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

  So I think it’s clear that I don’t like being categorised as a woman, and that writing about football offered a brilliant chance to dodge and weave, and keep them guessing. But this is where the double-bind comes in, because I soon had to face the totally galling fact that, as far as sports writing is concerned, I was valued almost entirely for having two xs and no ys. To which I could only say, ‘Oh, fuck, fuck, fuckety-fuck.’ But it was all too true: my gender was my usp. Had I woken up one morning with a smart new pair of testicles, it would have been curtains for me as a sports writer. Can you imagine how annoying to me it was that my gimmick - being a woman - was a biological accident common to over fifty per cent of the people on this earth? And that the premise - look, a woman writing about sport! - was at base quite sexist, anyway? Not much had changed, it seemed, since Dr Johnson made that unflattering comparison between a woman preaching and a dog walking on its hind legs. A woman reporting on a football match was clearly of the same order of curiosity as a horse calculating the cube root of 27 and tapping out the answer with a hoof. What’s that, Neddy? Did you stamp three times? What’s that, Lynne? Did you see the goal go in and switch on your laptop? Give that woman a sugar lump and a nose-bag.

  I did try to be positive. Looking back, I see that I tied myself in knots trying to reconcile all this stuff. Where a more carefree and confident woman might have taken this happy-freak-of-nature status as a glorious gift, and used it splendidly to her advantage, I am neurotic, wary and apologetic by nature, so I didn’t. I saw dangers and traps. I saw territorial men, blaming me for something that wasn’t my fault. And so I made the mistake I’ve made in every other area of my life, sooner or later: I piously tried to place myself beyond reproach, in the pathetic belief that this would ensure me respect. I demanded no special treatment on account of being a woman: as far as possible, I pretended not to be one. As for my sexuality, well, it’s a bit complicated. I was aware I might be accused of using it unfairly (by people who needed glasses), and I was also petrified of being sexually humiliated on account of my obvious unattractiveness, so I figured that the safest option was just to sublimate it. Knock it on the head completely. Switch it off at the mains. In retrospect, I think all these decisions were disastrous for my ultimate well-being; worse, however, they were based on a misunderstanding of how ‘a man’s world’ actually works. Just for starters: being undemanding earns you respect? Good heavens, what planet was I living on? Looking round at my male colleagues, how could I fail to notice that they gained not only respect but regular hikes in status directly in proportion to the number of times they could be arsed to call up the office (on deadline, for maximum effect) and shout and swear at the very people who were in a supreme position to fire them?

  Was there active misogyny in this world? Well, yes: loads. But I think it was more insidious than that. What I tended to think, when I first entered the press boxes, was that the culture of sports writing was a result of normal self-selection: logically, this profession was bound to be quite highly populated by blokes who were more comfortable in a world that contained no women. And I felt quite sorry that a handful of women sports writers were contaminating this lovely X-Y paradise for them, freighting oestrogen into it without permission, neglecting to leave their irreligious hair, lipstick, fannies and breasts outside in a plastic bag, or something. Was there a passage in Leviticus covering this woman-in-press-box anathema? If not, those enlightened writers of the Old Testament had uncharacteristically missed a trick. At provincial football grounds, I would often find myself sitting next to some tired old codger in a damp belted coat who was obviously proud of having a regular tip-up seat, a regular pulse-dial bakelite phone on his desk, and a regular job of calling up some long-suffering woman in a warm city office every time a noteworthy event occurred on the freezing pitch below. He would never be interested in the social life of the press box, this old codger. He would never get excited by the action. He most certainly did not regard himself as a good-will ambassador for the game. So what made this man turn up? Easy. The chance to get away from his wife (who doubtless danced a jig the moment the sad old bastard left the house). It’s not surprising that part of me should feel guilty for invading such men’s special sanctuary. In my more fevered moments, I would wonder whether I ought to stand up and announce the current state of my menstrual flow (‘The trouble is, they don’t make pads big enough’), so that the chaps could make their own minds up about sitting anywhere near me, or killing me by means of public stoning.

