Get Her Off the Pitch! How Sport Took Over My Life Read online

  Over the following week, conspiracy theorists tried to unpick the judging decision, convinced that there had been skulduggery. Nothing was ever proved. The American judge, Eugenia Williams, upheld that she scored the fight the way she saw it, even in giving Holyfield the fifth round. When shown the round again, she admitted she’d made a mistake, but argued that her view had been obscured by photographers. The British judge, Larry O’Connell, maintained he had handed in his scores round by round, and was surprised that these agglomerated scores had amounted to a draw. Putting it in context, it seems that iffy judging decisions occur all the time in boxing, which is why trainers so strenuously urge chaps like Lewis to finish off opponents when they get the chance, to put matters beyond dispute. But I will never accept that it was Lennox’s fault that he didn’t win at Madison Square Garden. If the draw decision wasn’t downright corruption, then it was wilfully bad organisation. With so much at stake, they should have employed a more experienced judge than Mrs Williams. But hark at me. It wasn’t Holyfield who turned into a crushed old man that night in Madison Square Garden: it was me. I muttered and railed. If I’d known how to do it, I’d have spat on the floor. I had fostered fond illusions about the nobility of boxing for only two or three days at the outside, but now those illusions had been shattered, I felt as cynical and embittered as the chaps who had inwardly wept about this stuff for years and years and years.

  Rob and I walked back up 7th Avenue, discussing events and trying not to have our faces torn off by the freezing wind. I got to bed around 2.30 a.m., and went to sleep still clutching the fight stats, which turned out to be quite a good idea, as I was woken an hour later by a call from my boss in London, who had got up early to watch the fight (around 4 a.m. local time) and then gone straight to the office in Wapping in an excited state of mind. It was now only 8.30 a.m. in London, but he was raring to go, and already scheming to get the story on the front page of Monday’s Times. So I read him the stats, made some coffee and started writing my column. It had been a comfortable week for the writing, by and large. The London first-edition deadline being 6.30 p.m., I had needed to file by 1.30 p.m. EST each day, which meant I could write (comfortably and in private) at the hotel in the morning, generally about things that had happened the day before. I had written about the sparrings, the weigh-in, Don King, and of course quite a lot of technical stuff about hooks, jabs and uppercuts in case the readers weren’t quite sure of the difference. I had also taken an interest in an undercard fight between ‘Ferocious’ Fernando Vargas (from the us) and Howard Clarke (UK) - ‘Ferocious’ being the rather terrifying 21-year-old IBF junior middleweight champion, and Clarke a likeable 31-year-old Englishman from Dudley who was fighting - adorably - under the sponsorship of ‘Fonz Leathers’, the shop he worked in. Clarke’s was the most heart-warming story on the night, as it happens. He went four rounds before being knocked out by Vargas, and I saw him having his dinner afterwards in a backstage area, fully dressed, evidently unharmed and completely thrilled to bits. He had earned £18,000 in a single night, and had acquitted himself better in the ring than he could ever have dreamed. His was the kind of benign boxing story not often made into a major motion picture, so it was all the more a privilege to hear about it.

  As I started writing in the early hours of Sunday morning, I realised that this was to be not only my last piece about the fight, but possibly my last piece ever about boxing. This was strange and sad, but I tried not to dwell on it. Life would have to get back to normal - and very quickly indeed, as it happened. At the back of my mind I was trying to adjust to the peculiar fact that I had bought tickets (for me and a resolutely non-sporty New York friend) to see Sophocles’ Electra at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre that afternoon, which I now saw required an absurdly large mental leap from one culture to another that might easily leave me falling short, scrabbling for a bit of vine to hold on to, and dangling over a bottomless ravine. As a person, I am nothing if not efficiently compartmentalised, but this was ridiculous. My friend wouldn’t even want to hear about Lewis and Holyfield. She was an art historian. And I was full of this fight. My ears were still ringing with it, and I was still hot with indignation. The only way I could smooth this transition was to remind myself that this particular Greek tragedy would be considerably more violent than the thing I had watched last night. It is noticeable in Electra, for example, that when the father-avenging Orestes gets his mother Clytemnestra against the ropes (so to speak), his bloodthirsty sister Electra does not call out, ‘No need to finish her off, Orestes! You’re winning on points. Any fool can see you’re winning on points!’

