To many people in the sports-writing profession, Richard Ford’s excellent novel The Sportswriter comes as a disappointment. The main trouble is that its hero, Frank Bascombe, works from home. True, he writes magazine profiles of big-name American football stars, but (oh my God) did I mention this? He works from home.True, he also embodies a recognisable anomie, and has a few childlike traits that make him unpopular with more emotionally mature people, but, look, for goodness’ sake, he works from home, so how the hell does that count as sports writing? Sorry to be so literal-minded where a Great American Novel is involved, but, good grief, it isn’t clear even whether Frank Bascombe owns a laptop (unlikely, since the book was published in 1986), let alone has acquired a cumbersome 20-piece set of telephone connectors for essential dial-up use in all the more bizarrely socketed countries of western Europe. Has he ever delivered 900 words ten minutes before the whistle in a stadium packed with jubilant Italians all using up the available Vodafone signal? Has he ever tried to park near Stamford Bridge after 10 a.m. on a match day? Has he turned up, week after week, at far-flung football grounds all over England only to be told by miserable blokes in donkey jackets, ‘You can’t come through here’? Has he ever attempted to drive with a dangerously empty fuel tank from Liège to Antwerp at midnight when all the petrol stations are mysteriously closed and the effing road signs have been draped with effing tarpaulins by those effing, effing Belgians? I think the answer to all these urgent questions must be no, because if Frank Bascombe had done any of these things in his career as a sports writer, let me tell you, there’s no way a novelist as good as Richard Ford could possibly have left them out of the narrative.
The main reason I’ve waited several years to write this book is that it took me all that time to calm down. For at least five years after I stopped sports writing, all I remembered about it was the stuff that made me scream - the stuff that one of our photographers memorably described as ‘The Agg’ - such as calling the Edgbaston Thistle from the road (‘Can you give me directions from the A45, please?’) and having the person at the other end say, ‘No, sorry, I can’t. But I know the way here from my house in Redditch if that’s any use.’ Even now, when people say, ‘Why was it golf you decided to keep doing?’ I never say anything about the beauty of the game, or the structure of the tournaments, or even the exhilaration of being outdoors near the sea for a pleasant week in July. With ill-suppressed passion, I burst out that, with a golf tournament, at least a girl gets a guaranteed indoor desk to work at, a guaranteed bed in a house she knows the route to, plus a guaranteed place in the car park. Not only that, but the same conditions pertain for a whole week.
They could honestly send me to cover illicit bloody kitten-juggling if all these things were offered in the deal.
It was getting lost that was the worst thing. And in case this sounds quaint and antique in the days of sat-nav, I should point out that I was quite well equipped with maps and books with up-to-date information; it just happens to be in the special nature of large sporting events that normal road systems don’t apply: regular routes are closed, one-way systems are instituted, signposts are covered up as if to confuse the Germans, and the police will bash the side of your car with their truncheons if you try to stop and ask them a question. It also happens to be in the nature of sports arenas (especially football grounds) that they don’t see the point of signposts in any case, partly because they are quite large structures, but mainly because the supporters know the way. As kick-off approaches, you see the fans mindlessly thronging in the right direction, following mysterious ancient trails like moribund elephants heading for their final resting place. Not one of them ever stops with a puzzled expression that says, ‘I wonder if it’s down this street or the next one?’
For the first-time visitor who arrives a few hours earlier than everyone else, therefore, things can be quite tough. I have deep and bleeding mental scars from the night I was carefully following detailed directions to Anfield (‘Pass Showcase Cinema on left after 1.8 miles; after further 1.9 miles turn left, signposted Widnes’) and ran into a road block. Veering by necessity from the prescribed route, I drove in desperate circles for the following half-hour, hyperventilating and performing illegal U-turns in residential streets, and finally pulled up outside a chip shop and ran inside yelling, ‘I can’t find Anfield! How can they put up a road block when there’s a match on? There’s an FA Cup match starting in four hours! Don’t they know people have to be able to find the ground?’ At which the chip-shop proprietor patiently took me to the door and pointed up at an angle of 45 degrees to the tell-tale floodlight towers standing just beyond the Victorian terrace opposite.
