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

  I now read newspapers starting at the back, and had incredibly strong opinions about a lot of things that were utterly unimportant. I had started to get exasperated with Emerson, for example, in these last two FA Cup games. Having watched him any number of times during the season, and sympathised with his homesickness, I still found it annoying that he pulled out of tackles nine times out of ten. Was this another Anderton-type prejudice on my part? Probably. But I had eyes in my head and it seemed to me that Emerson, in his rather crucial central position, had perfected an infuriating form of missing-the-bus football, whereby he would spot the ball nearby and accelerate towards it (‘Wait for me!’) and then realise the bus was drawing away (‘Ding, ding!’), so give up instantly, and stop expending unnecessary effort. Swinging his arms, he would slow to a contented strolling pace, as if to say, ‘Oh well. There’ll be another one along in a minute.’

  But what worried me most was the way these footballers had started to displace other knowledge. Emerson had previously been an influential transcendentalist philosopher whose house I had visited in Concord, Massachusetts. Well, not any more. Similarly, the name Zola had been a straight-forward matter for me until a year ago, as a French realist novelist of the late 19th century who dealt with dark subjects and got mixed up in the Dreyfus affair. Where was that Emile Zola now, in my brain? I searched about, but he was hiding in some dark recess, supplanted by a small, brilliantly gifted Italian goalscorer whose kit looked as if it had been hand-sewn by his mum for a slightly bigger boy. Looking just at the Chelsea team list for the Cup final, Hughes had been Poet Laureate, Newton a great scientist, Wise the short fat hairy-legged half of a great comedy duo, and Sinclair the inventor of a small motorised vehicle that never caught on except as an object of derision. Now they were all, emphatically, these other chaps in blue shirts, about whose day-to-day adventures I was absurdly over-interested. One day I saw the headline ‘Adams in Talks’ on the front page of a newspaper, and was disappointed when I discovered this was a reference to Gerry Adams and that the talks were about bringing peace to Northern Ireland. I had naturally jumped to the conclusion that this was a story about the much more important Tony Adams (of Arsenal and England) doing some sort of contract renewal.

  The best thing was that I’d met a lot of fans, most of whom were nice people with a pretty innocent enthusiasm for a sport that had a lot of merit. Of course I was scared from time to time, usually after the match, as I scuttled back to the car (or, occasionally, to the station, which was worse). I’ve always been fearful of crowds, so it was a big effort to propel myself, week after week, to places where tens of thousands of other people would also turn up. As for football-fan behaviour, a drunken man shouting foul abuse from the seat behind could certainly ruin any match for me, and it happened several times, but I was generally more interested in the less clichéd behaviour that no one had told me about. At Southampton, for example, I heard a couple of fans chatting learnedly at half time about the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, and I certainly wasn’t prepared for that. Then, at Selhurst Park, the man on my right had been supporting Crystal Palace since the 1930s, and occasionally rasped an exasperated ‘Leave ORF!’, while the much younger fan in front brooded like a human volcano and at intervals erupted with the shout, ‘NOTHING HAPPENED!’ At Brentford (which I loved), the fans yelled encouragement to their individual boys (‘Come on Marcus; come on Nicky’) - but one man in particular was evidently convinced that the players and the ref could hear him, which was a bit worrying. ‘Ref !’ he shouted officiously. ‘Three minutes left!’ And he held up three fingers to prove it. As for the chanting, it was sometimes funny, sometimes crass. I particularly enjoyed ‘You’ll never beat Des Walker,’ chanted by the Sheffield Wednesday fans - which, ok, isn’t that interesting, except that for a long time I thought they were singing, ‘You’ll never meet Des Walker,’ which seemed like a really useful philosophical point to make, because most of us never will.

  Obviously, after a year of this, it was time to stop this pretence of sports writing and re-enter the real world, before it was too late. With any luck, I’d be able to get my Zolas back into perspective in a year or two if I did a lot of deep breathing with my eyes closed. But then my bosses suggested I expand my sports portfolio to take in tennis, golf, motor-racing, rowing, cricket, horse-racing and rugby, so I had to think again. And I’m afraid I pictured Emile and I pictured Gianfranco, and I thought, in a genuinely befuddled way, ‘Real world? Which of these represents the real world?’ Before me stood the shade of a great French writer whose stories were already written, and a lively, brilliant and engaging football player who made new stories every time he set foot on a football pitch. Emile would always be there. Gianfranco wouldn’t. I wanted to be in the real world, apparently, so I signed up to be a sports writer. I signed up to be one of the boys.

