall out, he still wants to pay to read more about it the next day. And the result is that sport has traditionally been very well covered by the British press, so there’s a certain circularity to the matter, because the quality of the journalism then draws the fans in to read it. Is it an accident that sport is the right-sized subject for newspapers? I think Darwin would have a few things to say about that, if he were around today. Anyway, somehow it is possible for each newspaper, each day, to fill between eight and twenty-four pages on sport, with reports, interviews, previews - and above all, pictures. Meanwhile the appeal is obvious. As a subject, sport is a complete parallel world, but a manageably small one, with reassuring overtones: nothing that happens in sport is ever so bad that it even momentarily disrupts the endless cycle of tournaments, leagues, championships and race programmes. Individual players and teams may suffer terrible disasters, but usually they can start again the following week, or the following season, with a fresh outlook and a clean slate. It is now pretty well established that the human brain needs to think about something beyond itself - something fairly complex and open-ended, ideally involving lots of characters who need to be kept straight in one’s head, and regular exciting landmark events. On the one hand, The Archers evolved to fill this need - and, on the other hand, so did sport.
All sports fans are avid for news. Avidity for news is the thing that defines them. Loving sport and not wanting to know that (say) the owner of Manchester City has lost confidence in Sven-Goran Eriksson after quite good league results is not only unthinkable; it’s philosophically untenable. And no wonder, therefore, that the journalists are rather good, because they are fans as well as professional communicators, so the urge to convey the smallest item of fact is automatically multiplied. There was a very well-informed chap who used to join the Times team at the Open (golf ) every July, and he had a kind-of roaming brief. He would come to the desk a few times a day and say, in a low confidential whisper (even to me), things such as, ‘Don’t mention this to anyone else, but if Mark O’Meara breaks 70 today, I’ve worked out he’ll be the first Masters winner over the age of 40 since Jack Nicklaus to follow up a missed cut at the PGA with success on the first day at an Open held in Scotland on the west coast.’ And I would say, hypocritically, ‘Really? How fascinating. Do you know, I think there’s a piece in that. I can’t wait to see what happens.’ But then, when he’d gone away again, I would see what he was getting at, and worry about my reaction. The readers would want to know this O’Meara fact, Lynne. This is the sort of thing that readers want to know. And then I would counter-argue that I was already 400 words into a piece about the joy of owning waterproof trousers, so it was a bit late to change track now.
So, what is sports journalism, really? Take away the mystique created by the fact that it’s all highly-excluding gobbledegook to people who don’t care, and it’s pure, basic journalism: stories concern exceptional people doing stuff, exceptional people talking about stuff they’ve done, and the very same set of exceptional people being quizzed about stuff they might do in the future. As an exercise recently, I bought all the broadsheet newspapers every day for a week and cut out all the sport. Then I left the pages in a heap on the floor of my office for a number of months, so that their news value could mature, or ferment, or - whatever. My rather feeble idea was that, once the spurious next-day interest had safely passed, I could analyse (or at least measure and add up) the coverage of everything in them, from football to bowls, and see how stories developed from day to day. The gathered pages weighed 1.4 kilos, and my first impression was that it wasn’t a particularly interesting week, so they wouldn’t take long to read. But once I started, I was compelled to revise the original plan. Studying just the first day’s coverage - on the arbitrarilychosen start date of Thursday January 24, 2008 - took me two days, and was utterly, utterly absorbing. At the end of it, I admit that I still didn’t care much that James Toseland (motorcycling) had come 11th in Sepang (Malaysian Grand Prix), or that a strange breeze off the south-east coast of Australia (some sort of sailing event) had made a race go funny, but I was satisfied that not a single crumb of sport-related news had been ignored.
The night before January 24 had seen a fairly big football match: Everton v Chelsea in the second leg of the Carling Cup semi-final (Chelsea won 3-1 on aggregate, and by 1-0 on the night). The one, solitary goal of the match was scored by Joe Cole in the 69th minute (i.e. well into the second half ) - and by all accounts it was a well-executed one-touch drive from a long ball from Florent Malouda, a gravity-defying volley which made the main picture in all the papers (in fact, it was exactly the same Reuters picture in all of them). Now, 156 column inches of print were, in total, devoted to this game, with each paper running at least two pieces: usually, a match report and a more reflective piece, plus lots of pictures. Martin Samuel in The Times was alone in mentioning what a dull evening it was at Goodison Park - ‘The game was tired and tame…the occasion was muted’ - but it was obvious to anyone that this game was a considerable let-down after the other, far more action-packed semi-final second leg the previous night between Arsenal and Tottenham (not only six goals scored, but a punch-up between Arsenal team-mates).