There are other reasons for preferring golf, but to be honest they still mostly have to do with not getting the car broken into by hooligans, and not having hotel receptionists deny all knowledge of your booking. The highlight of my tenure as a sports writer will always be seeing Dennis Bergkamp score that magnificent last-minute winning goal for Holland against Argentina in Marseille in 1998 (it’s the best thing I ever saw, and the Velodrome was the coolest stadium I was ever in), but for a long time the memory of Bergkamp’s superhuman ball control was more than off-set by all the bloody ‘agg’ that surrounded it. Had The Times booked me into a nice hotel in Marseille, convenient for the stadium, for this match? Well, take a guess. Despite expecting me to come up with lovely local colour about loony Dutch fans with carrots tied to their heads (it’s to do with their orangeness) and the pungent fishy whiff of the dockside restaurants, the office had dispatched me to Marseille by stuffy train from Lyons a couple of days before the match, then told me to catch another stuffy train to Avignon (100 kilometres inland) and await instructions. At Avignon, glad to be in the fresh air at last, I was told to go to the Ibis Hotel next to the station - which was when I made the big mistake of thinking I’d at last be able to unpack, have a shower, and write my daily column. Because I turned out not to have a booking at this nasty little Ibis Hotel, you see - or so the high-handed check-in people claimed. They suggested I might in fact have been booked by mistake into the Ibis Hotel in the quite different location of Avignon Sud (an industrial suburb), and would need to get another train and then a cab, although naturally they couldn’t promise anything about there being a bed still available at the Avignon Sud Ibis Hotel when I eventually got there, because someone else might have got there first and taken it.
I phoned the office from under a tree outside Avignon station and told them this had stopped being funny quite a long time ago. I was hot and tired and already miles from where I really ought to be; meanwhile a deadline was looming, in case they hadn’t noticed, and I hadn’t seen any Dutch fans at all, either with or without the comical veg. They assured me they were hot on the trail of a suitable (i.e. cheap) hotel room ‘in Provence’, so things could still be all right. It was at this point that I broke down and wept. I’d been in France for three weeks already. I’d had to fight the whole time. I’d had to be fantastically organised, getting from one city to another, one stadium to the next; improvising methods for transmitting copy in apparently hopeless circumstances; managing on a tiny, minimal wardrobe without access to hotel laundry facilities (because the hotels were always too basic to have them, and I was never anywhere long enough for things to dry if I washed them myself ); and having to cope, above all, with all the utter misleading bollocks I kept being fed in place of information. And now the office was telling me they might have located a room for me… in Provence? The last time I looked, Provence was an administrative region of southeast France roughly the size of Switzerland. ‘Do you mean in Aix-en-Provence, which is a town rather than a region?’ I wailed. No, just Provence, they said; we’ll call you back. I stayed under my tree for the next hour, snivelling on my upturned suitcase, until a dear nice Times colleague thankfully arrived from Paris (‘Kevin McCarra! Thank God!’), and we came up with a plan that involved staying in a stylish converted monastery in Avignon that Kevin had luckily heard about. During my Beckett-y wait under the tree outside the station, incidentally, a taxi driver had sidled over and said discreetly I could always go home with him if I wanted, because his wife was away. So, on top of being abandoned, I got propositioned as well, which made me feel all the better.
I shan’t go on with all this complaining. I know how it gets people’s backs up. Being a sports writer is considered such an almighty privilege by all people who love sport that they simply won’t condone any grumbling. Sports editors won’t condone it either, but for a different reason. With them it’s down to an interesting physiological quirk: they are born with hearts of stone. When applying for the job, they are subjected to special tests: they are strapped to polygraph machines and then shown distressing images of sports writers tangled in barbed wire and screaming for help. If their eyes don’t flicker, and their pulse continues to flatline, they’re in. ‘You can’t expect sympathy from me; you’re under a tree in the South of France, and I’m in Wapping’ was the standard response to any whinge from a writer in the field, however justified. Naturally, this attitude added considerably to one’s already quite powerful sense of existential loneliness. But that was probably the idea. ‘Oh dear, pillows not fluffy enough?’ they would interrupt, if you started to point out that there were no trains back from Macclesfield after half past eight.
What used to annoy me much more than the ‘I have no sympathy’ reflex, however, was the thoughtless assumption that I must be enjoying a fabulous social life involving other sports writers. ‘Off to the bar now, I suppose?’ they’d chuckle, after I’d filed from Ewood Park or somewhere, and was already back in the parked car with the heater on and the doors locked, trying to read the road atlas by the light of a lonely street lamp, with the radio tuned to Radio 5 for the phone-in. Off to the bar? What bar? I never saw a bar. And with whom, in any case, would I be off to the bar? When I was staying in a cheerless apart-hotel in Antwerp during Euro 2000 (where every morning for a whole month the receptionist asked me brightly whether I was checking out), I drove down to meet one of my bosses in Brussels and he asked me in a friendly fashion whether there was a ‘gang’ of us staying in Antwerp. I remember just looking at him with my mouth open. What sort of gang did he think I belonged to? Did he know something I didn’t? Oh good grief, why had no one introduced me to all those other middle-aged women football writers who railed at the misleading bollocks all day, got soundly rebuffed when they appealed to the office for help, and did needlepoint watching the TC alone in their hotel rooms (watching the footie) on all their nights off ?
