Get Her Off the Pitch! (5 page)

Yes, some people had paid £750 to be at this event, but it was just a day's work for Sports Writer Truss. Lewis entered the arena through a flame-licked portcullis flanked by skinny blondes done up like Beefeaters - and this time the lengthy procession to the stage was drawn out intentionally. Why Botha chose to wear a white fluffy bathmat for his own walk through the booing crowd at the London Arena, by the way, only the gods of comedy could tell us.
But from the moment he made his entrance, wearing the bathmat in jaunty poncho style with a black knitted bobblehat to top the ensemble, Lennox's chances of knocking him out in the first round started to look extremely good. I assumed Botha intended to look like a white buffalo - this being his adopted soubriquet. But only if he had come out dressed as a rubber duck could the omens for a fifty-fifty contest have been worse. Not that Botha was an unworthy opponent in theory (or even on paper), but because from the moment they stood face to face, he had the look of someone whose torso might be packed to the neck with ‘heart' (not that again), but whose brain was sending the message, ‘Run! Run! Run for your life!'

This was a much less worrying occasion, as you can tell. I had a whale of a time. The battle between Botha's chief internal organs was quite as exciting to observe (by examining the look in his eyes) as the fight between Botha and Lewis.

HEART
: Stay on your feet, Frans. Draw him in. You have very fast hands, don't forget, and a good right hook. Duck, reverse, footwork, come on. Just avoid his left jab, Frans, and you'll be dandy.

BRAIN
: Run! Run for your life!

HEART
: Don't listen to him, Frans. Listen to me. You're a good boxer. You took Tyson to five rounds -

BRAIN
: But he's enormous! And he keeps punching the side of your head!

HEART
: Don't listen.

BRAIN
: Save yourself and flee!

HEART
: Shut up.

BRAIN
: No you shut up.

HEART
: You shut up.

BRAIN
: (
AND CHORUS OF OTHER SENSES
): Quick, Frans. Run! Run for your life!

The end was mercifully swift. Two minutes and 39 seconds into the second round, it was all over. Lewis jabbed Botha, then punched him with the right, and seeing Botha buckle, delivered two more immense blows to send the ‘white buffalo' halfway through the ropes and out of the fight. It was the sort of undignified exit usually associated with two muscular nightclub bouncers with the benefit of a run-up. Lewis, however, delivered it with one punch from a position of rest, and if you've never seen power of such magnitude at close range, I can only report it's worth seeing. The only time I'd seen anything like it before would have been in
Popeye
.

When I stopped writing about sport later in 2000, it wasn't that I was finished with it. Mainly, I was finished with the lifestyle of the sports writer - or, at least, the lifestyle of the middle-aged female sports writer, which (as Alan Bennett once beautifully said of being Prince of Wales) is not so much a job as a predicament. But if I had mixed feelings about sport while I was fully submerged in it, I have even more mixed feelings now that I have been safely back on dry land for over half a decade, blocking my ears to Premiership transfers, refusing to look at points tables, and reading newspapers resolutely from the front to the back, instead of the other way round. My idea of myself
is that I can now identify equally with both sports fanatics and sports agnostics - acting as a kind of human bridge

- but it's not strictly true. There is more than a remnant of Moonie-style thinking still in me, so that when a sports agnostic says that he ‘doesn't like' sport, I think, ‘Ah, but you would if you just knew a little more about it.' There was a time when a man professing not to like football made him tons more attractive to me; now I receive the news with a polite smile and try not to blurt out, ‘Blimey, were you born this negative, or did you have to work at it?' I am the agonised and restless result of a scientific experiment, like the poor, tortured creatures in
The Island of Dr Moreau
. I am neither one thing nor the other. Which is why I feel compelled to look back at those four years in sport and think, ‘Was being persuaded to become a sports writer the best thing that ever happened to me, or should I consider suing the paper for the lasting damage it did me?'

I have certain cool feelings towards sport, of course. I have made up my mind about a few things. I feel, for example, from the fan's point of view, that it wastes one's life, colonises one's brain and wrings the emotions, all in unhelpful ways. It encourages the appalling know-all that abides within us all. It is sometimes stultifyingly dull, although you're not encouraged to say so. I have been all day at a Test match at Headingley and seen only 14 runs scored; I have been at Wimbledon and seen only two points played, leaving the game tantalisingly poised overnight at no sets to none, no games to none, 15 all. One night I paid £27 to see Chelsea at West Ham and the only exciting bit was when I dropped my pencil. It isn't remotely comfy, and the food is often dreadful - and as the chap famously
said about the battle of Waterloo, ‘The noise, my dear! And the people!' Even when it's good, it's agony. In fact, agony is very largely the point.

