But though a few more hairs fall out, this is the only sign of the strain he is under. For Zidane is the Pete Sampras of football. The whistle blows. He makes a short run, fires it into the roof of the goal, into Baia’s right top corner. And France are in the final, and on this night in June in the year 2000, Zinedine Zidane is the best footballer in the world.
I did love the football, then. But I still don’t regret giving it up as a job. On the day in 2000 that Kevin Keegan resigned - and I spent the afternoon watering the sleeve of Brian Glanville with my wet salt tears - one of the chief sports writers said to me, out of the blue, ‘You were right about Keegan.’ Five words. Five rather kind words. But I get quite tearful recollecting them because of the magnitude of what they signified. They meant that, logically, even if I hadn’t just resigned from my job, I was finished. Oh my God. As those words were spoken, all my ambitions as a sports writer sort-of evaporated and rose out of me, like the soul leaving the body. It was like something out of a fairy tale - a fairy tale neatly illustrative of the cruel ironies of life. All this time I had wanted to be accepted by the proper sports writers, you see; but since it was my entire raison d’être to barge into their world without ceremony and write only the sort of stuff they would despise, acceptance was out of the question. Being despised had been awful, and I had hated it. However, what turned out to be far harder to take was one of the big boys giving me an unexpected pat on the back on a day when I was emotional enough already. Having someone say ‘You were right about Keegan’ like this was unbearable. It meant that I had gained a bit of respect from the people I worked with, but at what cost? At the cost of finding out, on my very last day on the job, that I had failed in my main objective, which was never to write anything that a proper sports writer would approve of.
Oh well. Having returned to the non-sports-writing world, I am pleased to say that I can now attend the theatre without feeling weird because the audience doesn’t moil about, and sing offensive songs, and keep standing up to get a better view, and chuck stuff at the stage. So there are parts of me that have clearly recovered fully from the experience. But I am mostly very proud of having been a sports writer, and grateful that I was given the chance to do something so extraordinary - and I can be quite sharp with anyone who is snobby about sport, that’s for sure. Because people can be very snobby on this subject, did you know? They think that it’s an inferior matter suited only to inferior minds. They also seem to think they will be fatally contaminated if exposed to someone else’s enthusiasm, so they block their ears and hum a passage from Handel’s Agrippina until the threat has gone away. I suspect intellectual insecurity lies behind this narrow-mindedness; or at least a rather loathsome fear for reputation. Either way, I find, increasingly, that I want to punch such people in the nose. I have already mentioned the friend who dropped me when I started writing about football - even though she’d known me for several years when I didn’t. Before she dropped me, she did a curious thing first, too, which I have pondered ever since. She presented me with a collection of Hugh McIlvanney’s football columns with the high-handed words, ‘I’ve taken advice, and apparently everything you’ll need to know is in here.’
I often wonder how she would have coped delivering 900 words on the whistle. This is reprehensible in me, I know; it is sheer vanity. But whenever I think of all those deadlines I met from cold, noisy, cramped press boxes, I can’t help thinking, ‘Not everyone could have done that. Some of these namby-pamby literary novelist types most certainly couldn’t have done that.’ Now that my everyday working environment is like all those other ‘Writers’ Rooms’ they show in the Guardian on Saturdays - a quiet corner of the house with a window I don’t look out of; a desk surrounded by heaps of writerly junk; a clock, a phone, a plate with toast crumbs, and a cat on a cushion - I am grateful that I was tested in the fire of football, and I think (rather sternly) that everyone who claims to be a writer should be put through it too. Start your piece at half time. Remember there are no action replay facilities, and no commentary, and that the person sitting next to you happens to hate you on principle. You may need to block out some swearing, and of course someone has nicked all the Yorkies. There is no electricity in the press box, and your laptop has a limited battery capacity. There isn’t room for a notepad next to the computer, your feet have turned to ice, and snowflakes keep settling on your eyelashes. You have 15 minutes to get started before play recommences, and then a further 45 to finish, during which period the story of the game (and therefore the thrust of your piece) will change - and even reverse - minute by minute, turning on players being sent off, scoring or assisting goals, diving, fighting, getting substituted, or scoring decisive last-minute penalties against the run of play. Well, deliver on deadline like this a few dozen times, and I think you will be justified in believing there is nothing (as a writer) you cannot do.
When I turn up to cover the golf at the Open every July, I get quite sentimental. I feel I’m coming home. Golf isn’t brutal like the footie, and it never was. They have women’s lavatories and everything. Now that I’ve been on the scene for so long, I feel genuinely welcome. Although the venue rotates through different seaside courses, I think I’ve been to most of them before - and besides, the big white press tent is a familiar space, with its long desks facing the enormous yellow scoreboard, and the same rather improbable job lot of dining chairs upholstered in red velour, which the old hands stack up in twos on arrival to attain a decent height to write from. Before the event each year, I remind myself who won last time, and who won the time before that (there is a small danger I will be expected to know this), and I drive up early in the week so that I can roam the course on practice days, get my picture taken for the paper in unflattering blustery conditions, achieve broadband connection, and try out my water-proofs. The days are long, and involve a great deal more exercise than I’m used to, and I always get an angry red stripe round the back of my neck because I don’t have clothes with collars. But the work is stimulating and engrossing, the event is beautifully structured, and my colleagues are not only clever, funny and well-informed, but they are even quite tolerant of all that bloody outdoor survival kit I pile up round my chair.
So this is where I will leave you, I think. At the Open, on a fine day, with half a ton of stuff strapped to my back, binoculars at the ready, crouching behind some gorse so as not to distract the players. From the tee, an almighty crack-whzzz announces that Tiger Woods has taken his shot. ‘It’s going left,’ says one of my colleagues, and I roll my eyes, Gromit-fashion. How can he possibly have seen the ball? But then, on the radio, they confirm that, yes, it did go left, and I let out a short scream. As we all scramble forwards over the undulations and tussocks towards the green, I make a squiggly note on damp paper that will be of bugger-all use to me later on, and resist the urge to offer anyone a cup of cocoa from the thermos or a go with my defibrillator. There isn’t much time for reflection here, but I have to admit, it is at times like these, as I travel inside the ropes parallel with one of the greatest sportsmen in the world, that I am overcome with the sense of privilege and awe, and can’t help imagining some future scene: of me saying to some hospital carer on my deathbed, ‘I used to be a sports writer, you know.’ And her patting me on the hand and saying, patiently, ‘Of course you did, dear. Of course you did.’
By the same author
With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed
Making the Cat Laugh:
One Woman’s Journal of Single Life on the Margins
Tennyson’s Gift
Going Loco
Tennyson and His Circle
Eats, Shoots & Leaves:
The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
The Lynne Truss Treasury:
Columns and Three Comic Novels
Talk to the Hand:
The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life
(or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves for Children:
r /> Why, Commas Really Do Make a Difference
A Certain Age:
Twelve Monologues from the Classic Radio Series
The Girl’s Like Spaghetti:
Why, You Can’t Manage Without Apostrophes!
Twenty-Odd Ducks:
Why, Every Punctuation Mark Counts!
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: Illustrated Edition
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Fourth Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB www.4thestate.co.uk Visit our authors’ blog: www.fifth estate.co.uk
Copyright © Lynne Truss 2009
FIRST EDITION
The right of Lynne Truss to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2009 ISBN: 978-0-007-34298-3
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Lynne Truss, Get Her Off the Pitch! How Sport Took Over My Life
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