* * *
Dancing on the edge of sports writing involved dancing on the edge of a variety of different sports, which only added to the stress. I was always setting off to Goodwood, or Silverstone, or Murrayfield, or the Hurlingham Club, or Headingley, or the National Indoor Arena, or Olympia, or Wentworth, or Frimley Green - and always doing it for the very first time in my life. ‘Lynne Truss at Trent Bridge’, the byline would announce under a cheery photograph on the Monday morning - and good heavens, didn’t it sound straightforward when it was put like that? As if I sort-of lived there. As if I had my own locker. Other sports writers did, of course, have regular stamping grounds, and I couldn’t help absolutely resenting and hating them for it. It was clear that the press box at Trent Bridge (or wherever) was indeed their second home. The only people who roamed as widely as I did were the chief sports writers - people like Richard Williams at the Guardian and Paul Heywood at the Mail - but theirs was nothing like my situation. These were men of vast journalistic experience achieved over decades, who just seemed to materialise effortlessly in all the major sporting venues, equipped with not only a sound magisterial overview of the forthcoming event but also (damn them) a thorough working knowledge of the relevant topography. By the end of my four years, the only place I regarded as a stamping ground was the now-demolished Wembley Stadium. It was a gritty, dank, dilapidated and unattractive place in many regards, the old Wembley, but knowing which door to use really brightened it up for me. Confidently swinging my weighty computer bag, I would whistle on the escalators and head straight for the press room, where I knew the ropes about tickets and team sheets and could say hello to the press officers by name. I even established a preference for which type of half-time sandwich. But Wembley was the exception. Everywhere else, I first had to work out how to get the car as near as possible, and then I had to fight, plead, argue and scream to get in.
‘You can’t come through here,’ they said. Even when I’d found the right bloke at the right gate, he would scan his list, tell me I didn’t exist, and send me to the box office, or club reception, or the gift shop - and they in turn would send me to the chip van or the players’ entrance (or whatever), and they in turn would finally send me back to the man at the gate. This was why I generally turned up at least two hours early for any event - to allow for all the time-wasting misleading bollocks, which could somehow never be averted, just endured. What I discovered about human nature during this period was that there are many people who cannot say ‘I don’t know’ when that’s the truth of the matter. For reasons of pride, perhaps, it is beyond them to do it. They think it is better to make something up, because it makes you go away. ‘Is there a press car park?’ you might ask, and instead of confessing their cluelessness, they’d stroke their jaws as if in genuine thought and then say, ‘Right. You need to go back to the A437, OK? Then take a left for half a mile, then go round the back of the old brewery, and then follow the signs. There’ll be a shuttle.’ Half an hour later, when you returned with the tragic news that there was no truth in any of that, they first of all wouldn’t recognise you, and then they’d say, ‘Really? Well, whatever. You can’t come through here.’
Still, there was a positive aspect to all this. By the time the actual sporting action commenced, it was - relatively - heaven. When you’ve just spent an hour explaining to a jobsworth that you don’t have a parking voucher because the only way to obtain a parking voucher is by going inside, which involves parking first, it is bliss to look at a team sheet, a blank scoreboard and a bit of grass with lines on it and think, ‘Here at last is something organised. I know where I am with this.’ I went to some rum and improbable events in my time, but however unfamiliar I might be with the rules of darts, or croquet - or indeed those of quite big sports such as cricket or rugby union - the rigidly circumscribed comings and goings of an unfolding game stood in wonderful contrast to the random petty annoyances and difficulties presented by real life outside. I remember Simon Barnes telling me (the first time I met him) how sport always got you this way, and that he’d once been immediately sucked - quite against his will, apparently - into the drama of a lumberjacking competition involving axes, logs, a lot of frantic chopping and an enormous shower of wood-chips.
I soon realised he was right. They sent me to Olympia for the show-jumping once, and on the undercard (as it were) was a dog agility competition that turned out to be sheer drama. There was a Great Dane called Blake who was clearly capable of all sorts of top dog agility, but would tantalisingly weigh up the pros and cons of each obstacle before deciding to take it on. For the impartial spectator, whose only interest was in sporting tension, this was dynamite. Would Blake go up the seesaw and down the other side? Well, it was touch and go. With precious seconds ticking by, Blake would stop first and give it some serious doggy thought. And then, with a visibly resolute, ‘Yep, OK, I’ll do that!’, off he would bound, to huge encouraging applause from the crowd. What about this little tunnel, Blake? Yes? No? Come on, boy, what do you think? ‘Yep, OK, I’ll do that!’ What I loved about Blake’s approach to his sport was the way he repeatedly excercised (and indeed embodied) the sometimes forgotten principle of free will. Stan Collymore used to do the same thing in the footie, didn’t he? But without the equivalent charm.
