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

  Notepad and pen are all that the guys carry, by the way, and I can’t imagine how they do it. I am permanently in awe at their sheer chutzpah in the face of four or five hours in the unpredictable outdoors. They just strap on an armband with ‘press’ on it, click a Biro, and out they go. By contrast, every time I go out on the golf course, I not only change into a completely different outfit (golf shoes with soft cleats, waterproof jacket, jumbo waterproof trousers), but I pack into a knapsack enough wardrobe options and essential survival items for a weekend on Dartmoor. While the chaps merely pay attention to the golf and jot down the occasional note (some of them pretend they can even follow the flight of the ball, but I don’t believe them), I am forever re-arranging my possessions: passing from hand to hand any combination of gloves, hat, glasses, binoculars, sun cream, radio, switched-off mobile phone, purse, wallet, allergy tablets, yardage guide, spare batteries, jumper, novel, spare glasses, back-up radio, tin of mints, tissues, sunglasses, sanitary towels, contact lenses (in case I lose all the glasses), bottle of water, glucose tablets, banana, firstaid kit, set of splints, fold-away stretcher, portable resuscitation unit and emergency distress flares. No wonder I never know what’s going on. No wonder I can never find my bloody notepad and my bloody pen. What is interesting is how the chaps are tactful enough never to comment on all this stuff I’m freighting about, but at the same time they won’t have anything to do with it, either. If a chap sneezes and I say, ‘Ooh, I’ve got a big box of tissues in here somewhere,’ I’ve noticed the offer is always declined quite sharply. If a chap is in visible need of a sustaining banana, I have equally learned not to say anything about having a spare apple and an individual fruit pie if they’re interested. It appears to be a male-pride thing, and I am bound to respect it, even without understanding it. Some men just don’t like to be offered things, do they? And they would rather die than ask. Mind you, I think my fellow golf writers are mainly worried I’ll one day magically produce a fully-erect hat-stand out of that bag of mine, like Mary Poppins. I’m actually quite worried about that myself.

  Back at the 2002 Ryder Cup at the Belfry on the Sunday, of course, there was no one to offer a fruit pie to besides Lee Westwood himself, because the smarter blokes had so wisely buggered off elsewhere. On the first two days, Westwood’s current supposed lack of form (he was ranked 148 in the world, having sunk dramatically since the team was fixed in 2001) had seemed a mere irrelevance. He and Sergio Garcia had played in all four sessions, and won three points - despite some rather costly juvenile heroics on the 10th. But now, on singles day, the miracle had been revoked, and the fact that Westwood managed to hang on to Verplank until the 17th was a huge achievement. He made a terrific birdie putt at the fourth (my notes say it was 30 feet, but I suspect I was mentally laying five golfers end to end again here, so this may not be a reliable figure). On the eighth, he did it again. But you just knew that, whatever he did, this stuff wasn’t going to make it onto the telly. Out on the leafy, autumnal course with only his wife in support, and only one journalist (me) still taking an interest, Westwood v Verplank was the remotest edge of the action. I kept wondering, ‘Should I go off and follow someone else? Where did all the guys go? Oh no, was it all my fault for offering that cheese board at the eighth? Oh come on, it was only a bit of brie and a few Bath Olivers!’

  But on the other hand, I couldn’t just leave Westwood now, could I? It would look so rude. I remember how Lee’s wife vented her feelings when captain Sam Torrance and team-mate Padraig Harrington eventually showed up in support on the 15th. ‘Finally, we get some help,’ she said. ‘Hear, hear,’ I echoed, quietly.

  There was an air of ‘finally’ about the whole Ryder Cup that year. Everyone was glad to get the damn thing played at last - and to move on to a new era in which no War on the Shore and no Brookline Outrage could occur again in our lifetimes. Postponing by a year put the events of 9/11 at a distance, but its true value was in shifting Brookline further into the past. Sadly, as it happens, history repeated itself at the first opportunity. Europe won again in 2004 and 2006. In 2006, in fact, someone at a press conference at the K Club in Dublin dared to suggest to the losing American captain Tom Lehman that, with the contest getting so one-sided these days, maybe it was time to change the rules again: maybe the US team should be opened up to include players from other parts of the world, just in the interests of making the contest more even? Lehman said that the question was ‘a little insulting in some ways’, by which he meant it was very offensive. He said there were cycles in these things, and that the American golf world was full of great players.

  But while his team lost with exemplary good grace - taking turns to hug the recently widowed Darren Clarke, for example, and talking a lot about respect - the effect was ever so slightly creepy, and those of us with a sense of history knew where this three-losses-on-the-trot thing would ultimately lead, and so it did. In September 2008, Europe was duly trounced at the Valhalla course in Louisville, Kentucky - with lots of unlovely crowd behaviour - and honour was restored.

  Miscellaneous Sports, Travel, and All the Misleading Bollocks I Had to Put Up With

  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 Frimle
y 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.