‘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.’
Still, there was a positive aspect to all this. By the time the actual sporting action commenced, it was - relatively - heaven. When you’ve just spent an hour explaining to a jobsworth that you don’t have a parking voucher because the only way to obtain a parking voucher is by going inside, which involves parking first, it is bliss to look at a team sheet, a blank scoreboard and a bit of grass with lines on it and think, ‘Here at last is something organised. I know where I am with this.’ I went to some rum and improbable events in my time, but however unfamiliar I might be with the rules of darts, or croquet - or indeed those of quite big sports such as cricket or rugby union - the rigidly circumscribed comings and goings of an unfolding game stood in wonderful contrast to the random petty annoyances and difficulties presented by real life outside. I remember Simon Barnes telling me (the first time I met him) how sport always got you this way, and that he’d once been immediately sucked - quite against his will, apparently - into the drama of a lumberjacking competition involving axes, logs, a lot of frantic chopping and an enormous shower of wood-chips.
I soon realised he was right. They sent me to Olympia for the show-jumping once, and on the undercard (as it were) was a dog agility competition that turned out to be sheer drama. There was a Great Dane called Blake who was clearly capable of all sorts of top dog agility, but would tantalisingly weigh up the pros and cons of each obstacle before deciding to take it on. For the impartial spectator, whose only interest was in sporting tension, this was dynamite. Would Blake go up the seesaw and down the other side? Well, it was touch and go. With precious seconds ticking by, Blake would stop first and give it some serious doggy thought. And then, with a visibly resolute, ‘Yep, OK, I’ll do that!’, off he would bound, to huge encouraging applause from the crowd. What about this little tunnel, Blake? Yes? No? Come on, boy, what do you think? ‘Yep, OK, I’ll do that!’ What I loved about Blake’s approach to his sport was the way he repeatedly excercised (and indeed embodied) the sometimes forgotten principle of free will. Stan Collymore used to do the same thing in the footie, didn’t he? But without the equivalent charm.
However, the best gig I got, I reckon, in the whole four years, was the BDO World Darts Championship at Frimley Green on a cold weekend in January 2000 - and not only because the round trip from my home in Brighton to Frimley Green (in Surrey) was so agreeably short. No, it was just that it had everything you could possibly require from a sporting event, if you are prepared to leave out fresh air and athleticism. From the moment I arrived for the Saturday semi-finals (Ronnie Baxter v Co Stompe from the Netherlands; Ted Hankey v Chris Mason), I knew I was going to love watching this stuff. It took place in a large, packed, carpeted and artificially-lit function room usually used for knees-ups and weddings. It was billed as sport but the blokes had corny nicknames and silky capes and ‘walk-on music’, like professional wrestlers, and the place was full of families in holiday mood. The stage was spangly, and there were big screens on either side. The all-day bar was emphatically open, and there was a range of high-cholesterol hot food for sale in a spot-lit buffet. Since Holland produces many top-ranking darts players (such as Stompe), there were many larky Dutch people present - although, sadly, none with root vegetable adornments.
And since darts is one of the few sports the bbc can still afford to cover, the dearly beloved Garry Richardson was in attendance - a circumstance that has never failed to raise my spirits.
It was larky, this semi-finals day, but it was also very serious. These players had already played three rounds to reach this point. Darts turned out to have the same sort of organisational palaver as boxing, with rival outfits staging their own world championships, and attempting to lure players into separate leagues - so there was the honour of the BDO (British Darts Organisation) at stake here, on top of everything else. By the time play commenced, I’d learned a bit about the players (Co Stompe used to drive a tram!) and was avid for oche action. And I had already worked out some of darts’ potential advantages over other spectator sports - which mainly concerned how straightforward it would be to officiate. No room for the players to contest any line calls here, for example. No need to consult a snickometer. No hunting for lost darts in the rough. No dodgy penalties awarded by blind-sided refs. Darts is, in fact, a doddle of a game, save for the lightning mental calculations entailed when suddenly everyone in the room knows that if you need 158, you quickly subtract 3 × 17, then 3 × 19, and then 50. Another interesting fact about darts is that, whereas in cricket ‘throwing’ is sometimes illegal, in darts it is positively encouraged. In fact, without throwing, there is absolutely no game to speak of.