However, the best gig I got, I reckon, in the whole four years, was the BDO World Darts Championship at Frimley Green on a cold weekend in January 2000 - and not only because the round trip from my home in Brighton to Frimley Green (in Surrey) was so agreeably short. No, it was just that it had everything you could possibly require from a sporting event, if you are prepared to leave out fresh air and athleticism. From the moment I arrived for the Saturday semi-finals (Ronnie Baxter v Co Stompe from the Netherlands; Ted Hankey v Chris Mason), I knew I was going to love watching this stuff. It took place in a large, packed, carpeted and artificially-lit function room usually used for knees-ups and weddings. It was billed as sport but the blokes had corny nicknames and silky capes and ‘walk-on music’, like professional wrestlers, and the place was full of families in holiday mood. The stage was spangly, and there were big screens on either side. The all-day bar was emphatically open, and there was a range of high-cholesterol hot food for sale in a spot-lit buffet. Since Holland produces many top-ranking darts players (such as Stompe), there were many larky Dutch people present - although, sadly, none with root vegetable adornments.
And since darts is one of the few sports the bbc can still afford to cover, the dearly beloved Garry Richardson was in attendance - a circumstance that has never failed to raise my spirits.
It was larky, this semi-finals day, but it was also very serious. These players had already played three rounds to reach this point. Darts turned out to have the same sort of organisational palaver as boxing, with rival outfits staging their own world championships, and attempting to lure players into separate leagues - so there was the honour of the BDO (British Darts Organisation) at stake here, on top of everything else. By the time play commenced, I’d learned a bit about the players (Co Stompe used to drive a tram!) and was avid for oche action. And I had already worked out some of darts’ potential advantages over other spectator sports - which mainly concerned how straightforward it would be to officiate. No room for the players to contest any line calls here, for example. No need to consult a snickometer. No hunting for lost darts in the rough. No dodgy penalties awarded by blind-sided refs. Darts is, in fact, a doddle of a game, save for the lightning mental calculations entailed when suddenly everyone in the room knows that if you need 158, you quickly subtract 3 × 17, then 3 × 19, and then 50. Another interesting fact about darts is that, whereas in cricket ‘throwing’ is sometimes illegal, in darts it is positively encouraged. In fact, without throwing, there is absolutely no game to speak of.
To my shame I’d never heard of the semi-finalists before, even though young-gun Chris Mason had apparently been making a name for himself all week, charmlessly casting aspersions about the other players. Instinctively, I supported the Dutchman, partly because he wasn’t the usual shape for a darts player (his nickname was ‘The Matchstick’), but mainly because I found it very touching that he used to drive that tram. But the first semi-final, between Stompe and Ronnie Baxter, was in all respects the lesser contest of the day, and Stompe didn’t put up a great fight. Matchstick-like, he snapped under the strain. It was the best of nine sets (each set consisting of five legs), and Baxter took his winning five sets rather easily and gracefully (the eventual score was 5-2). I didn’t particularly warm to Baxter, nicknamed ‘The Rocket’, but I did admire his choice of walk-on music. Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ was very well suited to his style of play. But although there was skill in this match, there was little drama. There was tension, but not much. At the end of the first semi-final, I still had no idea what glories a good game of darts had to offer.
The second semi-final pitched Ted Hankey (‘The Count’) against this young chap Chris Mason (‘The Prince of Dartness’). Having a nickname when you’re a darts player seems to be non-negotiable, by the way, but the unsmiling Hankey took the joke further than most. Pale and balding, he played up his resemblance to Dracula, chucking vampire paraphernalia to the fans, grimacing, and occasionally transmogrifying into an immense black dog (oh all right, he didn’t go that far). Hankey was the number five seed in this championship; Mason was unseeded, but the bookies’ favourite. From a superficial look at the two players, I jumped to the happy conclusion that here was a classic true-grit contest between age and youth - the tight-lipped old gun-slinger teaching some manners to the young, twitchy rodeo punk; John Wayne v Montgomery Clift. Someone would end up humiliatingly headfirst in a rain barrel at the end of this, I thought, and it probably wouldn’t be Hankey. It was at this point that I checked the player information and found that Whipper-Snapper Mason was 30, while Old Geezer Hankey was 31, so bang went that idea.
The game was again best of nine, and Mason led from the start, on account of superior finishing, but from the beginning the standard of play on both sides was obviously exceptional. This match was to set the record (I think it still holds it) for the number of perfect 180s scored in a nine-setter - Hankey and Mason threw a total of 38 between them. But Hankey was having trouble with that old rule about ending with a double, and by the interval, Mason was up 3-1 and looking pretty smug. When Hankey retrieved a set to make it 3-2, Mason quickly upped his game again and re-established the two-set margin. With the score standing at 4-2 (i.e. just one set from defeat), Hankey looked washed out, stricken, deflated - a bit like the way Dracula does when someone carelessly parts the curtains. He sweated lot. He looked deathly pale. He put his hand inside his silk shirt and adjusted a medallion. Was he turning to dust in front of our very eyes? He really didn’t look 31, by the way. I simply couldn’t get over that.