Yet I look back at Holyfield-Lewis and I am immensely glad I was there. It was a privilege to see this particular bit of history being made, and it doesn't matter to me that I subsequently never watched another fight after Lewis-Botha, and have only just found out for certain that Lewis retired - evidently with dignity and his brain still intact - exactly as he planned, while reigning champion. To many people, this battle between two overpaid and overgrown men in an artificial context counts for absolutely nothing. It is entirely trivial. In a world where real wars are going on, and people suffer under tyranny, what can it possibly matter that Lewis won the fight but didn't get the decision? To other people, the Holyfield-Lewis fight was a landmark event about which they cared deeply. No one keeps stuff in proportion; it's not human to do so. Sport's main claim to significance is that it acknowledges this great human failing, and provides an official outlet for it. Years ago, Boris Becker famously said, after losing at Wimbledon, ‘Nobody died. I just lost a tennis match.' And while some people applauded him for his healthy sense of proportion, it didn't ring remotely true. While I was writing about sport, I was caught on the horns of this dilemma for the whole bloody time. I was like the poor confused jurors in
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
who sit in their jury box, writing emphatically on their little slates, both ‘important' and ‘unimportant', because both words are equally valid.

Towards the end of May 1996, the sports editor of
The Times
asked me out to lunch, which was a bit weird. Sport was another country, as far as I was concerned. At the time, I was 41 years old, had been a columnist and
TV
critic on the paper for five years, and had once written a piece for it concerned specifically with women's apathetic attitude to sport, in which I'd confessed that I routinely tipped the second section of
The Times
(the bit with business at the front and sport at the back) into the bin each morning as it was quite clear that the basic qualification for a reader of this section was possession of a pair of testicles.

It had never occurred to me, by the way, that by expressing this viewpoint I might hurt anybody's feelings. It seemed like a harmless statement of fact. And, in mitigation, I did go on to explain that I was always obliged to retrieve the second section of the paper from the bin later on - with a squeal of annoyance and a pair of tongs - when I suddenly remembered that the arts pages were in there, too. Anyway, when I met sports editor David Chappell and his deputy Keith Blackmore, and they started
off by helpfully reminding me of the column I'd written (Keith said one of his sub-editors was so outraged by it that he had cut it out of the paper and pinned it on a noticeboard), I didn't know what to say. I wondered briefly whether they had been appointed by their colleagues to take me out to a public place and there strike me about the face and neck with rolled-up copies of Section Two.

Whether what subsequently happened to me was an enormous and Machiavellian Grand Revenge on Miss Hoity Toity is a question that I still ask myself. Because, as things turned out, these chaps were to control my life for the next four years and change me for ever. At the time, however, our meeting merely seemed a bit odd, as we obviously had so little to talk about, professionally speaking. For example, they asked me what I knew about the forthcoming ‘Euro 96', and I said, cheerfully, absolutely nothing, never heard of it, but probably something in the sporting line was my present guess. They seemed pleased by my unfeigned ignorance (and helpful attitude), but they nevertheless found it hard to believe. Had I really not noticed that England was about to host football's European Championships? That's honestly news to me, I said; and (no offence intended) not very interesting news at that.

I then politely asked whether this Euro thing took place every year - and it was at that point that Keith rubbed his hands together and ordered another bottle. What did I know about Terry Venables, then? ‘Some sort of crook?' I ventured. Ever heard of Alan Shearer? Nope. Although, in an effort not to sound clueless, I think I mentioned a coach company called Shearings - which might not be strictly relevant (especially as it was, um, a different name).
How would I feel about going to some matches and writing about the championships from this blissfully innocent point of view, Keith said. And I said, well, I suppose I could. Journalists do all sorts of peculiar and unnatural things in the line of duty don't they? Personally, I had once undergone colonic irrigation for
Woman's Journal
. Football could hardly be worse than that.

I'm always glad that we had that conversation, those nice sports editors and I, because it fixes a moment for me perfectly: a moment when football was just a kind of noise that came from the television in other people's houses. I knew that some of my friends were married to men whose passion for football was indulged domestically (or so I believed), but it was something that took place behind closed doors; it was easy to turn a tactful blind eye. In those far-off days, football news was rarely in the headlines, or on the front of newspapers, and mainstream television critics such as I were rarely exposed to the game as a subject on the main channels. Reviewing telly since 1991, I had probably seen three significant pieces about football: the first was a very funny drama by Andy Hamilton called
Eleven Men Against Eleven
(with Timothy West as a club chairman); then there was a documentary about Diego Maradona, focusing on the ‘hand of God' incident, the significance of which seemed to me to have been absurdly over-exaggerated, given that football was only a game. The third was the now famous ‘Cutting Edge' documentary on Channel 4 (
An Impossible Job
) charting Graham Taylor's last year as England manager, with its hilarious touchline swearing, ghastly scenes of not-qualifying-for-the-1994-World-Cup, and the buffoonish and frustrated
Taylor exclaiming, ‘Do I not like that!' and ‘Can we not knock it?'

