Get Her Off the Pitch! (20 page)

I thought the Grand Prix was preposterous. Whereas in all other sports, there's a reason for the writers to go outside and watch it for real (instead of on the
TV
), at a Grand Prix you'd have to be mad. Even when the cars zoomed right past our press box above the pits, it was noticeable that none of the blokes tore themselves from their screens to run over and give the drivers an encouraging wave. In the end, I left the press room and found a high windowsill in an out-of-the-way ladies' lavatory from which I could peer out at a segment of faraway track and glimpse the cars for real while listening to a radio commentary - but it didn't add anything valuable to the experience beyond a stiff neck from the draught. Everything in motor-racing was about sponsorship and conspicuous wealth, and I loathed it for pretending to be about anything else. Everything had ‘Seudaria Ferrari Marlboro Asprey Shell
Goodyear Pioneer TelecomItalia
NGK
arexons
SKF USAG
brembo
TRB
sabelt
BBS
' written on it, including the drivers. The best thing about the day was that Michael Schumacher's big end went. I have no recollection of who won. I do remember the traffic control system afterwards which directed you for miles at glacial speeds down country lanes to a b-road and then didn't tell you which one it was. Motor-racing was not for me, I told the office on Monday. ‘We noticed,' they said, and never sent me to anything engine-related again.

Horse-racing was a different matter. I cheerfully loathed horser-acing too, but only because being a surprise female guest of the racing press garnered the sort of reaction you'd get if you turned up to do a striptease in a mosque. ‘She's not writing for
us
,' one of the chaps broad-mindedly explained to another chap (and how I loved that third-person treatment). ‘She's writing for the Hampstead luvvies.' Honest amateurism was clearly not a quality much embraced by men of the turf, and naturally I could respect that. But it was a shame, because racing had lots of appeal otherwise. Those beautiful animals, for a start. The bewildering speed with which one race followed another. The opportunity to win £37.50 without deserving it. The chance to wear a broad-brimmed hat in the line of work. The endless circuit of down to the paddock, out to the bookies, back to the stands, and up with the binoculars. In particular I loved the brain-teasing aspect of studying form under pressure

- using the race card and all the newspapers - which reminded me of those old logic puzzles in which Peter has
three friends, Rebecca has red hair but doesn't eat nuts, and Julian is friends with Peter but failed to catch the 10.56 from Paddington. You could spend your whole life (and people do) trying to evaluate the different sorts of information available about horses running in the same race. Tippex Joy was a disappointment last time out; Red Bucket likes the going soft; Business Class is a one-time frustrating maiden; Mouse Mat Muesli never wins in months with an ‘r' in them (but this is June); Council Flat is owned by Sheikh Mohammed; and Simon's Moron is a ‘stayer'.

I won't go into how unpleasant it was in the press box, but you can understand why the racing press would have a certain Masonic air. They are pundits, these blokes; their job concerns divination - and it's well known that people in the oracle profession prefer to form secret societies and to keep their juju dark. A chap who writes about horse-racing will do the usual journalistic job of writing features about owners and trainers, and he will also report the races afterwards, but his main job, obviously, is to get on a rocking horse every night at home, with his eyes closed in a meditative trance, and then rock backwards and forwards until he reaches a state of frenzy and yells out the name of the winner of tomorrow's 2.45 at Newmarket. In no other branch of sports writing are the chaps judged on how well they predict results. In racing, it's everything. Naïve to a fault, I remember asking my boss whether racing correspondents were allowed to place bets themselves. I wondered whether this was properly consistent with the job of advising others. But betting turns out not to be a sacking offence, not by a long chalk. What my boss told
me, in fact (and this came as quite a big shock to Little Miss Pollyanna), was that a professional racing journalist who didn't add at least £100,000 to his salary from bets each year wasn't a chap worth employing.