  Now, all-male worlds are quite interesting, and I don’t mind admitting that my favourite film of all time is Peter Weir’s maritime epic Master and Commander, in which the only female character is a non-speaking black-eyed temptress with a parasol in a canoe off the east coast of South America, her presence in the film serving only to establish that the ponytailed Russell Crowe has heterosexual hot blood coursing through his veins, in case anyone was getting worried. But the more I saw of this particular all-male world of sports writing, the more I found it peculiar that it was even legally allowed to exist. Why is sports journalism considered a job that only a man can do? Why is it (generally) only men that are drawn to it? Is it a job for a man? I mean, it’s not like going down a mine. It’s not like rounding up mustangs, or rescuing people from towering infernos. The idea sometimes put forward by the old guard - that you have to be able to play football (say) before you can to write about it - is open to any number of rational objections, among which are:

  quite a lot of women have played football;

  many terribly good footballers have to sign their names with an X, and write extremely tedious copy, even when helped out by top sports writers;

  no one says Michael Billington doesn’t have a valid opinion of theatre because he has never directed Tartuffe.

  Obviously sport is a macho world full of sexist attitudes, and anyone reporting on it needs to be one of the lads - for protective colouring, if nothing else. I mean, if Sir Alex Ferguson condescended to tell you that cunt joke, you’d be well advised to find it amusing. All I wonder is: are there any exclusively male reporting qualities that can fully account for men’s complete - and continuing - dominance of this profession? I don’t see how that can be possible. Oh well. An interesting sidelong perspective on all this was offered to me in Paris during the World Cup in 1998, when I met a be-scarfed woman football writer from Alexandria. I was as taken aback as anyone to see her accredited at the Stade de France - and slightly miffed that I was, outrageously, obliged for once to share my handsomely accoutred (and brand new) female toilet facilities. Anyway, she told me that in fact her newspaper in Egypt had sent an entirely female reporting team to the World Cup - and the reason was straightforward enough. They didn’t trust the men not to get too involved.

  Evidently there is research to show that watching football increases testosterone levels. And I’m highly inclined to believe it: the first time I read about this research, it was during a lengthy football tournament and - honest to God - I had just been staring into space, pondering the question ‘I wonder how a carburettor works?’ So maybe exposure to football will make us all hairy-knuckled and gravel-voiced in the end, and the problem of being a woman in a man’s world will conveniently disappear. What has been fascinating in the past ten years is to see how, imagewise, the world of sport is every day tailored to a more politically correct inclusion of women. Broadcasting now has some terrific women sports presenters - although, controversially, a resistance to women football commentators. Match of the Day cameramen seem to have stopped picking out attractive women in the crowd, but you could see why they used to do it. First, it provided pleasant eye-candy for the viewers; and second, it gave the interesting (if misleading) impression that footie support was pretty evenly spread across the genders. I was once invited to watch Match of the Day being prepared and broadcast from the studio, and saw the highlights editors busily inserting shots of small boys with packets of crisps to signify half time, small boys eating pies, and so
on. From their Highfield Road footage that day they had a Coventry-West Ham game with the ultimate Saturday-afternoon gift: a stocky young bride arriving in the stands, in white, straight from the church, completing her nuptial outfit with a Coventry scarf. Was this the ‘something blue’ she had chosen to wear to the ceremony itself ? You couldn’t rule it out. The chaps even had a later shot of her in the crowd lighting a half-time Rothmans; but big-heartedly, they decided not to use it. But does one woman in her wedding dress amount to the overthrow of sexist thinking in the world of sport? I am here to tell you it does not.