  Tennis and the Value of Sports Writing

  Funny occupation, though, sports writing. People have been known to go a bit mad in the cause, and it’s hardly surprising, given the artificiality of the lifestyle and the demands of the work. Also, one’s status is very hard to get into perspective: sport is big and important, but does that make a sports writer big and important, too? There are people who can’t quite cope with this question. While I was doing the job myself, I wrote a deranged sports writer character into a comic novel: a man who said things like, ‘Seve Ballesteros gave me this sombrero’ and ‘I taught Jack Charlton how to fish’ - and colleagues who read it said they definitely recognised the type. My fictional sports writer’s entire family was emotionally scarred by his confusion. On his deathbed, when the phone rang, he rallied himself to say, with his final breath, ‘If that’s bloody Alex Ferguson again, tell him to - [cough, cough] - sod off.’

  Why is sports writing a kind of byword for alienation? Well, it’s a pretty lonely job. But, looking at it from the outside, you might imagine that what would nag at the professional sports writer was simply the essential triviality of the subject. ‘Perhaps I’m wasting my life on something that doesn’t matter,’ he would think, on sleepless nights. ‘After all, if all sport stopped tomorrow, nothing bad would happen, would it? God gave me gifts and I am using them to monitor the growing animosity between the French-born manager of a very successful north London football club and the Spanish-born manager of a different very successful football club, based on Merseyside - an animosity which may be of no interest whatsoever by this time next year.’

  But, astonishingly, this is not a problem. No one involved in sports journalism worries that sport isn’t worth writing about, or entertains for a moment the ‘if all sport stopped tomorrow’ scenario with which I personally entertained myself on many a long break-neck drive back down the M6 (while also light-headedly debating whether to stop for motorway service food or just carry on risking a blackout at the wheel). The world-without-sport was my favourite fantasy on those journeys. I liked to picture football stadiums dug over for allotments, and so on. I liked to imagine how the complete cessation of sport would release an enormous amount of weekend time for men (in particular) to spend reading improving novels, growing courgettes as thick as your wrist, or taking their children on lovely long walks beside canals.

  It would make an interesting dystopian novel, too - this world without sport. So easy to imagine: a future, library-quiet world in which suppressed sports followers had to pursue their faith underground, with secret meetings, always begun with a ritual hushed singing of ‘Football’s Coming Home’. What a market in illegal relics there would be. When the Goldstone ground in Brighton was deconsecrated (or whatever the word is) in 1997, the true followers of Brighton and Hove Albion dug up bits of the pitch to keep as little shrines, and there was an item in the local paper about a man who was keeping the centre spot alive in a bucket - I remember hoping he realised he had to repaint the spot as it grew, otherwise he would end up with just a bit of grass. And now I come to think of it, there had been another item in the local paper about a woman with a d
amp patch on her wall that miraculously resembled the boxer Chris Eubank, who lives in Hove. The headline said, ‘I’ve Got Chris Eubank Coming Through My Wall.’ Imagine the power of that in a world from which all sport had been banned. A small basement flat in Hove would become an object of clandestine pilgrimage. Alternatively, however (and looking on the bright side), perhaps no one would recognise the Miracle of the Damp Patch Eubank in this brave new world, and the wall would be painted over.

  But even if you accept that sport has huge significance in itself, surely a sports writer will still anxiously ask himself: what is the value of writing about it? How much is there to say, really? Isn’t some of the day-to-day business of sport too unimportant to deal with? And what of that mainstay of sports writing, the match report? What is the point of writing a 600-word first-hand next-day report of, say, a quarter-final match at Wimbledon? For one thing, you can’t possibly do justice to the action. And for another, at the same time as you are writing your piece, millions of tennis fans are actually watching it for themselves on television - and they are doing this with the additional benefits (unavailable to the poor mug sitting in the press box) of continuous commentary, regular analysis, pertinent running statistics and instant, slowmotion replays.

