Get Her Off the Pitch! (16 page)

‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality,' wrote T.S. Eliot in
Four Quartets
, and I'm sure it will be discovered one day that, when he wrote this, he had just endured a
disastrous afternoon at the Burnt Norton Golf Club. What I'm saying is: this game may actually demand more of people than they can give. John Updike's essay ‘Moral Exercise' (collected in his book
Golf Dreams
) perfectly describes how golf makes a person face his true worth.

What other four hours' activity can chasten a magnate with so rich a variety of disappointments, or unman a lothario with so many rebuffed desires? Golf is a square shooter. In the sound of the hit and the flight of the ball it tells us unflinchingly how we are doing, and we are rarely doing well.

I think it must be true, then, that the overwhelming philosophical magnitude of the game is, paradoxically, responsible for the kind of pigmy characters who give it such a terrible name.

In the wider world of sport, maybe something similar is going on - something that explains the sexism. Is it possible that men turn to sport to get away from women, because women remind them too forcibly of their failings? It's just a theory. But while I was writing this chapter, Sotheby's advertised for sale an original Bateman drawing of a teeing-off scene: a small, hunched and defeated-looking husband in plus-fours shrinking away to the tee from a large, curvycalfed and strident female, who stands arms akimbo, with lipstick and rouge, wearing a beret and smoking a cigarette. The caption reads: ‘Mind you beat him! If he beats you, I'll do the same!' Well, what a laugh, terrific joke, but
I believe this is where we came in. What one always has to remember is the well-known fact that the original aim of sporting competition was to sublimate carnality. Keep this in mind, and a lot of things fall into place. Sport was devised for the simple edifying purpose of keeping manly cocks safely dangling; it was designed to prove that, as a man, you could achieve quite satisfactory states of great excitement without doing anything dirty. So there is no mystery, is there? Does sport reject women because the activities themselves are fundamentally about sublimation? I don't think it's out of the question.

All this may explain, incidentally, the timeless mystery of why women's team sports never catch on with the public, despite being played to high levels, with earnest commitment, and with great organisation. The trouble is that when women play professional sport - even when they are hot-looking tennis babes - their play is plainly not about sublimating the sex urge; it's about celebrating physical liberation, which is a lot less interesting to watch. Hence the ho-hum response from the rest of us when they succeed or fail. This is a great shame. It shows how intrinsically unfair the world is. But it's true. Women can play games brilliantly to the crack of doom, I reckon, and no one, including me, will give a toss, because they make it too obvious they're enjoying it. Unlike men, they wouldn't rather be doing something else, you see. What they'd rather be doing is
this
.

On Wednesday September 12, 2001, a small item about golf appeared in the British media. It was not front-page news, because holding on to a sense of proportion was something everyone was struggling to do at the time - this being the day after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. However, as bathetic and distasteful as it may seem, a legitimately urgent golfing aspect to the events of 9/11 was already demanding attention, within 24 hours of the first plane hitting in Manhattan. The 34th Ryder Cup was scheduled to be contested by teams from Europe and America at the end of September 2001, at the Belfry, near Birmingham. In the light of events, should it go ahead or not? What on earth was the right thing to do in these exceptional circumstances? To cancel it? To postpone it? To go ahead and play it, but tone down the usual rabid jingoism? How about playing the first two days - of four-somes and fourballs - but then ditching the singles on the Sunday, which is usually when the trouble starts?
Oh for heaven's sake how can we even think about golf at a time like this?
Over the next few days, there was a proper flap, and it seemed right that golf - with its well-established passion
for rectitude - should be the sport forced to handle such a thorny issue. Here was a golfing etiquette puzzler that even the Royal and Ancient's exhaustive rule book seemed not to have dreamed up an answer to.

Football just went ahead, of course. True, uefa postponed a Manchester United match against Olympiakos in Athens on the Wednesday, but back in the uk, eight Worthington Cup ties were played regardless. Hugh McIlvanney (writing magisterially in the
Sunday Times
on September 16) was so shocked by this that he made comparisons with the 1972 Munich Olympics, and the monstrous decision of the International Olympic Committee's president Avery Brundage to press on with the games despite the appalling murder of eleven Israeli athletes. ‘Brundage justified continuing as a refusal to yield to evil,' wrote McIlvanney, ‘but to me the subsequent competition for medals was soulless, a circus in a graveyard.' Noting what other commentators had said - that here was surely a great opportunity to play the Ryder Cup in a sober and civilised manner - McIlvanney refused to be budged. ‘Would it be sport, or a contrived exercise in social therapy? The results of games should never matter too much. But if they don't matter at all, nobody should bother to play.'

Elsewhere some quick (but not very deep) thinking was taking place at Monza in Italy, where the Grand Prix was scheduled for Sunday. Bernie Ecclestone of Formula One pronounced that the show must go on - but out of respect for the dead, Ferrari stripped all the logos off its cars and painted the nose cones black.