  This section is supposed to be about golf; and it will be, I promise. I just needed to set the scene first; explain how I am too easily lured by the excitement of the transgressive, even when I am quite fully aware of the uncomfortable price I’ll have to pay. Taking an interest in golf was one of the most transgressive things I’ve ever done, when I think about it: it required a massive dismantling of lifelong prejudices - prejudices not only of gender, but also of class, culture, politics, and taste. To many people in my cohort group - university in the 1970s, fluffy left-wing politics, a career in the media, an interest in literary matters - golf represents everything establishment, reactionary and anti-intellectual; everything smug, wasp, racist and male chauvinist; and (above all) everything offensively tartantrousered. Come the revolution, most of my old chums will drive Centurion tanks across golf courses with red flags between their teeth, churning up the greens and firing twenty-pounders at the car parks and the clubhouses. Obviously I still feel sad about the friends I lost the instant I said excitedly on the phone, ‘Well, I’ve been reading Ben Hogan’s Modern Fundamentals of Golf; and it turns out, you see, that the plane for the downswing is not only less steeply inclined than the backswing plane, but is also oriented with the ball quite differently. This is the key to the whole mystery of the golf swing, I’m sure of it. Hello? Are you still there? My waggle is coming on enormously, by the way. Hello? Hello? Hello?’ I’ll never forget the sound of that dial tone in my ear. It wasn’t just that I was being boring and obsessive, because they were used to that. It was that I was being boring and obsessive about golf.

  The class thing is easily explained. I was a workingclass girl, who knew nobody who played golf. However, I grew up in the 1960s on a newly built council estate in a green, leafy area of south-west London, which meant there was a notable golf club nearby (where it was rumoured Bruce Forsyth was a member), so I was aware it was a game played by rich men with Jaguar cars with whom it would always be impossible - no matter how long I lived - to have any fellow feeling. There was also a polo ground very near to our house, bizarrely. It was between us and the Thames. My mother sometimes washed up the dishes in its old wooden pavilion on scorching Sunday afternoons. From across the small, airy copse which separated our house from the polo field, the rest of us - my dad, my nan, my sister and I - would hear the bells ringing romantically for the chukkas, carried to us on the breeze from the river; but we were immune to such calls from the outdoors: we turned up the volume on the telly and drew the curtains more securely to prevent reflections on the screen. We did occasionally go to watch the polo, but only if we first heard the tell-tale noise of a landing helicopter, which signified the arrival of the Duke of Edinburgh, or Prince Charles, or both. And even then, we usually preferred to watch Ingrid Bergman in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, because you never knew when you would next get the chance, and we all liked that bit with the children singing ‘Knick knack paddy-whack’ as they marched their way to safety.

  But occasionally, we did stroll down to the polo. Does anyone else remember ‘Professor’ Jimmy Edwards? A very keen polo player, he was. I remember his large stomach, trademark moustache and bug-eyed purple face as he galloped back and forth in his straining jodhpurs. Sitting on a dusty track outside the perimeter of the polo field, we unimpressed council-house kids would suck on Strawberry Mivvies from the ice cream van, and watch assorted energetic nobs in shiny long riding boots thunder past on chestnut steeds. What a noise. What a palaver. The chukka bells rang out. A posh male voice announced the score. Horses clashed with a clatter of sticks. Highborn people put themselves in the way of life-threatening injury. We didn’t have a clue what was going on. But between chukkas we scruffy non-paying spectators were suddenly included in events: while the nobs and their great, sweaty horses took a lengthy breather in the green shade of tall, rustling trees, we were invited to contribute to the afternoon’s entertainment by milling onto the field and treading the divots back into the turf.