Elsewhere, in the Independent, from an extremely detailed match report from Ian Herbert we learned not only that the occasion pitched the ‘flash fluorescence of Chelsea…against sheer Evertonian spirit’, but such minute-by-minute information as that, at one point, Shaun Wright-Phillips’s movement flummoxed Lee Carsley and led to an ugly challenge on the midfielder for which Carsley was booked on 24 minutes. I have no idea, by the way, how anyone’s brain can retain such details of footballing action when events have moved on - retain them, that is, long enough to set them down in words. I mean, this stuff does all happen very quickly. In my experience of trying to keep up with football matches while writing at the same time, you would have time only to say, at most, ‘Why did he do that?’ or, ‘Would you say Carsley was flummoxed there?’ or (more likely in my case), ‘What happened? Did anyone see what happened?’ before play resumed, and another foul took place, and the whole original incident was wiped from one’s mind.
This is the skill of match reporting - a skill I never even attempted to acquire. ‘It was left to [Mikel] Arteta to carve out the best chance of the game when he delivered another perfect ball for Andrew Johnson who reversed and span with the ball in his path before taking it into the penalty area, only to find the side netting,’ writes Herbert. Good heavens. What a good description. I once worked alongside a football correspondent at the World Cup in France who, while watching - and presumably mentally noting - such ball-by-ball detail at the start of the second half of England v Argentina, was dictating from memory a report of the action in the first. And I could hardly contain my admiration for either his sang froid or the capacity and flexibility of his brain. I eavesdropped openly on what he was saying, by the way, and everything he described - chaps reversing and spinning, or flummoxing other chaps - I could not remember seeing.
How was the match-reporting space filled, then, on January 24, 2008, if not by the drama of the occasion at Goodison Park? Well, despite the dullness of the evening and the paucity of goals (or even chances), there was still a huge amount to say about Everton losing to Chelsea in the second leg of a Carling Cup semi-final - because, quite frankly, look at any match and there always is. For one thing, this was a rare silverware opportunity for Everton, whose last excitement on such a scale was back in 1995. What a crushing blow for the fans, then. David Moyes, the Everton manager, said afterwards that it was a brilliant effort by the lads, ‘but we need to find that extra ingredient that gets us to Cup finals and wins Cup finals’ - which, like most such inadequate post-match statements by managers would hardly give hope to the thousands of miserable supporters who already knew all about Everton lacking the magic ‘winning’ ingredient. They had woken up each day knowing this, and gone to bed each night knowing it, year after year.
Meanwhile, Nicolas Anelka - who, at this point, had been on the Chelsea strength for less than two weeks, having just transferred from Bolton at a cost of £15 million - had hit the bar in the second minute of the second half, but maybe had not contributed as much to the Chelsea victory as some had wished for. But on the other hand, how much could a man whose cumulative transfer fees now totalled £80 million really care about the Carling Cup? New-ish England manager Fabio Capello had watched the match from the directors’ box, so there was speculation that he would be including Joe Cole in his immediate England team-selection plans. And what else can I tell you; what else? Captain of Chelsea John Terry wasn’t playing, but - rather excitedly - one of the match reporters tells us that ‘it was reported’ (so he didn’t see it himself ) that Capello and Terry actually ‘spoke at half time’!
Astonishingly (I’m sorry), there is yet more of incidental interest to be gleaned from this game. Oh yes. Don’t forget we are talking about 156 column inches here. Chelsea goalkeeper Peter Cech (who saved a header from Joleon Lescott) had become a father for the first time earlier that day. Although both teams had lost players to the African Cup of Nations competition, Everton missed theirs more, for the obvious reason that they couldn’t afford to just go out and buy Nicolas Anelka. Some of the Chelsea fans had come all the way from Cyprus. Of historical note was the fact that Frank Lampard’s father (also called Frank Lampard) was responsible, nearly thirty years ago, for the goal that deprived Everton of a place in the 1980 Cup final - a fact so incredibly interesting that the Telegraph man put it in, even though neither of the illustrious Frank Lampards was on the pitch for the game under consideration. A victory for Chelsea at Wembley (against Tottenham) would give them their sixth trophy in four seasons. The din from the Everton crowd ‘lacked some of the poetic soul of Anfield, but it was raw and raucous and fitted the occasion perfectly’ - which I have no doubt is true, but is surely a bit of an additional insult to the Everton fans. They can’t even shout as well as Liverpool? And Avram Grant, Chelsea’s manager, was (possibly) finally emerging from the daunting shadow of his glamorous, smouldering, dog-smuggling predecessor Jose Mourinho.
