Get Her Off the Pitch! (18 page)

But he not only had to wait for the celebrations to die down; the crowd then yelled abuse at him. Nowadays, as part of the generous campaign to forget Brookline and not point the finger at anyone (because it just makes the us players defensive, and doesn't achieve anything), Olazabal is often quoted as saying, in a saintly way, that had the boot been on the other foot, who knows whether the Europeans would have behaved similarly. At the time, however, that was not what he said. At the press conference afterwards, he congratulated the Americans but said that ‘What happened today should not have happened. We are playing a match and we should show respect to each other and what happened was not the right thing to do.'

When people refer darkly to the events at Brookline in 1999, this is what they are talking about. When the pgas tore their raiments in agony in September 2001, deciding whether or not to postpone, they knew that the event under consideration was more than just a straightforward golfing competition, it was potentially a bloodbath. Those events on the 17th at Brookline had shown us what happens when you mix golf with war, start meaning it, and leave yourself with no way to get back. On both sides the memory was fresh, and people were still very sore about it. It no longer cut much ice to console oneself with, ‘Yes, but Jack Nicklaus did say that fantastic thing to Tony Jacklin back in 1969.' It is a harsh thing to say, but postponing the competition by a year and then playing it in the shadow of a terrorist atrocity was, as it turned out, precisely what was required. It lent a bit of perspective. I've never heard anyone say this, but perhaps the horrific events of 9/11
were responsible, in an ill-wind kind of way, for saving the Ryder Cup.

My main memory of the 2002 Ryder Cup at the Belfry is of being in the wrong place at the wrong time - so no change there, then, I hear you say. But it's the chief reality of on-the-spot golf-writing that there is no optimum place from which to view an unfolding golf tournament, except in front of a telly, listening to Peter Alliss sending private warm wishes over the public airwaves to the party with fairy cakes going on today for the 90th birthday of the expro Sandy MacHoots at the Old-Bastard-on-the-Wold Golf Club. (I do wish he'd stop doing that.) If you opt to follow a match for 18 holes - which involves walking several miles, crouching motionless in the long grass when required to, and jotting down umpteen yardages and club selections - you must do it in full knowledge that in terms of getting a useable story you probably might just as well have stayed at home and groomed the cat. The story of the day will arise wherever it chooses to, and is impossible to secondguess. On the Sunday at the Belfry in 2002, I was assigned to the match between Lee Westwood and Scott Verplank, which looked all right on paper, but turned out to be an odd, dreamlike affair, with no story in it for anyone concerned. Basically, Westwood didn't look like winning, by contrast to most of his team-mates, who were blazing a trail towards an eventual victory of 15
¹
/
₂
points to 12
¹
/
₂
. He won a hole here; lost a hole there. Elsewhere on the course - as tantalising distant roars frequently attested - all was going fabulously well for Europe, and I was very
glad just to hear about it on Radio 5 as I plodded round regardless. The virtually unknown Philip Price was beating Phil Mickelson. Jesper Parnevik was heading for a half with Tiger Woods. Padraig Harrington was slaughtering Mark Calcavecchia.

As always in these circumstances, I used no journalistic initiative. I stuck with Lee. Where a better journalist assigned to this match would have dashed off to get a better story (and all the rest of them did), I didn't have the heart. And to be honest, it has now become almost a point of pride for me to pick a naff match on the Sunday of the Ryder Cup. At Valderrama in 1997 I went out with Ian Woosnam, who lost to Fred Couples by one of the most horrific margins ever - 8 and 7. In 2002, I got Westwood. And in 2006, at the K Club in Dublin, in a drenching downpour, I was allotted Sergio Garcia, who immediately started losing so catastrophically to Stewart Cink (five down after seven holes) that John Hopkins - knowing from experience how stolid I can be in such circumstances - came out to intercept me after the front nine, pulling me out of the squelching mud, and officially taking me off this awful non-story. I wouldn't have minded, but the bloody rain stopped the moment I went indoors. Anyway, at Louisville, Kentucky (2008), the pattern was finally broken. Noticing my jinx effect, perhaps, my bosses begged me to keep away from the players altogether on the Sunday, so I stayed in the tent with all my outdoor paraphernalia piled untidily around my desk, and wrote about the very real mental agony of having to revise my prejudices concerning Ian Poulter (still a bit of a git, but incontrovertibly the most impressive player on the European team).

I missed going out, of course. One of the reasons I love covering golf is that you get to walk round with the players. I mean, you don't chat with them or anything. You don't say, ‘I'd aim for that
TV
tower if I were you,' or ‘I was surprised you chose the wedge.' Your presence is something they blank out, which is fair enough. I did once help David Duval look for his ball in some gorse, but I'm pretty sure I was invisible throughout, and I kept my distance anyway on account of that awful gobbing. Generally you stay near to the ropes, and you have to kneel or crouch when the shots are taken, so the spectators can see over your head. It is no stroll, however. Ambling is not an option. While the golfers stride down rolling velvety fairways, we hacks have to scramble over tussocks of long grass and occasionally slip and fall over (to cheers from the crowd). The marshals who control the crossings will often wait for the players to pass and then, just as we approach (yelling ‘Wait for us!'), they open the ropes, so we have to fight our way through crowds of spectators, streaming from one side of the fairway to the other. We are often a fairly merry band, however. We have a laugh. ‘Ten foot putt?' we say, peering towards the green. ‘Twelve,' says someone. ‘Fifteen,' says another. I am usually listening to the radio commentary, so I tend to pass on what the commentator has said (‘He says eight'), so we can all agree a number. My own method of calculating distance on the green is to imagine laying a number of six-foot golfers end to end, but I wouldn't dare mention this to the guys, obviously, because of the scope for innuendo.

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.

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 Frimley 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.

‘You can't come through here,' they said. Even when I'd found the right bloke at the right gate, he would scan his list, tell me I didn't exist, and send me to the box office, or club reception, or the gift shop - and they in turn would send me to the chip van or the players' entrance (or whatever), and they in turn would finally send me back to the man at the gate. This was why I generally turned up at least two hours early for any event - to allow for all the time-wasting misleading bollocks, which could somehow never be averted, just endured. What I discovered about human nature during this period was that there are many people who cannot say ‘I don't know' when that's the truth of the matter. For reasons of pride, perhaps, it is beyond them to do it. They think it is better to make something up, because it makes you go away. ‘Is there a press car park?' you might ask, and instead of confessing their cluelessness, they'd stroke their jaws as if in genuine thought and then say, ‘Right. You need to go back to the A437,
OK
? Then take a left for half a mile, then go round the back of the old brewery, and then follow the signs. There'll be a shuttle.' Half an hour later, when you returned with the tragic news that there was no truth in any of that, they first of all wouldn't recognise you, and then they'd say, ‘Really? Well, whatever. You can't come through here.'