To my shame I’d never heard of the semi-finalists before, even though young-gun Chris Mason had apparently been making a name for himself all week, charmlessly casting aspersions about the other players. Instinctively, I supported the Dutchman, partly because he wasn’t the usual shape for a darts player (his nickname was ‘The Matchstick’), but mainly because I found it very touching that he used to drive that tram. But the first semi-final, between Stompe and Ronnie Baxter, was in all respects the lesser contest of the day, and Stompe didn’t put up a great fight. Matchstick-like, he snapped under the strain. It was the best of nine sets (each set consisting of five legs), and Baxter took his winning five sets rather easily and gracefully (the eventual score was 5-2). I didn’t particularly warm to Baxter, nicknamed ‘The Rocket’, but I did admire his choice of walk-on music. Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ was very well suited to his style of play. But although there was skill in this match, there was little drama. There was tension, but not much. At the end of the first semi-final, I still had no idea what glories a good game of darts had to offer.
The second semi-final pitched Ted Hankey (‘The Count’) against this young chap Chris Mason (‘The Prince of Dartness’). Having a nickname when you’re a darts player seems to be non-negotiable, by the way, but the unsmiling Hankey took the joke further than most. Pale and balding, he played up his resemblance to Dracula, chucking vampire paraphernalia to the fans, grimacing, and occasionally transmogrifying into an immense black dog (oh all right, he didn’t go that far). Hankey was the number five seed in this championship; Mason was unseeded, but the bookies’ favourite. From a superficial look at the two players, I jumped to the happy conclusion that here was a classic true-grit contest between age and youth - the tight-lipped old gun-slinger teaching some manners to the young, twitchy rodeo punk; John Wayne v Montgomery Clift. Someone would end up humiliatingly headfirst in a rain barrel at the end of this, I thought, and it probably wouldn’t be Hankey. It was at this point that I checked the player information and found that Whipper-Snapper Mason was 30, while Old Geezer Hankey was 31, so bang
went that idea.
The game was again best of nine, and Mason led from the start, on account of superior finishing, but from the beginning the standard of play on both sides was obviously exceptional. This match was to set the record (I think it still holds it) for the number of perfect 180s scored in a nine-setter - Hankey and Mason threw a total of 38 between them. But Hankey was having trouble with that old rule about ending with a double, and by the interval, Mason was up 3-1 and looking pretty smug. When Hankey retrieved a set to make it 3-2, Mason quickly upped his game again and re-established the two-set margin. With the score standing at 4-2 (i.e. just one set from defeat), Hankey looked washed out, stricken, deflated - a bit like the way Dracula does when someone carelessly parts the curtains. He sweated lot. He looked deathly pale. He put his hand inside his silk shirt and adjusted a medallion. Was he turning to dust in front of our very eyes? He really didn’t look 31, by the way. I simply couldn’t get over that.
But just when Mason was looking unbeatable, Hankey fought back - and all one’s hopes about true grit were rewarded. In the seventh set, he started to put pressure on the younger man, and Mason responded by making mistakes and talking to himself ! Mason didn’t have what it took! Thud, thud, thud came those relentless 180s from Hankey. Thud, thud, thud. People were leaping to their feet to yell their appreciation. Hankey won the seventh set and then the eighth, pulling level at 4-4. By this time the Kid was seriously rattled. He threw wildly and talked to himself even more. And suddenly he was trailing! He’d been two sets up, and now he was fighting to stay in the match. Honestly, a Borg v McEnroe five-setter was only ever so slightly better than this, in the wider sporting scheme of things. Come on, Ted. Show him how it’s done, son. This is all about character. You know you can do it. In the final set, Ted won the first leg, and the second. In fact, suddenly, hang on, Ted required only 45 to win the match!
We held our breath. He shot a five, and then - oh no
- missed the double 20 with both remaining darts. Oh my God, don’t you play darts for a living, Ted? This gave Mason a chance, but he likewise blew it. The pressure was beginning to tell on everybody. People in the audience were dancing with agony. Ted tried for the double 20 again. He got a single! He tried for the double 10. He got a single there as well! With the last dart, he tried for the double five. Some of us couldn’t bear to watch. Dividing five is notoriously difficult in a world consisting only of simple integers. If he missed the double again, he’d have to wait his turn and then go for a one and a double two. And then, if he got only a single two…The world stood still. Get the double five, Ted, for God’s sake. Get the double five. (He did.)