Besides the match report, there is a raft of football news. Jonathan Woodgate, playing for Middlesbrough, might be going to Newcastle. In fact all four papers report the fact that Kevin Keegan, managing Newcastle, is keen to bid for Woodgate - although other clubs are keen, too. (In fact, Woodgate signed for Tottenham four days later.) Emmanuel Adebayor, the starry Arsenal striker who head-butted a team-mate during the other Carling Cup semi-final, has made a statement saying that it was all down to his zeal - his ‘passion’ for the game getting regrettably out of hand. The victim of the assault, the young Danish international Nicklas Bendtner, is reported to be unpopular with his team-mates, and it is recalled that Arsenal are not good losers in any case (something quite similar happened last season). The Guardian notes that Arsenal’s manager Arsène Wenger is furious, which, for obvious reasons, doesn’t have much impact as news. Arsène Wenger is always furious. The Guardian also suggests that Bendtner ‘raked Adebayor’s achilles’ (no one else says this, and there is no evidence), and offers a fabulous little picture feature entitled ‘When Team Mates Attack’, with famous incidents such as John Hartson kicking Eyal Berkovic in the head at West Ham’s training ground in 1998. (I seem to remember this was put down to over-excitement, too.)
The remaining big football stories are similarly teeny-weeny (you might think) but of considerable interest. For example, Sir Alex Ferguson (speaking in Riyadh, where Manchester United are having a little holiday) sympathises publicly with Liverpool’s manager Rafael Benitez over the lack of support he seems to get from the owners of the club. This is a massive story in three of the papers. Meanwhile there is speculation about who will take over as manager at Southampton, now that George Burley has been cleared to take the job of managing the Scottish national team. Front-runners are generally agreed to be Glenn Hoddle (pictured), Alan Shearer, Kevin Blackwell and Billy Davies. (Three weeks later, Nigel Pearson was appointed.) Following up from the Tottenham victory on Tuesday night, there are stories on manager Juande Ramos, and the reassuring news for Tottenham fans that the Bulgarian striker Dimitar Berbatov is not going anywhere. ‘I look happy, don’t I?’ Berbatov is quoted as saying. ‘This club can challenge for trophies.’ (In the Carling Cup final a month later, Berbatov scored an equalising penalty, helping Tottenham to win 2-1. Two months after that, in April, he is quoted as saying he quite fancies playing for Milan. In September he completes a move to Manchester United for a fee of £30.75 million.)
Such is the football coverage for one very average day. The rest of the pages are similarly thorough - and just as unmissable for anyone interested in sport. In tennis, it’s getting to the closing stages of the Australian Open, and all eyes are on the 20-year-old Serbian, Novak Djokovic, who is about to meet the world number one Roger Federer in the semi-final of the men’s singles (and go on to win the tournament, as it happens). It is generally agreed that Djokovic is now right up there with Federer and Nadal, and that this is exciting. Mark Hodgkinson in the Daily Telegraph describes Djokovic as having ‘an all-round air of self-confidence that makes Russell Brand look shy and retiring’. Neil Harman in The Times describes how Djokovic lost concentration in the last game of his quarter-final: ‘He frittered away serve after serve, while having to deal with taunts from his own supporters.’ Meanwhile Steve Bierley in the Guardian is all praise: ‘He has achieved a level of controlled excellence, combined with an unbending mental fortitude, that has lifted him to an undisputed third place in the world, behind Nadal and Federer.’