But just when Mason was looking unbeatable, Hankey fought back - and all one’s hopes about true grit were rewarded. In the seventh set, he started to put pressure on the younger man, and Mason responded by making mistakes and talking to himself ! Mason didn’t have what it took! Thud, thud, thud came those relentless 180s from Hankey. Thud, thud, thud. People were leaping to their feet to yell their appreciation. Hankey won the seventh set and then the eighth, pulling level at 4-4. By this time the Kid was seriously rattled. He threw wildly and talked to himself even more. And suddenly he was trailing! He’d been two sets up, and now he was fighting to stay in the match. Honestly, a Borg v McEnroe five-setter was only ever so slightly better than this, in the wider sporting scheme of things. Come on, Ted. Show him how it’s done, son. This is all about character. You know you can do it. In the final set, Ted won the first leg, and the second. In fact, suddenly, hang on, Ted required only 45 to win the match!
We held our breath. He shot a five, and then - oh no
- missed the double 20 with both remaining darts. Oh my God, don’t you play darts for a living, Ted? This gave Mason a chance, but he likewise blew it. The pressure was beginning to tell on everybody. People in the audience were dancing with agony. Ted tried for the double 20 again. He got a single! He tried for the double 10. He got a single there as well! With the last dart, he tried for the double five. Some of us couldn’t bear to watch. Dividing five is notoriously difficult in a world consisting only of simple integers. If he missed the double again, he’d have to wait his turn and then go for a one and a double two. And then, if he got only a single two…The world stood still. Get the double five, Ted, for God’s sake. Get the double five. (He did.)
‘Tragedy’ by the Bee Gees was played for the benefit of Mason, who didn’t need reminding: he was openly in tears. Dealing with defeat was not something Mason had any ambitions to be good at - and he wasn’t. On the telly afterwards, he told Garry Richardson, ‘I was the best player here this week, but my name wasn’t on the pot.’ So no old Corinthian nonsense about the best man winning on the day, then. But it had been a brilliant match, and in people’s memories I believe it has quite overshadowed the final, which was played the next day. A complete let-down, the final was, a whitewash, with Hankey beating Baxter 6-0 in the fastest BDO final on record (46 minutes). Personally, I never went to darts again, but I felt I didn’t need to, after an experience as perfect as that. According to the internet, all these blokes are still playing, but not at the same level, and not all for the same organisation.
It’s quite interesting, though. Chris Mason renicknamed himself, for example. Nixing the rather clever ‘Prince of Dartness’, he became ‘Mace the Ace’. He has been in trouble with the law a couple of times - once earning himself 180 hours of community service; and you can’t help thinking that this particular figure was picked for a quasi-humorous reason, when the bench knew it was dealing justice to a professional darts player. Meanwhile, Ronnie Baxter jumped ship from the BDO to the PDC (Professional Darts Corporation) and his world ranking (at time of writing) is 15, which isn’t bad. But there is tragedy in Baxter’s story, too: in the 2008 Las Vegas Desert Classic, he threw his first ever nine-darter in a qualifying round, and it wasn’t televised. Co Stompe stuck with the BDO until 2008, and then joined the PDC, as a result of which he dropped down the rankings. After 2000, the furthest he got in the World Championships was the last 16. Finally, Ted Hankey won the title again in January 2009, bringing him - suitably - back from the dead. In the intervening years he had gained a reputation for complaining about crowd behaviour and for quarrelling about whether the air conditioning should be switched off; in 2008, at the BDO World Championships, he received a warning for punching the dartboard, and told Ray Stubbs on the bbc that he was considering quitting the game. You can put a lot of this stuff down to chronic vitamin d deficiency, but I suspect he doesn’t want to know.