  I duly went to the theatre that afternoon, and it was as confusing for me as I had expected - especially when only one hour’s sleep separated me from events at Madison Square Garden. Zoë Wanamaker was fantastic as Electra, I have to say; and with a very original haircut and Iron Curtain trench-coat to boot. The production was great, and I liked the translation. All in all, Electra very nearly succeeded in putting all thought of the Holyfield-Lewis stinkeroo decision out of my still-racing mind. But the audience was the trouble, ultimately: it was so damned quiet and inert compared to the fight crowd. I squirmed in my seat at how sedate it all was. Throughout the play, I sighed and harrumphed, clenching and re-clenching my leg muscles. How can people just sit here like lumps, with all this interesting and semi-justified slaughter going on? Did the ancient Greek audiences sit mute like statues? I’m sure they didn’t. This lot didn’t even boo when Clytemnestra appeared. They didn’t even jump up and down when the first blood was shed (offstage, of course), or shout ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it!’ when the carnage was described. There were no half-naked showgirls coming on between scenes in stilettos, either, holding up bits of card - which wouldn’t add much to the cost of the production, surely, and would really brighten things up. Blimey, was I in a strange perceptual state. I wanted to be back at the Garden, yelling ‘Fix!’ and ‘Bastards!’ and here I was, in a small, darkened auditorium, strenuously empathising with a cropheaded grudge-nurser who’d been crying vengeance for going on 3,000 years. The injustice of Holyfield-Lewis might not be of mythical proportions, but it happened only last night. If anyone should be wailing and demanding attention from the gods, surely, it was poor, poor Lennox Lewis?

  As it happened, however, I had two further brushes with boxing. When ‘Holyfield-Lewis II’ duly took place eight months later in Las Vegas, I stayed up all night to watch it on TV. Lennox finally got his undisputed title, and I got fully re-animated in instant-know-all mode, especially when the commentators kept saying, ‘Lennox has forgotten his left jab!’ which really incensed me. ‘What nonsense,’ I kept saying. If Lennox wasn’t using his left jab, and was mixing it more, it was because he knew that battering Holyfield’s head at arm’s length was a strategy that had failed to impress the judges on a previous occasion. ‘Lewis knows what he’s doing!’ I started to yell at the telly. ‘Is it likely that he has forgotten his left jab, sir, when you and I have not?’

  Then, in July 2000, I was sent to see ‘The Homecoming’ - not the Pinter play, alas, but Lewis’s triumphant return to the London Arena, in a fight against Frans (or Francois) Botha, a scared-looking South African who never stood a chance, quite honestly, and was knocked half out of the ring in the second round. Feeling remotely comfortable in fight surroundings was even more surreal than feeling like an alien, I discovered. I waved hello to the chap from the Sun. I recognised lots of boxers, all done up in tuxedoes and dicky-bow-ties. There was a moment before the fight when Garry Richardson (of Radio 4) tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to get the attention of boxing promoter Frank Warren (who was sporting a blood-filled eye at the time, rumoured to be the outcome of a disagreement with Mike Tyson). Anyway, I tapped Frank Warren on the shoulder and said, indicating behind me, ‘Frank, sorry; Garry wants a word.’ And I did feel very proud at that moment. Going up some stairs with the chap from the Guardian, we passed George Foreman going down. I think he even said ‘Good ev
ening.’ But I decided not to stop him and say, ‘I don’t suppose you remember this, Mr Foreman, but in 1974 in Zaire, Muhammad Ali really took you by surprise.’