Alongside all this news there are opinion pieces and celebrity columns, the most bizarre of which is a very defensive and strongly worded piece in The Times about it being perfectly all right for men to ogle women tennis players, especially when they look like the four hottie singles semi-finalists in Melbourne: viz, Jankovic, Hantuchovna, Ivanovic and Sharapova - all of whom are pictured in red-carpet evening dress mode, with their long hair down, one of them in a very, very, very short skirt. ‘There has always been a soft-porn dimension to women’s tennis,’ states Matthew Syed - and having worked on the sports pages myself, I know that this view is not a new one, and that the idea for this piece may have originated quite high up in the paper. Syed argues that, since women are allowed to ogle male rugby players (and clearly do, to his annoyance, all the time), it’s hypocrisy to criticise the red-blooded male custom of seeing female tennis players as sex objects. Besides (he goes on), don’t these female tennis players pose provocatively for photographs all the time? Don’t they trade on it? ‘That we have not, as a society, reached a place where heterosexual men can acknowledge the occasional erotic dimension of watching women’s sport without being dismissed as deviant tells us everything we need to know about contemporary sexual neuroses.’
All this explains, I think, why my dipping into the sports pages in 1991 was such a disaster. It was me. I simply wasn’t up to speed, was I? I didn’t know that sport - as a subject for newspaper coverage - was so earnest, so involved, and so aware of itself as a continually unfolding story. When I now look at the Times coverage of Agassi at Wimbledon in 1991, I find it well-informed, often spot-on in terms of his talents and potential, and even funny. The background information I wanted is there, after all; just deftly included in the match reports. All my other objections melt away, too. The idea that a newspaper account of a match should be some sort of adjunct to yesterday’s television coverage strikes me as silly (and even offensively so); meanwhile, the Bechuanaland posture of our-man-on-the-spot is delightful and the main appeal of the report. The authority that comes with being present at an event is the cornerstone of sports journalism. Not being present at an event you write about is, I think, the only automatic sacking offence. It’s just a shame that so few writers do anything to remind you of their presence - no mention of the cold and dark at the Goodison match, for example. Was it raining, perhaps? Did a sharp wind blow from the end where the church is? What state was the pitch in? Did Chelsea wear yellow? Did Everton wear blue? Was there that special football-ground smell of fried onions mixed with fresh manure (from the police horses)? Unfortunately, such namby-pamby descriptive stuff is sniffily classed as ‘colour’, and is left to soft old literary types like me.
Of course, no one would want to read, in a match report, about the conditions the writers work under - the narrow tip-up desk at the halfway-line, where you sit trying to write 900 words for delivery ‘on the whistle’, surrounded by other reporters doing the same thing, tightly shoulder to shoulder, some of them calling the office, others broadcasting on club radio, and all of them wonderfully stolid in their refusal to get involved, in any way whatsoever, in crowd behaviour - especially Mexican waves. This bah-humbug attitude to crowd self-entertainment makes the press a bit unpopular sometimes, but that’s tough. ‘Oh God, no,’ the reporters groan, when some bright spark starts one of these tedious group celebrations. ‘Whoooaaa!’ goes the wave, round one end of the stadium; ‘WHOOOAAAA’ it goes round the other. Then the wave slops up against the press box, where the occupants remain seated. Then, perfectly on cue, it starts up again the other side of the obstacle, ‘Whoooaaa!’ And off it goes again. As someone who hasn’t been in a press box for a while, I like to watch Mexican waves whenever they’re reported on the telly, just so that I can see where the hiatus takes place, and send telepathic killjoy support to all my suffering killjoy chums.
When I first heard about the ‘press box’, by the way, I naïvely assumed that the term implied enclosing walls, and even a ceiling and floor. I expected comfy seats and a picture window. Possibly cups of tea with saucers. What I soon learned, however, was that where press boxes actually were enclosed, they were ghastly; the benefits (of warmth, and safety from missiles) were easily outweighed by the fact that you can’t hear properly, have to combat claustrophobia, and get much more distracted by your colleagues, who might be chatting, eating, smoking, or loudly dictating dismayingly unrecognisable descriptions of the footie you’ve just been watching. At cricket grounds - where the matches last considerably longer than 90 minutes, of course - the reporters do sit indoors, behind glass, and are completely cut off from the atmosphere. At Lord’s, the famous spaceship press centre (on stilts) is fronted by sound-proofed tinted windows, and on the one occasion I worked in it, I hated it. I kept having to shake off the sensation that I had suddenly gone deaf.