Some sports were slower and more reluctant to reveal their treasures, sadly. They didn’t all have the simple thud, thud, thud, hurrah of championship darts. There is a story beloved of sports writers (and it’s told about different people, so its origins are probably now lost) of one sports writer saying to another before an equestrian three-day event, ‘I think I’m going to enjoy this,’ and the other one saying, ‘Ah, you can enjoy it; I have to understand it.’ Part of my remit was to strike an interesting triple variant to this usual professional axis of enjoying and understanding sport: I had to a) enjoy the fact that I didn’t understand it; b) understand exactly how far I didn’t understand it; and c) understand and enjoy the fact that I couldn’t enjoy it as much as people who understood it. This was naturally quite tiring, and sometimes it couldn’t be managed. Sometimes I merely got grumpy and said, ‘I’m not enjoying this and I don’t understand either.’ Attending just the one Grand Prix at Silverstone, for example, I wanted to gnaw my own leg off, I hated it so much. For once, I had no fellow-feeling with the spectators; I thought they were mugs. A well-meaning man in a draughty cafeteria tried to strike up a conversation with me by saying, ‘Great day out,’ and regretted it instantly. ‘How is this in any way at all a great day out?’ I snapped at him. ‘You can’t see anything, mate,’ I said. What’s the point of a spectator sport where you can’t see anything? Even if you’ve paid hundreds of quid for a decent grandstand seat to sit in (open to the elements), you still have to watch on a big screen and listen to a commentary, just to have a vague idea of who’s winning. Lesser mortals who had paid a mere 75 quid for admission (Yes! £75!) got nothing at all. They had merely bought the privilege, it seemed, of wandering around this puddly and bedraggled former air-field, trying to negotiate a route avoiding all the unexplained roped-off areas, in search of a free bit of miserable chain-link fence to watch a bit of track through.
I thought the Grand Prix was preposterous. Whereas in all other sports, there’s a reason for the writers to go outside and watch it for real (instead of on the TV), at a Grand Prix you’d have to be mad. Even when the cars zoomed right past our press box above the pits, it was noticeable that none of the blokes tore themselves from their screens to run over and give the drivers an encouraging wave. In the end, I left the press room and found a high windowsill in an out-of-the-way ladies’ lavatory from which I could peer out at a segment of faraway track and glimpse the cars for real while listening to a radio commentary - but it didn’t add anything valuable to the experience beyond a stiff neck from the draught. Everything in motor-racing was about sponsorship and conspicuous wealth, and I loathed it for pretending to be about anything else. Everything had ‘Seudaria Ferrari Marlboro Asprey Shell Goodyear Pioneer TelecomItalia NGK arexons SKF USAG brembo TRB sabelt BBS’ written on it, including the drivers. The best thing about the day was that Michael Schumacher’s big end went. I have no recollection of who won. I do remember the traffic control system afterwards which directed you for miles at glacial speeds down country lanes to a b-road and then didn’t tell you which one it was. Motor-racing was not for me, I told the office on Monday. ‘We noticed,’ they said, and never sent me to anything engine-related again.
Horse-racing was a different matter. I cheerfully loathed horser-acing too, but only because being a surprise female guest of the racing press garnered the sort of reaction you’d get if you turned up to do a striptease in a mosque. ‘She’s not writing for us,’ one of the chaps broad-mindedly explained to another chap (and how I loved that third-person treatment). ‘She’s writing for the Hampstead luvvies.’ Honest amateurism was clearly not a quality much embraced by men of the turf, and naturally I could respect that. But it was a shame, because racing had lots of appeal otherwise. Those beautiful animals, for a start. The bewildering speed with which one race followed another. The opportunity to win £37.50 without deserving it. The chance to wear a broad-brimmed hat in the line of work. The endless circuit of down to the paddock, out to the bookies, back to the stands, and up with the binoculars. In particular I loved the brain-teasing aspect of studying form under pressure
- using the race card and all the newspapers - which reminded me of those old logic puzzles in which Peter has three friends, Rebecca has red hair but doesn’t eat nuts, and Julian is friends with Peter but failed to catch the 10.56 from Paddington. You could spend your whole life (and people do) trying to evaluate the different sorts of information available about horses running in the same race. Tippex Joy was a disappointment last time out; Red Bucket likes the going soft; Business Class is a one-time frustrating maiden; Mouse Mat Muesli never wins in months with an ‘r’ in them (but this is June); Council Flat is owned by Sheikh Mohammed; and Simon’s Moron is a ‘stayer’.
I won’t go into how unpleasant it was in the press box, but you can understand why the racing press would have a certain Masonic air. They are pundits, these blokes; their job concerns divination - and it’s well known that people in the oracle profession prefer to form secret societies and to keep their juju dark. A chap who writes about horse-racing will do the usual journalistic job of writing features about owners and trainers, and he will also report the races afterwards, but his main job, obviously, is to get on a rocking horse every night at home, with his eyes closed in a meditative trance, and then rock backwards and forwards until he reaches a state of frenzy and yells out the name of the winner of tomorrow’s 2.45 at Newmarket. In no other branch of sports writing are the chaps judged on how well they predict results. In racing, it’s everything. Naïve to a fault, I remember asking my boss whether racing correspondents were allowed to place bets themselves. I wondered whether this was properly consistent with the job of advising others. But betting turns out not to be a sacking offence, not by a long chalk. What my boss told me, in fact (and this came as quite a big shock to Little Miss Pollyanna), was that a professional racing journalist who didn’t add at least £100,000 to his salary from bets each year wasn’t a chap worth employing.
