Get Her Off the Pitch! How Sport Took Over My Life

  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 thei
r 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 …’

  THE PLAYER

  The 1999 men’s final at Wimbledon is remembered by historians of tennis as one of the great matches of the modern era. On Sunday July 4, 1999, Pete Sampras beat Andre Agassi in three sets, and in the course of it raised his game to heights few tennis-observers had ever seen before. Sampras was 27 years old, and already the holder of five Wimbledon singles titles; he went into the championships as the number one seed - as he had for five out of the six previous years. Agassi, aged 29, had been champion at Wimbledon only once (in 1992, beating Goran Ivanišević in a tense five-setter), but had by now managed to win all four of the Grand Slam championships - the Australian, the French, Wimbledon and the US Open - which meant he was likewise a giant of the game. For those with hazy memories, Sampras v Agassi at Wimbledon may seem like something that happened all the time in the 1990s (‘Not Pete and Andre again?’), but in fact it had happened only once before, in the quarter-finals in 1993, when Sampras took the first two sets against an apparently sleep-walking Agassi, then conceded two sets, then polished him off in the fifth.

  Theirs was indeed the great rivalry of that period, however - or, at least, it was marketed as such by Nike, famously in the sexy ‘Just Do It’ TV ad in 1995, in which the two players jump out of a cab in a busy downtown area, stretch a tennis net across an intersection, and start walloping a ball at each other, with orgasmic grunts, until a horn-honking bus ploughs into the net and the excited onlookers scatter. The idea behind this ad, obviously, was that these two hormonally-charged young American alpha-males couldn’t contain their volcanic feelings of spontaneous wallop for each other - and that they therefore carried tennis court accoutrements with them at all times, so that they were always ready to try each other out on new and exciting surfaces. One wonders whether the Nike ad-men ever suggested a naked-wrestling-on-the-carpet-by-firelight sequence as well, but possibly my mind is wandering into dangerous territory. Anyway, it was definitely a head-to-head between these two that was engineered as often as possible at all tournaments, so it was doubtless a real bummer for Wimbledon that, after the 1993 quarter-final, however hard the seeding committee tried to contrive it, Sampras and Agassi did not meet again across a competitive grass court in SW19 for another six whole years.

  On the Sunday morning of the match, I knew I wouldn’t be watching it - and I wouldn’t be seeing the delayed women’s singles final between Lindsay Davenport and Steffi Graf either. Never reliable at the best of times, my Centre Court access had been withdrawn midweek, for the simple, common-sense reason that the press box on Centre Court had a finite capacity, and proper sports writers from all round the world obviously needed the seats to put their bums on. I bore this blow quite well, I think. This was my second time at Wimbledon, and in terms of my dealings with the press office I had largely stopped (in that lovely phrase, not used half enough these days) kicking against the pricks. Also, in terms of seniority on the sports pages, I knew my place. On hearing that my chum Simon Barnes had been held up on a dicky train from Mortlake that morning, I helpfully - one might even say nobly - collected the Times Centre Court accreditation on his behalf.

  Speaking to the office at the start of the day, I had found out that they had quite definite views about the outcome they wanted from the upcoming events: Steffi to win the women’s; Andre to win the men’s. Such a result would guarantee sales next day, you see - since Steffi and Andre were both extremely popular old-timer type players, and they had both just won the French (although nobody knew they were an item yet). I thought this was fair enough. I then asked them what they wanted from me, and they suggested (what else?) that I spend yet another day roaming the grounds and reporting the atmosphere - which is how I happen to know that, at the moment when Sampras started to get transcendental, breaking Agassi’s service game at the start of the second set, the people in the queue for pizza didn’t give a toss. I wondered, miserably, what on earth these people were doing here - paying money to get in, and then not bothering with the tennis. I was reminded of stories of the crucifixion (ordinary Jerusalem people going about their daily business and just putting the lights on when it got dark in the afternoon), but tried really hard to drive these thoughts from my mind. The power of association is all very well, but it’s best not to rely on it totally - especially when it leads you down the road to casual blasphemy.

  So I didn’t see the matches, but I watched the scoreboard obsessively. And, well, as it turned out, The Times was unlucky that day. Lindsay Davenport won the women’s in two sets; Pete Sampras won the men’s in three. Dear, oh dear. At the end of play, I went back into the press centre and sat down next to Simon Barnes, who was literally rubbing his hands with glee at the thought of all the lovely, lovely tennis greatness to which he would soon expertly attest. I opened my laptop, took a sip of a cup of tea. And then, thinking I ought to show that I had at least followed the results while on my humble trudging duty, I did a foolish thing. I made the innocent and light-hearted remark, ‘So. The wrong ones won.’