In addition to the outdoor ‘press box’ at football stadiums, there is usually a dingy lounge of some description, with a TV in it, bolted to the wall. In my day, this lounge would sometimes offer the luxury of electrical sockets, but there was no guarantee. Oh, the misery of those footie press lounges. All the charm of a working man’s club at ten in the morning. The lounge at Coventry City’s Highfield Road had been cunningly adapted from some sort of airless subterranean cupboard, half of it taken up by a flight of carpeted stairs, with only five chairs for 28 people, and when you said, ‘Any chance of a cup of tea?’ they looked at you in disgust and snapped (as if it was reasonable), ‘Not until half time!’ I remember turning up there one day when the match was sponsored in some way by Yorkie bars. I think I was the first to arrive, and I watched with interest as a man with a box of Yorkies distributed about two dozen bars around the place. That ought to keep a few spirits up, I thought, innocently. A few minutes later, a couple of local sports writers arrived, and one of them said, ‘Oh good,’ and put the full two dozen in his bag. ‘Kids’ lunches,’ he explained - as if that made it all right, then. ‘The wife went nuts when she found out I didn’t get them all last time.’
When football writers talk about the relative merits of various grounds, it’s the food they will probably talk about. Nowadays, I hear that Arsenal (at the Emirates) lays on a tasty spread of hot dishes for the journos, so perhaps things generally have improved. I certainly hope so. In my day the same club (at Highbury) gave us tasteless carrot sandwiches - and not many to go round, either. All it needed was for one fat bloke from a tabloid to get a whole tray to himself, and you were done for. Meanwhile, I couldn’t wait to go to Leicester’s Filbert Street, once I heard about the cream buns. And I liked the spacious, smoky press lounge in a corner room at Aston Villa, where there was quite a spread, although the lady pouring the teas once put me right off the footie by telling me a horrific story about how her mother had been murdered by a next-door neighbour (who got away with it), and she’d had to clear up the blood by herself.
Back at Wimbledon on my first assignment, it was a big deal just to meet other sports writers. Aside from one or two trips to Wembley, my first year had been about sitting in the stands with the regular punters and writing at home a couple of days later. Now I not only had colleagues, but I had to deliver my 900 words by 6 p.m. using a mid-1990s uncooperative bastard of a laptop that combined immense weight with no beauty and a hair-trigger intolerance of error - and do it while exiled to the far corner of a smokers’ den, don’t forget, because a nasty old man with a red face (with some official authority over the photographers) had shouted at me, ‘This is an eating area! Not a writing area!’ when I set myself up at a regular table in the restaurant.
Good God, it was such an appalling day, my first day at Wimbledon, and I’m afraid my bitter memories of it have for ever changed my opinion of the place and made me uncomfortable (not to say chippy) about working there. The posh people in the press office - who made a big show of welcoming their posh old friends (‘Julian! Hello!’) through a hatch arrangement - seemed not to like the look of me at all. Having handed me my badge and a heavy complimentary Wimbledon equipment bag full of programmes, maps and so on, they seemed to disapprove of the fact that I didn’t know where to go next. The day was hot. I had a heavy bag with a computer in it, and now I had another heavy bag. I had a jacket that was now surplus to requirements. Was there anywhere to leave stuff ? Certainly not. Can I take all this lot with me on court, then? No, of course you can’t. Where would my colleagues be? No idea; go and look. But not that way: that’s the way to Centre Court. I was told at the end of my first Wimbledon fortnight, by the way, that the obstructive and hoity-toity personnel of the press office could be easily got round by sending bottles of scotch as a thank-you gift - and this news incensed me so much that I nearly went straight round to their fancy hatch and hit someone.
What I was learning quickly on my first day, however, is that sports writing means never getting any help from anyone. Not even your own colleagues, initially. I mean, fair enough, they didn’t know me. I’d met only one of them before, at football. When I reported for duty, I didn’t even know the name of the tennis correspondent. I turn up in their territory, huffing and puffing with heavy bags, demanding ‘Where do I sit, then?’ and they quite naturally say that these three desks are taken; have you tried in the foreign press area upstairs? So I go up there, dragging these fucking bags, and am told by a hoity-toity obstructive person that this area is for foreign press (am I stupid?), and I get hotter and more emotional, which naturally makes everyone all the more keen to get rid of me. Luckily, ahead of me is a very gentle day, tennis-wise. I am to watch a British hopeful on an outside court, and I’ll have a couple of hours to turn the piece round, assuming I can find somewhere to settle long enough to do it. I recognise that, by giving me such a soft assignment, the office is thinking tactically: my piece is dispensable. If I screw this up, no one will miss the report on the British hopeful, and the story can be covered quite easily with a picture.