Under the heading of ‘didn’t enjoy, didn’t understand, and didn’t enjoy not understanding’, I think the worst experience was a trip to Paris to see basketball. I suppose I needn’t go into the logistics of getting to and from the Palais Omnisports at Bercy during a transport strike. You know all about that irksome stuff by now. I needn’t tell you that the check-in staff at the hotel were emphatic I was booked for one night only, when I needed to stay for two, because I’m honestly not banging on about that any more. In theory the basketball event looked very interesting, and I spent my time on the outward Eurostar journey swotting up on the differences between nba and fiba rules - about the amount of time on the ‘shot clock’, for example - and trying very hard to care. I tried to memorise terms like ‘burying a jumper’ and ‘pump fake’. I tried to imagine skywalking. A thousand journalists were due to attend this event, apparently. The 13,000 seats of the Palais Omnisports had sold out. Paris was very excited. In a championship sponsored by McDonald’s, basketball teams from Europe and the wider world (but not the usa) were to play each other in an ‘open’ knockout competition, and in the final stages the winners would be pitted against none other than Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls - who would, of course, make short work of beating the living pants off them.
By good fortune, at the event I found myself sitting next to a very well informed American man with a fantastic job. He was the European scout for the Cleveland Cavaliers, which meant he lived in Florence (Florence!) and his only responsibility was to keep an eye on all the beanpole-shaped young Yugoslavians currently playing basketball all over Europe, and occasionally approach one of them to ask whether he’d ever fancied wintering in Ohio. The preponderance of Yugoslavians was very noticeable on the team sheets at the Palais Omnisports that day. Teams were ostensibly from Barcelona, Paris, Argentina, Italy and Greece, yet virtually every player was pale, with a very long face, and had a surname ending in ‘-ic’. I asked the scout about this shot-clock thing. He said it was important. He also drew diagrams of burying a jumper and so on. We discussed that excellent documentary film Hoop Dreams. The challenge for the Americans today would be in dealing with zone defence, he explained. Under nba rules, a player marks an opponent; he is not permitted to defend in a general kind of way. But in this competition, zone defence would be allowed. This would give an advantage to the Europeans.
So I was properly up for a day’s worth of basketball. Each match being 48 minutes, I reckoned I could concentrate that long on this alien game. I furrowed my brow and prepared to be swept along by the action. Which was where I made my big mistake, because the infuriating thing about basketball is that it no sooner starts than it stops again; then it re-starts and stops, re-starts and stops, restarts and stops. If you have an attention span of any length whatsoever, it is a kind of mental torture. Even during the play you can’t pretend that the game has its own organic momentum, because irritating count-down music is played the whole time, shoes make ear-splitting squeak noises on the polished floor, you feel rushed and bamboozled - and then someone calls for a time-out (arbitrarily, as far as I could see) and the game is mystifyingly suspended for precisely 90 seconds while acrobats come on, and some pop music blares, and mascots clown around, and small boys with mops clear the sweat off the playing surface. My brain really couldn’t cope with all this, and nor could my patience. With all these interruptions, each match represented the longest 48 minutes I had ever endured. It occurred to me that those of us who can watch a whole 45 minutes of football in one go ought really to congratulate ourselves for what it says about our superhuman powers of concentration.
It was great to see Michael Jordan, of course. One of the French papers had announced that having Michael Jordan in Paris was better than having the Pope: it was ‘God in person’. Those who had hoped to see Jordan’s two pretty famous Chicago Bull team-mates Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman were disappointed, because Pippen was injured and Rodman was ill. (The Cavaliers man was gutted about Pippen, and said I ought to be gutted too.) But looking on the bright side, their absence may have prevented further blasphemies about the Holy Trinity, and I suspect Jordan did not resent being left alone in the lime-light in any case. For he was indeed like a god, compared with everyone else. It was impossible for the other players literally to resemble pigmies because they were all eight feet tall, but in all other respects besides height, pigmies is what they relatively were, when seen beside the colossus of Michael Jordan. Evidently he wasn’t even trying very hard, but he ran and soared and made graceful plays (and squeaked), always with the ball somehow miraculously adhering to his horizontally outstretched palm.