Under the heading of ‘didn't enjoy, didn't understand, and didn't enjoy not understanding', I think the worst experience was a trip to Paris to see basketball. I suppose I needn't go into the logistics of getting to and from the Palais Omnisports at Bercy during a transport strike. You know all about that irksome stuff by now. I needn't tell you that the check-in staff at the hotel were emphatic I was booked for one night only, when I needed to stay for two, because I'm honestly not banging on about that any more. In theory the basketball event looked very interesting, and I spent my time on the outward Eurostar journey swotting up on the differences between nba and fiba rules - about the amount of time on the ‘shot clock', for example - and trying very hard to care. I tried to memorise terms like ‘burying a jumper' and ‘pump fake'. I tried to imagine skywalking. A thousand journalists were due to attend this event, apparently. The 13,000 seats of the Palais Omnisports had sold out. Paris was very excited. In a championship sponsored by McDonald's, basketball teams from Europe and the wider world (but not the usa) were to play each other in an ‘open' knockout competition, and in the final stages the winners would be pitted against none other than Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls - who would, of course, make short work of beating the living pants off them.

By good fortune, at the event I found myself sitting next to a very well informed American man with a fantastic job. He was the European scout for the Cleveland Cavaliers, which meant he lived in Florence (Florence!) and his only responsibility was to keep an eye on all the beanpole-shaped young Yugoslavians currently playing basketball all over Europe, and occasionally approach one of them to ask whether he'd ever fancied wintering in Ohio. The preponderance of Yugoslavians was very noticeable on the team sheets at the Palais Omnisports that day. Teams were ostensibly from Barcelona, Paris, Argentina, Italy and Greece, yet virtually every player was pale, with a very long face, and had a surname ending in ‘-ic'. I asked the scout about this shot-clock thing. He said it was important. He also drew diagrams of burying a jumper and so on. We discussed that excellent documentary film
Hoop Dreams
. The challenge for the Americans today would be in dealing with zone defence, he explained. Under nba rules, a player marks an opponent; he is not permitted to defend in a general kind of way. But in this competition, zone defence would be allowed. This would give an advantage to the Europeans.

So I was properly up for a day's worth of basketball. Each match being 48 minutes, I reckoned I could concentrate that long on this alien game. I furrowed my brow and prepared to be swept along by the action. Which was where I made my big mistake, because the infuriating thing about basketball is that it no sooner starts than it stops again; then it re-starts and stops, re-starts and stops, restarts and stops. If you have an attention span of any length whatsoever, it is a kind of mental torture. Even during the play you can't pretend that the game has its own organic
momentum, because irritating count-down music is played the whole time, shoes make ear-splitting
squeak
noises on the polished floor, you feel rushed and bamboozled - and then someone calls for a time-out (arbitrarily, as far as I could see) and the game is mystifyingly suspended for precisely 90 seconds while acrobats come on, and some pop music blares, and mascots clown around, and small boys with mops clear the sweat off the playing surface. My brain really couldn't cope with all this, and nor could my patience. With all these interruptions, each match represented the longest 48 minutes I had ever endured. It occurred to me that those of us who can watch a whole 45 minutes of football
in one go
ought really to congratulate ourselves for what it says about our superhuman powers of concentration.

It was great to see Michael Jordan, of course. One of the French papers had announced that having Michael Jordan in Paris was better than having the Pope: it was ‘God in person'. Those who had hoped to see Jordan's two pretty famous Chicago Bull team-mates Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman were disappointed, because Pippen was injured and Rodman was ill. (The Cavaliers man was gutted about Pippen, and said I ought to be gutted too.) But looking on the bright side, their absence may have prevented further blasphemies about the Holy Trinity, and I suspect Jordan did not resent being left alone in the lime-light in any case. For he was indeed like a god, compared with everyone else. It was impossible for the other players literally to resemble pigmies because they were all eight feet tall, but in all other respects besides height, pigmies is what they relatively were, when seen beside the colossus
of Michael Jordan. Evidently he wasn't even trying very hard, but he ran and soared and made graceful plays (and
squeaked
), always with the ball somehow miraculously adhering to his horizontally outstretched palm.

And there was statistical evidence for his supremacy, if you don't believe me. In the course of the final against Olympiakos Piraeus, which the Bulls won by 104 points to 78, Jordan was responsible for 27 points, scoring 11 field goals for 22 of them. But I resent even writing this down, to be honest, because the thing I hated most about basketball was that it was all about numbers. The clock ticked down, the points ticked up, statistics kept pressing themselves on your attention. And all the while that maddening damn music played, driving you out of your mind. I found myself adding the number of Jordan's defensive rebounds to the number of his offensive rebounds, just because it seemed the right thing to do. And I sat there pining for a good old straightforward game of footie. I remembered how an American friend had said an odd thing when I'd taken him to his first football match and apologised that there didn't seem to be a scoreboard. ‘Will you be
OK
?' I'd said. And he had replied, somewhat scathingly, ‘I think I can keep track of the number of
goals
.' Well, having watched the basketball, all was now explained.