What else? I remember my female boss - the literary editor of an academic weekly - once on a Monday morning in the early 1980s saying that she had watched some foot-ball at the weekend, and that she had generally approved of what she saw. ‘You're kidding,' I said. (Her usual leisure activities were playing tennis at a rather exclusive North London club and practising the clarinet.) ‘No, it was quite balletic,' she said, her eyes wide in self-amazement. Apart from that, the footballing event that had impinged most on my consciousness was the Heysel disaster in 1985 - not because I understood how truly awful it was, but because I didn't. At this time I had a crush on a chap in the office who made a perversely big show of adoring football, especially Italian football; and for some reason I always felt that he was putting this on. I thought he carried copies of
La Gazzetta dello sport
around just to annoy me (or possibly - which was worse - to arouse the interest of other men). Either way, I did not respect, understand or believe in his passion for football, and I remember a couple of days after Heysel asking him why he was still depressed.

The Times
's idea of sending an agnostic, literary, 41-year-old female survivor of colonic irrigation who'd always minded her own business to cover a bit of football in 1996 has to be set in context. And it's quite simple, looking back. In the mid-1990s, football was mounting its bid for total domination of British culture - a domination that it subsequently achieved. Nick Hornby's 1992 book
Fever Pitch
was responsible for making football respectably middle-class; Rupert Murdoch's Sky Sports channels
(launched in 1990) for flogging football as a seemingly limitless source of home entertainment. Everyone could see that football was breaking out in unlikely places in the 1990s. In the
London Review of Books
, for example, Karl Miller (the Northcliffe Professor of English at University College London; not the German footballer) wrote a hyperbolic essay on Paul Gascoigne's World Cup performances in Italia 90, in which he described the flawed-heroic Gazza as, ‘Fierce and comic, formidable and vulnerable…tense and upright, a priapic monolith in the Mediterranean sun.' At the other end of the mythologising scale, on Friday nights from 1994 to 1996, David Baddiel and Frank Skinner's laddish and brilliantly bathetic series
Fantasy Football League
(BBC2) placed football in the same friendly bracket as alternative comedy. Football's traditional associations - male, tribal, anti-intellectual, hairy-kneed, working-class, violent, humourless, misogynist, foulmouthed, unfashionable - were being undermined from all directions.

Given all these signs and portents, it was naturally felt - by clever
zeitgeist
specialists such as Keith and David - that Euro 96 might be a tipping point. Match attendances, which had sunk to terrible lows in the 1980s (Tottenham had been playing to crowds of around 10,000) were already recovering thanks to the formation of the Premier League and the investment from television - but, basically,
Après Euro 96, le deluge
. In the context of all this, I believe my own small journey into football for
The Times
was a clever editorial decision: I would be a trundling wooden horse freighting a few new readers into the sports section. It was also, however, a deliberate and rather rash mind-altering
experiment, familiar from films such as
The Fly
and (more recently)
The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
, and I have sometimes wondered subsequently whether I ought to sue. No one thought about the consequences, least of all me. We merely thought: let's connect the brain of this apathetic 41-year-old literary woman to a big lot of football, maximise the voltage and then see what happens. If she starts getting up during matches to yell, ‘Can we not knock it?' then the conclusion is clear: football can appeal to bloody anyone. If she starts describing Gazza as a priapic monolith, however, things have probably gone too far, and it may be necessary to reverse the polarity.

But I agreed to do it, so there you are. And my first act as special know-nothing Euro 96 correspondent for
The Times
was to go out and get a book. I acted on the advice of a child, which seemed appropriate. ‘How should I prepare for Euro 96?' I said. And the child said, ‘Get a sticker book.' So I bought a special Euro 96 sticker book in W.H. Smith's and the astonishing thing was: it was only a pound. Imagine my disappointment, however, when I took it home, shook it, and no stickers came out. Apparently you have to buy the stickers separately at considerable expense - something the child had neglected to tell me. But never mind. I was now committed to Euro 96. I had invested in it. And in the build-up to the event, I persevered with my research. I bought a magazine-sized glossy bbc guide to the championships, for example, which was packed with pictures of completely unfamiliar long-haired men doing historic things for their countries in very, very brightly coloured football shirts. Evidently, quite a few of these chaps played for English teams while artfully retaining
their foreignness for international contests. I wondered how this could possibly work in practice. I also wondered, seriously, whether it ought to be allowed.