Were there any positives to this day? Well, I loved the fact that the crowds were so quiet at tennis - as contrasted to football - that the chap sitting next to me on Court 17 waited patiently with a small stick of carrot in his hand until the change of ends, for fear that chomping on it might distract the players. (He then masticated it very carefully, with no sound.) I think I got to meet our photographers Marc and Gill, who were great; and I gradually realised that the other chaps on the desk were pleasant and funny, and that it had been my job to get off on the right foot with them, rather than the other way round. It had never occurred to me (in fact it’s occurred to me only now, really) that my months of prominently-displayed stuff in the sports pages might have prejudiced my colleagues in any way against me; on the contrary, I assumed they wouldn’t know who I was.
I did get a small buzz out of the fact that this was Wimbledon - a tournament I’ve watched on TV all my life - and that great players were preparing to do great things there over the next two weeks. But watching Wimbledon on TV is quite different from being on the spot, and the crowds were tiring, and the distances were quite big, and there were some confusing one-way paths, and I turned up successfully at Court Number One for an opening ceremony only to find out that a special ticket was required, so I went all the way back to the press-office hatch to get one, and they said I couldn’t have one because I wasn’t Dutch (I think); and I kept going the wrong way round Centre Court, and I couldn’t believe no one told you anything - you have to find everything out for yourself - and basically I was close to tears for the entire day - sometimes tears of frustration at having my way barred by people pointing a firm arm in the opposite direction, sometimes tears of discomfort and self-pity, but mostly tears of realistic anxiety that my unfamiliar laptop would crash (as it duly did) when I was three quarters of the way through writing my piece, fifteen minutes before deadline.
I was staying with my mum for that Wimbledon fortnight in 1997, and I returned to her after the first day such an emotional wreck that she encouraged me to resign at once and go back to reviewing television. But I’m glad I persevered. As the two weeks went by, I learned that, just as other people pushed me off the desk, I could do the same to them - by simply waiting until they went to the lavatory and then lifting all their stuff onto a handy shelf and sitting down. The sports writers turned out to be great company; in fact, the best company in the world. I came to grips with Copymaster - the system installed on all our laptops, by which we wrote and filed. I learned the ropes about getting onto Centre Court - although the idea that this privilege was in the gift of a hoity-toity obstructive person who guarded the steps like a three-headed dog made my blood boil at the time, and still does. We had a number of rain days, so I went off and ingeniously extracted enormous amounts of ‘colour’ from sod all. And sometimes I was scheduled to cover a match that, through rain delays (or by design), didn’t come on court until five o’clock - so I’d have to watch some of it live, and then go back to the press room and follow it with half an eye on the TV screen, and file a piece for the first edition at 7 p.m., and then revise it for later editions as the match progressed. Which is how sports writing is always done.
The easiest thing about the job, always, was the business of writing to deadline about stuff that was (often) still going on. I never thought, ‘I won’t be able to do that.’ I always thought, ‘I am really lucky to be doing this, because this is great.’ I used to imagine how theatre critics would manage if they had to work under the same conditions, all jammed up next to each other. They don’t know they’re born, those people. Imagine them all tapping away with their reviews of The Seagull, which they had started at the interval, before they knew whether anything of special tragic note was ever going to happen. ‘The evening holds no dramatic moments,’ they would be confidently writing, in their intros, with five minutes to go; ‘If one expects a tragedy, it is not forthcoming.’ At which point, ‘Bang!’ comes the shot from offstage. All stop typing, and some are heard to whisper, ‘Konstantin may have shot himself.’ All scan their pieces in alarm, and scroll back quietly to the top, check their watches, chew their lips, and then sit poised for confirmation from the stage. ‘Which one’s Konstantin?’ pipes a small voice from the end. The doctor comes in and says that it was just a bottle of something exploding in his bag - at which Konstantin’s mother is visibly relieved, and some of the theatre critics, satisfied with this innocent explanation, press ‘Send’ and start packing their bags. Then the doctor confides to Trigorin, ‘Get Arkadina out of here. The thing is, Konstantin has shot himself.’ At which, there is a thunder of keyboard pounding as all the critics start again, with, ‘Sensationally, in the 134th minute of The Seagull last night, one young man’s destiny was tragically fulfilled …’