The final game I didn't understand and didn't enjoy much either was rugby. This may come as a surprise, when all women are supposed to be fantastically turned on by the sheer heft of the rugby-playing physique, but I can only protest that a meaty male thigh shaped like an upended
lightbulb has never done a thing for me. Naturally, I always felt bad about not warming to such an important national sport, played by amenable popular heroes who sometimes go on to become stars of reality television, but there was an insuperable obstacle to enjoyment in the case of rugby, which was to do with the plain fact that, as far as I could see, it was a game that no one watching it fully understood, because that would entail having the mystic ability to read the mind of the ref.

Every few seconds the game would stop for one side or other to be penalised. No one could tell you why. ‘Oooooh, offside, probably,' they sometimes said, but it was clear they were bluffing. Isn't this a basic flaw in a spectator sport? Shouldn't something be done? I loved the atmosphere at rugby matches, and could appreciate the toughness of the players, but it drove me nuts that the game turned so often (and so significantly) on rulings that were accepted by all and sundry as unfathomable. You just have to trust the ref, you see. I saw one game between England and Italy in a downpour in Huddersfield where there were 47 penalties. Forty-seven. In 80 minutes. What was that all about? But no one else minded. ‘I played rugby myself for years and I still don't understand it!' the chaps said, whenever I asked what the hell had happened now. In football, when a player commits a foul and a free kick is given, one knows who to blame and can even evaluate the damn-fool reasoning that made him do it. In rugby, there's a load of pushing and then a whistle is blown. What did the ref see? What happened? Will we ever be allowed to know? The fact that the players always obey the ref in rugby is significant, I think. Because my suspicion is, they don't have a clue
about what's going on either, which leaves them no grounds for objection. Only the ref knows what has occurred. The entire effing game is played for the benefit of its officiator.

Nowadays at least the referee wears a microphone and is obliged to explain himself for the benefit of people watching at home. One hears him telling players which rule they've infringed; he dresses down 20-stone giants as if they were 11-year-olds, saying he doesn't want to see any more of that kind of nonsense, does he make himself clear? Thus, I suppose, the true star of the show is duly acknowledged - but it surely makes things even worse for people in the crowd. In my day the ref had to perform internationally-recognised hand gestures to signal his reasons, so if you could be bothered to study his body language, you stood a (small) chance of interpreting fragments of mime. But they weren't self-evident, I must say. Peering through binoculars, one would discover the ref gesturing with open palms, fingers pointing downwards. What did that mean? Well, what it looked like was ‘Oops, I dropped my tray.' There was another gesture I spotted that involved stroking one hand up and down the inside of the opposite arm, as if to say, ‘And I still can't get rid of this rash.' A third seemed to involve the miming of setting doves free (‘Fly, my little one!'). None of this was helpful in following the game.

In 1999, of course, there was the rugby World Cup. I expected it to win me over, but it didn't. I got quite bored, and I wasn't the only one. It was generally thought to have been too drawn-out, to lack drama, and to lack much decent offensive play. Plus England got knocked out in Paris by that South African with the golden boot, and the final
between Australia and France at Cardiff was largely boycotted by the disappointed Welsh (the crowd was top-heavy with South Africans and Kiwis who had booked their seats in a state of hubris). The memorable result of this mix-up was that Shirley Bassey (star of the pre-match entertainment) had to walk to her little stage in virtual silence, when she had come out of the players' tunnel with her arms out, expecting wild, spectacular applause. The Millennium Stadium hadn't been quite ready in time, and the pitch got scabby. In short, there were many reasons to complain. Personally, I don't remember the details of a single match I saw - and I went to five, including the South Africa-Australia semi-final at Twickenham and the final. I just remember yelling ‘Pass it wide!' miserably, week after week, at chaps who knew more about it than I did. ‘Why don't they pass it wide?'