And there was statistical evidence for his supremacy, if you don’t believe me. In the course of the final against Olympiakos Piraeus, which the Bulls won by 104 points to 78, Jordan was responsible for 27 points, scoring 11 field goals for 22 of them. But I resent even writing this down, to be honest, because the thing I hated most about basketball was that it was all about numbers. The clock ticked down, the points ticked up, statistics kept pressing themselves on your attention. And all the while that maddening damn music played, driving you out of your mind. I found myself adding the number of Jordan’s defensive rebounds to the number of his offensive rebounds, just because it seemed the right thing to do. And I sat there pining for a good old straightforward game of footie. I remembered how an American friend had said an odd thing when I’d taken him to his first football match and apologised that there didn’t seem to be a scoreboard. ‘Will you be OK?’ I’d said. And he had replied, somewhat scathingly, ‘I think I can keep track of the number of goals.’ Well, having watched the basketball, all was now explained.
The final game I didn’t understand and didn’t enjoy much either was rugby. This may come as a surprise, when all women are supposed to be fantastically turned on by the sheer heft of the rugby-playing physique, but I can only protest that a meaty male thigh shaped like an upended lightbulb has never done a thing for me. Naturally, I always felt bad about not warming to such an important national sport, played by amenable popular heroes who sometimes go on to become stars of reality television, but there was an insuperable obstacle to enjoyment in the case of rugby, which was to do with the plain fact that, as far as I could see, it was a game that no one watching it fully understood, because that would entail having the mystic ability to read the mind of the ref.
Every few seconds the game would stop for one side or other to be penalised. No one could tell you why. ‘Oooooh, offside, probably,’ they sometimes said, but it was clear they were bluffing. Isn’t this a basic flaw in a spectator sport? Shouldn’t something be done? I loved the atmosphere at rugby matches, and could appreciate the toughness of the players, but it drove me nuts that the game turned so often (and so significantly) on rulings that were accepted by all and sundry as unfathomable. You just have to trust the ref, you see. I saw one game between England and Italy in a downpour in Huddersfield where there were 47 penalties. Forty-seven. In 80 minutes. What was that all about? But no one else minded. ‘I played rugby myself for years and I still don’t understand it!’ the chaps said, whenever I asked what the hell had happened now. In football, when a player commits a foul and a free kick is given, one knows who to blame and can even evaluate the damn-fool reasoning that made him do it. In rugby, there’s a load of pushing and then a whistle is blown. What did the ref see? What happened? Will we ever be allowed to know? The fact that the players always obey the ref in rugby is significant, I think. Because my suspicion is, they don’t have a clue about what’s going on either, which leaves them no grounds for objection. Only the ref knows what has occurred. The entire effing game is played for the benefit of its officiator.
Nowadays at least the referee wears a microphone and is obliged to explain himself for the benefit of people watching at home. One hears him telling players which rule they’ve infringed; he dresses down 20-stone giants as if they were 11-year-olds, saying he doesn’t want to see any more of that kind of nonsense, does he make himself clear? Thus, I suppose, the true star of the show is duly acknowledged - but it surely makes things even worse for people in the crowd. In my day the ref had to perform internationally-recognised hand gestures to signal his reasons, so if you could be bothered to study his body language, you stood a (small) chance of interpreting fragments of mime. But they weren’t self-evident, I must say. Peering through binoculars, one would discover the ref gesturing with open palms, fingers pointing downwards. What did that mean? Well, what it looked like was ‘Oops, I dropped my tray.’ There was another gesture I spotted that involved stroking one hand up and down the inside of the opposite arm, as if to say, ‘And I still can’t get rid of this rash.’ A third seemed to involve the miming of setting doves free (‘Fly, my little one!’). None of this was helpful in following the game.
In 1999, of course, there was the rugby World Cup. I expected it to win me over, but it didn’t. I got quite bored, and I wasn’t the only one. It was generally thought to have been too drawn-out, to lack drama, and to lack much decent offensive play. Plus England got knocked out in Paris by that South African with the golden boot, and the final between Australia and France at Cardiff was largely boycotted by the disappointed Welsh (the crowd was top-heavy with South Africans and Kiwis who had booked their seats in a state of hubris). The memorable result of this mix-up was that Shirley Bassey (star of the pre-match entertainment) had to walk to her little stage in virtual silence, when she had come out of the players’ tunnel with her arms out, expecting wild, spectacular applause. The Millennium Stadium hadn’t been quite ready in time, and the pitch got scabby. In short, there were many reasons to complain. Personally, I don’t remember the details of a single match I saw - and I went to five, including the South Africa-Australia semi-final at Twickenham and the final. I just remember yelling ‘Pass it wide!’ miserably, week after week, at chaps who knew more about it than I did. ‘Why don’t they pass it wide?’
As an outsider, I felt that the rules of rugby would definitely benefit from simplification (how about having fewer players?). It also occurred to me that an excellent England reply to the New Zealand or South Sea Island haka would be a rendition of the Birdie Song. Nowadays the boys stare it down while the crowd sings ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ to drown it out. But I still think a camp disco routine originating in the 1980s (with arm flapping) would be a great deal more effective in taking the wind out of their sails.