‘Tragedy’ by the Bee Gees was played for the benefit of Mason, who didn’t need reminding: he was openly in tears. Dealing with defeat was not something Mason had any ambitions to be good at - and he wasn’t. On the telly afterwards, he told Garry Richardson, ‘I was the best player here this week, but my name wasn’t on the pot.’ So no old Corinthian nonsense about the best man winning on the day, then. But it had been a brilliant match, and in people’s memories I believe it has quite overshadowed the final, which was played the next day. A complete let-down, the final was, a whitewash, with Hankey beating Baxter 6-0 in the fastest BDO final on record (46 minutes). Personally, I never went to darts again, but I felt I didn’t need to, after an experience as perfect as that. According to the internet, all these blokes are still playing, but not at the same level, and not all for the same organisation.
It’s quite interesting, though. Chris Mason renicknamed himself, for example. Nixing the rather clever ‘Prince of Dartness’, he became ‘Mace the Ace’. He has been in trouble with the law a couple of times - once earning himself 180 hours of community service; and you can’t help thinking that this particular figure was picked for a quasi-humorous reason, when the bench knew it was dealing justice to a professional darts player. Meanwhile, Ronnie Baxter jumped ship from the BDO to the PDC (Professional Darts Corporation) and his world ranking (at time of writing) is 15, which isn’t bad. But there is tragedy in Baxter’s story, too: in the 2008 Las Vegas Desert Classic, he threw his first ever nine-darter in a qualifying round, and it wasn’t televised. Co Stompe stuck with the BDO until 2008, and then joined the PDC, as a result of which he dropped down the rankings. After 2000, the furthest he got in the World Championships was the last 16. Finally, Ted Hankey won the title again in January 2009, bringing him - suitably - back from the dead. In the intervening years he had gained a reputation for complaining about crowd behaviour and for quarrelling about whether the air conditioning should be switched off; in 2008, at the BDO World Championships, he received a warning for punching the dartboard, and told Ray Stubbs on the bbc that he was considering quitting the game. You can put a lot of this stuff down to chronic vitamin d deficiency, but I suspect he doesn’t want to know.
Some sports were slower and more reluctant to reveal their treasures, sadly. They didn’t all have the simple thud, thud, thud, hurrah of championship darts. There is a story beloved of sports writers (and it’s told about different people, so its origins are probably now lost) of one sports writer saying to another before an equestrian three-day event, ‘I think I’m going to enjoy this,’ and the other one saying, ‘Ah, you can enjoy it; I have to understand it.’ Part of my remit was to strike an interesting triple variant to this usual professional axis of enjoying and understanding sport: I had to a) enjoy the fact that I didn’t understand it; b) understand exactly how far I didn’t understand it; and c) understand and enjoy the fact that I couldn’t enjoy it as much as people who understood it. This was naturally quite tiring, and sometimes it couldn’t be managed. Sometimes I merely got grumpy and said, ‘I’m not enjoying this and I don’t understand either.’ Attending just the one Grand Prix at Silverstone, for example, I wanted to gnaw my own leg off, I hated it so much. For once, I had no fellow-feeling with the spectators; I thought they were mugs. A well-meaning man in a draughty cafeteria tried to strike up a conversation with me by saying, ‘Great day out,’ and regretted it instantly. ‘How is this in any way at all a great day out?’ I snapped at him. ‘You can’t see anything, mate,’ I said. What’s the point of a spectator sport where you can’t see anything? Even if you’ve paid hundreds of quid for a decent grandstand seat to sit in (open to the elements), you still have to watch on a big screen and listen to a commentary, just to have a vague idea of who’s winning. Lesser mortals who had paid a mere 75 quid for admission (Yes! £75!) got nothing at all. They had merely bought the privilege, it seemed, of wandering around this puddly and bedraggled former air-field, trying to negotiate a route avoiding all the unexplained roped-off areas, in search of a free bit of miserable chain-link fence to watch a bit of track through.
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,’ t
hey 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.