  I pick on Wimbledon for three reasons. First, because it was my first assignment as an accredited sports writer: i.e. working from a press room, and sitting in a press seat. (Or, rather, not sitting in a press seat, because there were three allocated desks for each paper in the old Wimbledon press room, and The Times had six writers, so I ended up, on my first day, writing miserably in a smokers’ enclosure in the press canteen.) The second reason is that tennis is famously quite hard to bring to life on the page. It is noticeable that, whereas there are many great books about boxing, horse-racing, football, cricket, baseball and golf, there are few even halfway readable books about tennis. And third, tennis was the first sport I ever tried to read about in a newspaper before I was called to the profession; and the experiment was so profoundly unsatisfactory that it put me off trying again.

  This occurred in 1991, when Andre Agassi made his first real mark at Wimbledon. He had competed there once before, in 1987, and was knocked out in the first round by Henri Leconte - but, to be fair, most Wimbledon watchers have no recollection of this. Anyway, hoping to find expert background information about this phenomenal player who, seemingly from nowhere, was making it to the quarter-finals in 1991, I opened the sports pages and was simply bewildered by the cool, haughty, longdistance, from-our-own-correspondent-in-Bechuanaland attitude I found there - especially as the precious who-is-this-bloke-then background info I sought was not on offer, either. I was quite perplexed. I had gone to the paper to enhance my appreciation of an interesting sportsman. I felt I had been prepared to meet sports journalism halfway. What I found was a toffee-nosed dismissal of him, based on his haircut and his eye-catching two-tiered shorts. Most confusingly of all, the tennis writers evidently believed that their mere physical presence on the spot conferred an almost divine authority on their accounts of proceedings - and on their judgements concerning Agassi’s ‘silly trousers’, too.

  This was extremely odd. Weren’t these chaps aware that a lot of people watched Wimbledon at home? Had no one ever mentioned it to them? It was as if they loftily surveyed those neat grassy oblongs in south-west London from a balcony somewhere, and had no idea what all those little TV cameras and commentary boxes were for. ‘You may have heard a few rumours about this chap Agassi,’ was the tenor of the reports - transmitted, one imagined, by way of a humble cockney telegraph operator in a pith-helmet, kneeling on the floor of a makeshift tent, while the writer paced about and dictated, pipe in hand. ‘Well, take no notice of those jungle drums, dear readers. This comically dressed young man will never achieve the stature of Ivan Lendl.’

  In short, the air of complacent self-importance was a bit shocking. But I was glad, when I started having to give thought to all this in the summer of 1997, that I could remember those unfavourable first impressions. Because it took no time at all to discover where at least some of these sports writers’ extraordinary sense of entitlement came from. First of all, there is the accreditation business, which makes a sports writer shake his head at the jostling, holiday-mood crowds and think, ‘You may be here to enjoy this; I am here to understand it. You are here for the Pimm’s and strawberries; I am here to work.’ (Which is fair enough, actually.) But more importantly, from the professional point of view, there is the wonderful, deeply unfair, but utterly incontrovertible fact that sport sells newspapers, which means that anyone who writes about sport for a newspaper is conscious of the fact that he has already - without necessarily writing a single word that’s worth reading - won the double rollover jackpot in the lottery of life.

  To join the sport department was, simply, to join the winning team. And my main reaction when I realised this was: why had no one ever told me this before? Why was I 42 before I found out? For twenty arduous and quite inky years, as an editor and a writer, I had toiled in the fields of literary criticism and arts features, thinking it was a life worth leading. And now, completely unexpectedly, by simply having the word ‘Sportswriter’ embossed on my new Times business card, I had received the biggest hike in status of my entire career.

  I had never known what I was missing, you see. I had loved those windowless, dusty, demoralised and half-starved books and arts departments. I had run a couple of them myself, and had assumed it was normal to live in a constant state of flinching apprehension that one’s meagre page allocation - and indeed one’s meagre office space, and meagre job - would at any moment be savagely halved, or subsumed into lifestyle, or snatched away completely. In my youth I had edited a single, measly, once-a-month arts page on a weekly newspaper which, every single time, the editor would neglect to include in the page-plan. ‘Don’t forget my arts page, Peter,’ I would remind him, helpfully, from the doorway, when I noticed him working on the schedule, with ball-point and ruler. ‘All right, all right, don’t go on about it,’ he would say, shooing me away with the back of his hand. But it was always the same. ‘You forgot my arts page, Peter,’ I would have to point out when the plan arrived, and he would silently clench his jaw, and get up from his desk, roll his eyes, and then personally lumber around the news room gathering back all the page plans that had been distributed - and all the time I knew he was cursing me, but he was also cursing the arts.