  I never knew what to think about this lowly divot-treading. After all, I was a helpful girl, as all my school reports kept saying. I also loved horses with a normal schoolgirl passion, and read about them in books called things like Jill Enjoys Her Ponies. I knew all about gymkhanas. Good heavens, I could even spell ‘gymkhana’. But there was something about being asked to repair the damage done to the surface of the earth by galloping nobs that didn’t sit comfortably with me, and it still doesn’t. Fairly recently, I attended a charity polo match in Wiltshire, near Highgrove, in which Prince Charles played, as well as both of his sons; and it brought back a lot of bad memories, to be honest. For a start, I was 30 years older and I still didn’t know what was going on. The most entertaining aspect of the match was the way the commentator couldn’t identify his princes - ‘That’s Prince Harry - no, Prince William - no, Prince Harry!’ and in the end yelled excitedly, ‘And it’s all princes now!’ by way of covering himself. But the real challenge came with the bloody divot-treading. It made no difference that, here in Wiltshire amongst the rich, I was able to observe women in high-heeled slingbacks and pastel-coloured Ascot outfits quite happily turning to turf-mending when asked. It still made me feel like an oik.

  I got interested in golf entirely against my better judgement one glorious, sizzling summer when I was in my late thirties, writing a novel in a holiday flat on the Isle of Wight. By chance one evening at the village telephone box I met a nice, attractive local man called Peter who announced himself at once as a sports enthusiast, so of course my first thought was, ‘That’s that, then.’ Nevertheless, I found myself sitting with him in a hotel bar at Freshwater Bay, asking politely about golf - about pars, birdies, woods, irons, the handicap system and so on - and I can only report that something twigged. Maybe it was a combination of him, the night, the lapping of the waves in the moonlight, and the sheer romance of being on the Isle of Wight, but I thought his enthusiasm was something I’d like to share; it occurred to me, too, that the only thing preventing me from crossing this significant divide was unexamined snobbery. So, one lovely warm evening, towards sunset, he borrowed his mother’s clubs (and her car as well), and we drove up to the spectacular, blowy Freshwater Golf Course, with its westward view of the cliff-high Tennyson Down, and he watched and encouraged me while I happily topped some golf balls with a lofted club against a stiff wind from the sea.

  I will never forget the exhilarating thrill of guilt I felt as these badly-struck balls scudded off to right and left - and occasionally, oh my God, took flight for a yard or so. Look at me here, bending my knees and keeping my head down, betraying everything I believe in! I felt sullied, but I felt liberated too. Never in my life had I followed a road sign that said ‘Golf club this way’. Never in my life had I attempted to hit a tiny ball, smack on the meat, with the angled head of a long stick. I’d been too busy indoors, probably, shelving books in strict alphabetical order. When Peter told me about the 14th at Freshwater (a par-three known as ‘The Drop’), I desperately wanted to know what it felt like to drive a ball off the elevated tee and see it plummet down to the waiting green far, far below. I think he had to tear me away from the course when the sun finally went down. I was all for kipping in a bunker, so as to be ready to resume lessons, as soon as possible, at break of day.

  Then came the truly life-changing experience. Spotting that golf was the unlikely route to my affections, Peter invited me to his mum’s to watch the 1995 Op
en from St Andrews on the TV with his entire family. Abandoning my novel without a second thought, I signed up for the full four days, offered to contribute to the food, and had one of the happiest long weekends of my life learning to identify the players and to follow the counter-intuitive plus and minus scoring convention that comes so easily to golf’s initiated. It was a revelation. Long before Costantino Rocca forced the famous play-off with John Daly on the Sunday night with that legendary, impossible long putt on the 18th (after his equally famous fluffed chip), I was captivated. For one thing, this game was dramatic. For another: what a lot of famous golfers there turned out to be. Before this, I had heard of Seve Ballesteros and maybe Gary Player. Now I discovered that Bernhard Langer was a world-famous and universally recognised born-again German recovering from the yips. Corey Pavin was a world-famous and universally recognised American whose legs were too short, who had once been extremely obnoxious at a place called Kiawah Island. Sam Torrance was a world-famous and universally recognised popular Scotsman who chain-smoked like Andy Capp. Meanwhile the world-famous and universally recognised Colin Montgomerie had the interesting nickname ‘Jennifer’ (although I was later forced to accept that the amusing custom of calling him this was actually unique to Peter’s mum).