  I regret this now, of course. But if it’s any consolation, I also regretted it instantly, because this was not the thing to say to a sports writer in a state of rapture. ‘People who can’t appreciate fucking genius should fuck off,’ was Simon’s memorably hot reply - and I’m fairly certain (as Wodehouse might have added) that he meant it to sting. But feelings were running high, deadlines were pressing, and Simon was among the few sports writers who’d been friendly towards me from the start. So, while he then went on to write a heavily ironic opening about exactly how and why Steffi and Andre had lost to ‘the wrong ones’, I, feeling a bit shaken, went on to write a speculative, space-filling 900 words of drivel asking whether the folks on Henman Hill were ‘the true fans’ (as the TV commentators evidently liked to think), or in fact drunken layabouts with no homes to go to. While I was doing this, I kept wondering, ‘Should I interrupt Simon to explain? Does he really think I should fuck off ? Isn’t that a bit unfair?’ But I make it a policy not to argue with people who are angry with me already, especially when I have a deadline impending (and nothing to write about), so I didn’t.

  The fact that I hadn’t been allowed to see a single point of the Sampras-Agassi match and therefore couldn’t possibly be accused of not appreciating fucking genius was immaterial, in any case. Simon has always felt (and enjoyed feeling) that he is specially qualified to appreciate the talents of great sportsmen such as Sampras; and of course it is essential to this belief that the rest of the world can’t see it at all. In 2003, when it finally became clear that Sampras had quietly retired, Simon wrote a farewell song of praise to his hero, pinpointing the 1999 Wimbledon final as the day when anyone who had ‘put in the hours and covered the hard yards of sport’ spotted the emergence of true greatness. The fact that no one - no one - disagrees with him about Sampras cuts no ice at all. Recalling that day in 1999, he wrote four years later, ‘Those who felt that yet another Sampras win was a bit of a bore were entitled to their view.’

  The only thing I would now argue with in this, is that July 4, 1999 was a pretty interesting moment for Andre Agassi too - and that this has been rather overlooked in all the lovely Sampras myth-making associated with that day. I know this seems an odd thing to say. How could anyone ‘overlook’ Andre Agassi, you ask. Surely he was in the limelight constantly for two decades? Didn’t he wor
k at it? Wasn’t he adored everywhere? After Muhammad Ali and Tiger Woods, he is probably the most universally recognised American sportsman. Well, I can see what you mean by that. I just think Agassi is an interesting case of where sports writing doesn’t quite cope, and that the reasons are worth exploring. If Pete Sampras was a gift to sports writing, Andre Agassi exposed its shortcomings. You could watch Andre play, week after week and year after year; you could write about it a thousand times for the next day’s paper; you could comment amusingly on his latest bodyhair choices; but still you could never get a handle on the man. He wins when he’s supposed to lose; he loses when he’s supposed to win. Is he a flake or what? What sort of perspective can you get on Andre bloody Agassi, and how could it be worth the effort? What does he care what anyone in the tennis world thinks of him, when he’s so rich and popular, and stars all the time in TV ads? In 1989, when he was already a contender in Grand Slam finals, a columnist in the American magazine Sports Illustrated woundingly asked whether Agassi was ‘the game’s new savior or just another infantile twerp’. And the headings ‘SAVIOUR’ and ‘TWERP’ were probably at the top of most sports writers’ notepads (with a line down the middle) whenever they thought about him ever after - or until he finally retired, an impressive 17 years later, in September 2006.

  In my experience, Agassi would generally elicit a shiver of impatience, a frisson of distaste, in people who write about sport, largely because of his sheer wealth and rock-star popularity, but also because - in so many ways other than the literal - he didn’t play the game. A wilful shape-shifter, evidently with a lot to prove and a pair of equally-matched demons tussling inside him for his tennis-playing soul, he found a simple way of clouding the issue of his inner torment: he dressed up in eye-catching clothes. Looking back, this strategy seems a bit obvious - but it wasn’t obvious at all to the people paid to watch. When Agassi played Andrei Chesnokov in the first round of Wimbledon in 1992 - having reached the final of three Grand Slam events in the preceding 12 months - John Barratt did not say, ‘Looks a bit tense and haunted to me, this talented young man; personally, I blame the way his tennis-mad father brought him up. And call me simplistic, but I also wonder whether this look-at-me long blond ponytail is a classic example of psychological double-bluff, because actually he doesn’t want people to penetrate what’s inside.’ No, Barratt did not say that. Instead he chuckled, ‘He looks a bit like a pony, doesn’t he?’ And when Agassi had completely mysteriously chucked away the second set (6-1), but then regained himself to polish off Chesnokov in the fourth, Barratt commented, ‘A showman to the last, the Las Vegas kid goes off to the kind of applause we usually give to pop stars.’