I also read every word in the supplement that came with
The Times
, bored to tears, and spent a long time studying the cover picture of Les Ferdinand with no shirt on, trying to memorise his chiselled features for later identification. (Since the injured Les played no part in England's Euro 96 games, this turned out to be a waste of time.) Having nothing else to do until the games began, I pored over the results tables waiting to be filled in, speculating on their use. There were columns headed ‘
W
', ‘
D
' and ‘
L
', for example, which I immediately deduced were abbreviations. Win, Draw and Lose was my guess. However, after ‘
W
', ‘
D
' and ‘
L
' came columns for ‘
F
' and ‘
A
', and here I drew a blank. I searched the page for a key, but there wasn't one. Damn. I couldn't work it out.
F
?
A
? Even if it was to do with the number of goals scored - which seemed likely - how did that get to be represented as two columns? Dear, oh dear, there was so much to learn.

The good news was that the opening match (to which I would be going) was England v Switzerland. Phew. What a good idea to start things off playing a nation known not only for its keen neutrality and cleanliness, but also for its extreme tardiness in giving women the vote. In all my years of not really listening to sports news, I had never heard of England fans having particular antagonistic feelings towards the Swiss - not even for their disgraceful suffrage record. Moreover, according to my Euro 96 guide, Switzerland were not one of the great teams of the world, either, so they would probably be an utter walkover on the
field, thus ensuring a nice successful opening game for the home side. At this stage, it had not occurred to me that the 15 teams competing alongside England in Euro 96 had all needed to qualify for the event - or, indeed, noticed that many, many other European countries were not represented at all. I never asked, ‘Shouldn't Sweden be playing in this?' or ‘Where is the Republic of Ireland?'. I just thought it was fitting that small countries with no chance at all were playing alongside big footballing nations such as Germany, England and Italy. It seemed to have been nicely thought out; someone high up in football had obviously sat down in the winter with a yellow legal pad, a sharp pencil, a cup of coffee and a biscuit, and selected this bunch of interesting countries to play against each other - a bit like planning a really big dinner party, but with less at stake if it went wrong.

Meanwhile, I waited. At the last minute,
The Times
supplied me with an intriguing electronic device: a special bt pager decorated with the Euro 96 logo which would, they promised, thrillingly vibrate to inform me whenever anything important happened (in case I missed it, I suppose). For the time being, however, this gadget was inert, lifeless - even when prodded. I wrote an introductory piece explaining how I had achieved my pristine ignorance of football over a lifetime of loudly running the bath, boiling kettles and singing tunelessly to the cats (‘La la la, What's for breakfast today, La la la, Spot of Whiskas, La la la') during the sports bit on the
Today
programme at 7.25 a.m. and/or 8.25 a.m. Then I finalised my preparations by asking my friend Robert to come with me to Wembley, knowing that he had an interest in football, and
assuming he would snatch my arm off for a ticket. What a let-down, therefore, to discover that, while he would certainly be happy to escort me to England-Switzerland, Robert was a Sheffield Wednesday fan primarily, and not over-keen on international fixtures.

So that was it. On the fine morning of Saturday June 8, 1996, I set off for Wembley from Brighton station clutching a pair of tickets and a dormant pager, wondering whether I'd be able to recognise Les Ferdinand with his clothes on, imagining the tournament mainly in terms of social dining, and with a slightly under-excited friend in tow. Not great clues, any of them, to the fact that my world was about to be turned upside down.

I'll mainly skip over the England-Switzerland game. All I can say is that I was jolly pleased when Alan Shearer scored the opening goal halfway through the first half, partly because it made my pager go off with a very definite buzz (wow), and partly because everyone said he'd gone 21 months without scoring for his country, which seemed like a pretty good reason for him not to be selected for the team, actually, if you were being ruthlessly practical about it. When Switzerland equalised from a penalty in the second half, it was a bit confusing for spectators in the stadium, because we had no idea what had caused it (evidently a hand-ball from Stuart Pearce was the transgression), but the final 1-1 result - while apparently a great big downer for England fans - did not feel like any sort of injustice. England had been disorganised and had run out of ideas quite quickly; after the long-drawn-out palaver
of the loosely-themed opening ceremony, and the excitement of the opening goal, the afternoon sort-of fizzled out, and there were long, yawning patches of pointless play that took place amid virtual silence, as if the whole event had suddenly been submerged under water.