Get Her Off the Pitch! (14 page)

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 Open 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).

The young Tiger Woods had played at the Scottish Open the previous week - as US Amateur Champion - and there had been quite a kerfuffle about him, but my new friends warned me to be suspicious of the hype when he turned up at St Andrews. They reckoned he might be a flash in the pan, and that the big-boned British amateur Gordon Sherry would probably amount to more than Woods in the long run. (I still have hopes this might come true.) The big news was that John Daly won the Open that year. We would have preferred to see Rocca triumph, but the mega-hitting Daly was undeniably exciting to watch. We all went ‘Ooooh!' like an old-fashioned advert for fireworks whenever Big John slugged the ball. As someone who had so far managed to knock the ball along the ground a maximum of twenty-five yards (using a driver), I was naturally lost in admiration for Daly's crack-whizz 300-yard shots. I couldn't wait to get out there again, to grip it and rip it just like Big John. Which is why, when I got home to Brighton, I immediately called up a local golf course and arranged to have some lessons.

And that was when I was forced to accept that all those old prejudices of mine did have some foundation in reality, after all. When I first turned up at the golf club, I was hanging around in the pro shop in advance of my lesson, fingering the knitwear and trying not to scream, and two members introduced themselves. One was a woman whose
husband had collapsed with a heart attack on the course the previous week, and she had dropped by this morning to return his motorised trolley, with many thanks for everyone's kindness. Whether the motorised trolley had accompanied her husband to surgery wasn't clear, but anyway it was back now, and the husband was in recovery. As she extended a welcoming hand to me, her first, rather startling words were, ‘Are you thinking of joining us? Do you
have
a husband?' (She said this as if she strongly suspected the answer was no, and that I wouldn't get membership without one.) The other member keen to say hello was a man who claimed to be an airline pilot, but didn't ask me what I did. Without preamble, he said warmly that he was all in favour of women members sharing the tee equally. Scarcely knowing what he was talking about, I said, ‘Oh good.' ‘Yes,' he said, barely able to contain his amusement. ‘I mean, fair's fair. Men can have the tee from nine in the morning till nine at night; and women can have the rest.' Shortly after this the lanky pro arrived, and we strolled out to an airy practice ground where I told him - in between gaily topping balls with a lofted club again - that I wasn't feeling terribly comfortable with the culture of this place already, and he said, to my relief, that he couldn't stand the members either, and was hoping to leave quite soon.