I'm not making this up, incidentally. Evidently, you see, it was the commercial aspect of motor-racing that would
make its continuance offensive to people who needed time to absorb the significance of the attack on the World Trade Center, and to mourn the dead. ‘Ferrari has taken the decision to show that it shares a sense of grief with the American people, with whom it has always felt close ties,' said a press release. ‘Therefore, this weekend, with the full agreement of its sponsors and partners, and as a mark of respect, its cars will carry no logos relating to its commercial or technical partners. For Ferrari and its partners, Sunday's race will be a purely sporting event with no commercial implications, nor will it be a joyful event.'

To me, it was a bit easy, I admit. To me, it was cut and dried. Sport was not an essential part of life. It was supremely optional, a luxury of peacetime, and should know its place. Its own convenience should always take second place to real-world considerations - especially really big ones such as life and death. However, this wasn't how things usually turned out in practice, as I knew full well. It is in sport's interests to consider itself essential; one simple way it asserts its claim to immanence is by refusing to yield to any sort of interruption. This is a small example, I know, but I was once at a Saturday-afternoon Portsmouth-Sheffield United match at Fratton Park (a hell-hole; don't go), when a referee's assistant was struck to the ground by an incensed fan - and, to my utter astonishment, they didn't stop the game. I can still picture the victim: this poor, stricken bloke lying there on his face on the pitch, not moving, still holding his flag, one leg straight, the other bent at the knee. It was very shocking. Was he dead? While his assailant was quickly caught by security men, his body continued to lie there, motionless. Whistles were blown and a stretcher brought to remove him
from public gaze. It was horrible. Everything went quite quiet. And then the game quickly re-started, whistle, flag, off we go, free kick, play on, with a new chap standing in.

I was truly confused by this. I think I had already zipped up my coat, stamped some blood into my frozen feet, and fished the car key out of my pocket, so convinced was I that this game would be automatically abandoned. Isn't there a rule that if you can't play nicely, you can't play at all? After something as serious as this, you surely don't just suspend this match; you suspend football altogether until after the public inquiry. But it seemed the reverse was true. Pitch-side homicidal attack was precisely the kind of thing you
don't
stop matches for. ‘If they stopped the football it would send out the wrong message,' the seasoned chaps of the press box explained to me, wearily. ‘Then every time a fan wanted to sabotage a fixture, he'd just bludgeon an official. They went ahead with the game at Heysel, you know. They reckoned it would be worse for everyone if they didn't play the match.' A few minutes later, we heard that the linesman had recovered consciousness and was being taken to hospital, so that was all right, then; but I was very disturbed by it, and I still am. In the Monday paper, I banged on about it, but I got no sympathy or support from anywhere. I still wonder where you draw the line, though, if not at an absolute. What if the linesman had been shot in the head? What if the assailant had used a crossbow, and taken out a few rival supporters as well? Would they have stopped the match then? Or would that have sent out the wrong message, too?

Of course, it showed how little respect I had for football - that I expected everyone to interpret an outbreak of
violence as a signal to stop what they were doing immediately, go home in silence, and think jolly hard afterwards about what had happened. And I suppose I ought to confess here that when, at the theatre once on a hot evening a couple of years later, a chap in the audience for
The Postman Always Rings Twice
had to be removed (and might have been dead), I did not even consider gathering my things to leave; instead I waited in some excitement for the resumption of the play, and was hugely impressed that Val Kilmer and the rest of the cast were able to pick up the action exactly where they had left off. Their self-possession was magnificent, and it earned them an enormous round of applause at the end. However, this is not a fully comparable situation. The man in the stalls had - as it turned out - merely fainted. But even if it had been more serious (as many feared), he had not been knocked unconscious in full view of everyone by a shaven-headed hooligan under the direct malign influence of the action on the stage.

Anyway, the bigger point is, when sport comes face to face with reality, it freaks out. When asked to adopt a sense of proportion (even temporarily), it runs around in circles as if its bum is on fire. In the week following 9/11, when sport came face to face with one of the biggest doses of reality of my lifetime, there was a great deal of anxious soul-searching from the people who write about it. Richard Williams in the
Guardian
summed it up nicely when he wrote that ‘those of us who earn our living from sport instinctively flinch from what feels like the sudden exposure of our essential frivolousness'. It seemed right for Radio 4's
Today
to drop its usual three minutes of larky sports news - but, on the other hand, if you want to argue that
sport has nothing to do with real life, logically it might as well have just carried on as normal. An editorial in the
Observer
argued that if the Ryder Cup were cancelled, sport would thereafter ‘always be considered expendable' - clearly an unthinkable proposition. Meanwhile, less elevated arguments for cancellation were emerging from the golfers themselves. Some of the chaps said some wise things about the humble place of golf in the greater scheme of things; but some of them also made rather less impressive not-on-your-nellie noises about not wanting to put their own precious lives at risk by stepping aboard transatlantic aircraft. Leading the way, Tiger Woods said on his website:

I don't believe this is a proper time to play competitive golf. I feel strongly that this is a time to pause, reflect and remember the victims of Tuesday's horrific attack. I also fear that the security risks of travelling overseas at the present are too great.