  But now here I was on the winning team on a newspaper, and it was wonderful. No one forgot to include the sports pages. Goodbye Doncaster Rovers; hello Real Madrid. Not only that, though. Suddenly, I was on the winning team in the culture as a whole as well. Having a job that involves reading long books with a pencil counts for relatively little these days in the uk, I find, even if you read them before they are in the shops. Getting free tickets to the FA Cup final, the British Grand Prix, as well as (oh yes) the World Darts Championship at Frimley Green, on the other hand, makes you a kind of god. On the rare occasions when sports writers interface with non-journalists, therefore, the experience does absolutely nothing to help keep things real for them, ego-wise. To a vast number of people (who admittedly don’t think about it very deeply), sports writing is simply the best job in the world. ‘Ooh, can I carry your suitcase?’ people always say. Or sometimes it’s the variant: ‘Can I come with you - in your suitcase?’ For some reason, luggage is always mentioned, which is one of those baffling facts in life that it’s just not worth stopping to question. So I was never judgemental about the suitcase-carrying offer. I just wish I’d had the nerve occasionally to laugh politely and then say, ‘Blimey, absolutely, suitcase, what a brilliant idea, it’s that blue one actually; listen, I’m off to Stoke on Saturday, you couldn’t do the driving as well?’

  The symbiosis of sport and newspapers is actually quite a lovely thing to behold. The wonderful thing is, despite the fact that a fan can watch sport on telly till his eyes fall out, he still wants to pay to read more about it the
next day. And the result is that sport has traditionally been very well covered by the British press, so there’s a certain circularity to the matter, because the quality of the journalism then draws the fans in to read it. Is it an accident that sport is the right-sized subject for newspapers? I think Darwin would have a few things to say about that, if he were around today. Anyway, somehow it is possible for each newspaper, each day, to fill between eight and twenty-four pages on sport, with reports, interviews, previews - and above all, pictures. Meanwhile the appeal is obvious. As a subject, sport is a complete parallel world, but a manageably small one, with reassuring overtones: nothing that happens in sport is ever so bad that it even momentarily disrupts the endless cycle of tournaments, leagues, championships and race programmes. Individual players and teams may suffer terrible disasters, but usually they can start again the following week, or the following season, with a fresh outlook and a clean slate. It is now pretty well established that the human brain needs to think about something beyond itself - something fairly complex and open-ended, ideally involving lots of characters who need to be kept straight in one’s head, and regular exciting landmark events. On the one hand, The Archers evolved to fill this need - and, on the other hand, so did sport.

  All sports fans are avid for news. Avidity for news is the thing that defines them. Loving sport and not wanting to know that (say) the owner of Manchester City has lost confidence in Sven-Goran Eriksson after quite good league results is not only unthinkable; it’s philosophically untenable. And no wonder, therefore, that the journalists are rather good, because they are fans as well as professional communicators, so the urge to convey the smallest item of fact is automatically multiplied. There was a very well-informed chap who used to join the Times team at the Open (golf ) every July, and he had a kind-of roaming brief. He would come to the desk a few times a day and say, in a low confidential whisper (even to me), things such as, ‘Don’t mention this to anyone else, but if Mark O’Meara breaks 70 today, I’ve worked out he’ll be the first Masters winner over the age of 40 since Jack Nicklaus to follow up a missed cut at the PGA with success on the first day at an Open held in Scotland on the west coast.’ And I would say, hypocritically, ‘Really? How fascinating. Do you know, I think there’s a piece in that. I can’t wait to see what happens.’ But then, when he’d gone away again, I would see what he was getting at, and worry about my reaction. The readers would want to know this O’Meara fact, Lynne. This is the sort of thing that readers want to know. And then I would counter-argue that I was already 400 words into a piece about the joy of owning waterproof trousers, so it was a bit late to change track now.