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 o
f 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?’
As an outsider, I felt that the rules of rugby would definitely benefit from simplification (how about having fewer players?). It also occurred to me that an excellent England reply to the New Zealand or South Sea Island haka would be a rendition of the Birdie Song. Nowadays the boys stare it down while the crowd sings ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ to drown it out. But I still think a camp disco routine originating in the 1980s (with arm flapping) would be a great deal more effective in taking the wind out of their sails.
Cricket
Among sports writers, it is generally agreed that the worst sport to cover is cricket. This has nothing to do with the game itself, just the life-destroying way in which it’s organised, with a national team on tour to the Indian subcontinent for weeks on end, or to the Antipodes, or the West Indies. Such extended periods of travel in exotic lands sound lovely in theory, but it’s an unusual marriage that can survive so many lengthy separations, and divorce is common. One of the big flash-points in the married lives of all sports writers must, I reckon, be the issue of holidays. Once international travel becomes a mere necessary evil, it’s hard to think of it as a source of pleasure. Moreover, once you have been everywhere in the world, the main attractions of marriage and family are bound to be exclusively hearth-related. The end result is that the wife and kids stand no chance whatever of being taken abroad by you.
‘I fancy the Caribbean,’ says the wife, wistfully.
‘Really?’ huffs the sports writer. ‘Do you know what I fancy? I fancy sitting in the garden with this cup of tea.’
‘It’s a long time since I had an exotic rum-based drink,’ sighs the wife. ‘It’s a long time since I had a cuddle with the dog,’ comes the unanswerable reply.
The wife’s chin wobbles. She gathers her children to her skirts and surreptitiously waves a freshly-peeled onion under their noses, so that tears stream down their little cheeks.
‘It would be really nice to stay in a hotel for once,’ she sobs (she and the children have slept in their own beds every night for the past five years).
‘Well, send me a postcard when you get there.’
‘We all think you’re being very selfish!’ says the wife.
‘I’m being selfish?’ he yells.
And so on, and so on, predictably, until the chap finds himself back in the press box in the Windward Islands, staring at his decree nisi and a tattered photo of his kids, sipping his tenth exotic rum-based drink of the day, dreading his hotel, and calculating on the back of an envelope how much of his salary will be left over to rent a small room in Bucks after all the alimony and school fees have been extracted from it at source.
Obviously I was not in this kind of fix myself. While I was sports writing I had a nice boyfriend who was very supportive of the enterprise. The longest I was away was five weeks in France in 1998. Since the boyfriend lived in Yorkshire and I lived in Brighton, he particularly approved of all the northwards driving I was obliged to keep doing. ‘I’ve got Elland Road next week,’ I’d say, and he’d be jolly pleased and start tidying. He often told my friends and relations the droll story of how I had asked him specifically, when we first met, whether he was interested in sport, and had said ‘Thank God’ when he said he wasn’t. I realised that this was his way of pointing out, ever so tactfully, that he had initially signed up for a literary and quite feminine sort of girlfriend who had turned, overnight, into this fixated sports fan who argued with strangers in pubs about the future for English goalkeeping. I did feel bad about this unlooked-for transformation, of course. I did worry - more for his sake than mine, really - that I was turning into a bloke.
However, the funny thing is, even knowing all this recipe-for-a-dismal-life stuff, if I had my time again, I reckon it’s cricket I would go for, because it doesn’t take much to see that cricket is by far the most rewarding game in the long run. It’s not just that, being generally stringy and long of limb, the cricketer conforms to my personal taste in athletic frames (Australia’s lanky Glenn McGrath embodying the ideal). It’s that every match has potential for an enormous and fascinating range of outcomes. The way the game unfolds is simply more interesting than anything else offered by sport. It is designed to reward thought. Maybe it’s the drugs I’ve been taking for this cold, but it seems to me there is a solid-geometry aspect to cricket: every development alters the three-dimensional shape of the game, turns it inside out, flips it round. Ricky Ponting is bowled for 23 (say), and the cubic limits of the possible have to adjust themselves so quickly and radically that you can almost feel the draught. On top of that, from an atavistic point of view, cricket is the spectacle of one lonely bloke at the crease, staunchly facing down a whole pack of eleven other blokes, who surround him and his currently powerless partner like hungry hyenas and have no other purpose than to wear him out and tear him down. But hark at me. A woman who can’t tell her deep square leg from her third man, or her extra cover from her backward point. Stop mainlining the Night Nurse, that’s probably the answer. Stop taking that Night Nurse at once.
While I was on duty for Sport, there was a Test series visit from the Australians in 1997, plus the 1999 cricket World Cup. The World Cup was marked by some stupendous, epic one-day games, and also (sadly) by some quite remarkable post-match pitch invasions. These took the edge off some of the victories, I thought. The players were never able to clap each other on the back and enjoy the moment, because at the second the words ‘That’s it’ were spoken, they had to pull the stumps and sprint to the pavilion, dodging and slipping through a great crowd of spectators charging the other way. I happened to go to the theatre one night in the middle of the tournament, and at the resonant curtain line (‘Go, bid the soldiers shoot’), I felt a momentary impulse to duck under my seat, on the assumption that the audience would dash on stage and steal all the props while the actors fled for safety to the dressing rooms.
But the excitement of the crowds at the cricket World Cup was certainly understandable. Aside from the weird non-event of the final between Australia and Pakistan at Lord’s (a d
odgy business which has never been fully accounted for, in my view), it had all kinds of carnival atmosphere, all kinds of last-over drama, a bit of unseasonal sunshine (it was held in May and June), and some passionate cricketers excelling themselves all over the country and in all areas of the game. The cricketer who made the biggest impression on me, I remember, was the young, scowling, skinny and fascinating Pakistani fast bowler Shoaib Akhtar. This was before Shoaib was officially classed the fastest bowler in the world, but even an ignoramus could see (as she tried not to swoon) that he wasn’t exactly a slowcoach; also that his technique earned his team great results, and that he had magnificent nostrils.
I was sent to several matches, the first a supposed ‘warm-up’ match at Hove between South Africa and Sussex which was rained off completely, and was not a good start. True, I met a lot of very nice South African cricket writers who talked lark dis, and I learned how to use a tricky, newfangled hot drinks machine in the press area - a life skill that has subsequently stood me in good stead. But in terms of raising excitement for the upcoming tournament, there was nothing. Covers were rolled up and then unrolled again. Men in blazers stood under umbrellas with their arms outstretched. Children played baby cricket on the outfield. Spectators stayed shivering in their seats because their bottoms kept the seats dry (there are few things more demoralising in life than getting up for a bit of a walk-round and coming back to a wet seat). There was a smell of beer and chips. I spent the day mostly under cover, fishing for information about the South African team (among them Allan Donald, Shaun Pollock, Hansie Cronje, Herschelle Gibbs) and getting a bit transfixed by the name Lance Klusener for the shamefully irrelevant reason that it reminded me of ‘Lars Porsena of Clusium’ from the once popular reciting poem by Macaulay about Horatius holding the bridge, with its famous thumping rallying cry, ‘Who will stand at my right hand,/And keep the bridge with me?’