Isn't there a rather big step from ‘Golf is unimportant: let us sacrifice our games in full awareness of that fact,' to ‘Golf is so important, oh my God, I might be a target just because I'm really good at it'? Yet several members of the American Ryder Cup team straddled both positions without apparent queasiness. The tall Alabaman Stewart Cink - a young man whose easy, loose-shouldered swing I am always pointing out to people as one of the most beautiful in the game (and it never works, because they conclude I just fancy him) - was the first golfer to be quoted as saying that the Ryder Cup might itself be targeted by terrorists. ‘If someone wanted to strike at America, or
freedom, or capitalism, the Ryder Cup would be a tempting event to hit…I have a wife and two boys and do not want to make them live without a husband and without a father just because I want to play in the Ryder Cup.'

In the end, good sense prevailed, and the event was postponed for a year - but with the extraordinary proviso that the make-up of the teams would not be revised in the interim. What this was meant to prove I never understood (the form of some players dipped dramatically in the next 12 months; other up-and-coming chaps missed their chance to play), but this resolution not to change the teams was presented to us as golf's small way of delivering one in the eye to Al-Qaeda, so nobody asked. At the opening ceremony at the Belfry a year later, on a cool green day in September 2002, both captains solemnly introduced their 2001 teams as if in tribute to 9/11. I suppose they could have painted their noses black as well, but fortunately there was no one around from Formula One to suggest it.

The Ryder Cup actually began its life with a disruption due to world events. It started, if you like, with a pause. The first organised meeting, scheduled for June 1926 at Wentworth in Surrey, is known as the ‘lost' Ryder Cup because it fell foul of the General Strike and went off at half-cock. However, a year later, in 1927, the competition got going properly in Worcester, Massachusetts, and thereafter established a pattern of play that has lasted (so far) for more than eighty years, barring world wars and inconvenient terrorist atrocities. True, major things have changed in its constitution down the years - the size of
the teams, the number of holes played, the number of points competed for, the number of days over which it takes place. Virtually every aspect of the competition has been adjusted over time, but it has now settled at:

Size of each team: 12, plus non-playing captain Number of holes played per match: 18 (it used to be 36) Number of points competed for: 28 (eight on each of the first two days; 12 on Sunday) Number of days: Three

The few key features of the Ryder Cup that have survived intact from its inception are:

It is played every two years.

The two pgas (Professional Golfers' Associations) host it alternately.

It is matchplay (where each hole is won, lost or halved), as opposed to stroke play, where it's the lowest overall shot total that wins.

It is an exciting mixture of paired games and single matches.

It starts with a dedication to the spirit of glorious sportsmanship, then quickly slips into complaint and/or recrimination, and finally ends up in muck, bullets, lifelong animosity, clubs broken across knees, and so on.

The biggest single change to the Ryder Cup's constitution occurred in the 1970s. It was not before time, either.

Until 1977, you see, the us played a team from Great Britain and Ireland whose official blazer might just as well have sported a special crest with ‘Kick Me, Charlie' emblazoned on it in Latin. I am generalising, obviously. There were periods of up and down. But in broad terms, an examination of the history of the Ryder Cup's first half-century reveals the us team politely asking, every couple of years, ‘Hey! Sucker! Your place or mine?' and then delivering a humiliating pasting of sickening proportions. The British and Irish traditionally limped away afterwards, vowed to try harder next time, and sulkily refused to accept that the contest was fundamentally unequal. After an 8-4 thrashing at Palm Springs in 1955, the president of the British pga came over all Churchillian, saying that ‘We are going back to practise in the streets and on the beaches.' In 1961, a chap writing in
Golf Illustrated
said it was always the same at the Ryder Cup: the gb and Ireland players started off overwhelmed by the occasion, ‘and when they come to their senses their opponents are one or two holes to the good'. In 1967, at Houston, America's captain, the great Ben Hogan, secured the outcome of the event even before a stroke was played. At the pre-match dinner he introduced his team with the words, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the finest golfers in the world!' and the British and Irish were so demoralised that they gave up before even touching the soup.

Much as all this was good for the egos of American golfers, it did start to look a bit pointless after fifty years. Which is why, in time for the 1979 Ryder Cup at Greenbrier in West Virginia, years of common-sense campaigning by the competition-hungry Americans finally
bore fruit and the Great Britain and Ireland team was extended to include Europe. This clever decision ultimately turned the Ryder Cup into what it is today: the third most popular sporting event in the world, after the football World Cup and the Olympics. Excellent mainland-Europe players such as Bernhard Langer (German), Jesper Parnevik (Swedish) and Sergio Garcia (Spanish) have played wonderfully in recent Ryder Cups. Back in 1979, however, the decision to extend the catchment area mainly meant that the charismatic young Spaniard Severiano Ballesteros could play against the Americans - although, sadly, at first the main benefit of Seve's inclusion was that the European team could add the heartfelt groan of ‘Ay caramba' to the usual ‘Oh fuck, not again' when they lost convincingly by 17 points to 11.