  Yes, some people had paid £750 to be at this event, but it was just a day’s work for Sports Writer Truss. Lewis entered the arena through a flame-licked portcullis flanked by skinny blondes done up like Beefeaters - and this time the lengthy procession to the stage was drawn out intentionally. Why Botha chose to wear a white fluffy bathmat for his own walk through the booing crowd at the London Arena, by the way, only the gods of comedy could tell us. But from the moment he made his entrance, wearing the bathmat in jaunty poncho style with a black knitted bobblehat to top the ensemble, Lennox’s chances of knocking him out in the first round started to look extremely good. I assumed Botha intended to look like a white buffalo - this being his adopted soubriquet. But only if he had come out dressed as a rubber duck could the omens for a fifty-fifty contest have been worse. Not that Botha was an unworthy opponent in theory (or even on paper), but because from the moment they stood face to face, he had the look of someone whose torso might be packed to the neck with ‘heart’ (not that again), but whose brain was sending the message, ‘Run! Run! Run for your life!’

  This was a much less worrying occasion, as you can tell. I had a whale of a time. The battle between Botha’s chief internal organs was quite as exciting to observe (by examining the look in his eyes) as the fight between Botha and Lewis.

  HEART: Stay on your feet, Frans. Draw him in. You have very fast hands, don’t forget, and a good right hook. Duck, reverse, footwork, come on. Just avoid his left jab, Frans, and you’ll be dandy.

  BRAIN: Run! Run for your life!

  HEART: Don’t listen to him, Frans. Listen to me. You’re a good boxer. You took Tyson to five rounds -

  BRAIN: But he’s enormous! And he keeps punching the side of your head!

  HEART: Don’t listen.

  BRAIN: Save yourself and flee!

  HEART: Shut up.

  BRAIN: No you shut up.

  HEART: You shut up.

  BRAIN: (AND CHORUS OF OTHER SENSES): Quick, Frans. Run! Run for your life!

  The end was mercifully swift. Two minutes and 39 seconds into the second round, it was all over. Lewis jabbed Botha, then punched him with the right, and seeing Botha buckle, delivered two more immense blows to send the ‘white buffalo’ halfway through the ropes and out of the fight. It was the sort of undignified exit usually associated with two muscular nightclub bouncers with the benefit of a run-up. Lewis, however, delivered it with one punch from a position of rest, and if you’ve never seen power of such magnitude at close range, I can only report it’s worth seeing. The only time I’d seen anything like it before would have been in Popeye.

  When I stopped writing about sport later in 2000, it wasn’t that I was finished with it. Mainly, I was finished with the lifestyle of the sports writer - or, at least, the lifestyle of the middle-aged female sports writer, which (as Alan Bennett once beautifully said of being Prince of Wales) is not so much a job as a predicament. But if I had mixed feelings about sport while I was fully submerged in it, I have even more mixed feelings now that I have been safely back on dry land for over half a decade, blocking my ears to Premiership transfers, refusing to look at points tables, and reading newspapers resolutely from the front to the back, instead of the other way round. My idea of myself is that I can now identify equally with both sports fanatics and sports agnostics - acting as a kind of human bridge

  - but it’s not strictly true. There is more than a remnant of Moonie-style thinking still in me, so that when a sports agnostic says that he ‘doesn’t like’ sport, I think, ‘Ah, but you would if you just knew a little more about it.’ There was a time when a man professing not to like football made him tons more attractive to me; now I receive the news with a polite smile and try not to blurt out, ‘Blimey, were you born this negative, or did you have to work at it?’ I am the agonised and restless result of a scientific experiment, like the poor, tortured creatures in The Island of Dr Moreau. I am neither one thing nor the other. Which is why I feel compelled to look back at those four years in sport and think, ‘Was being persuaded to become a sports writer the best thing that ever happened to me, or should I consider suing the paper for the lasting damage it did me?’

  I have certain cool feelings towards sport, of course. I have made up my mind about a few things. I feel, for example, from the fan’s point of view, that it wastes one’s life, colonises one’s brain and wrings the emotions, all in unhelpful ways. It encourages the appalling know-all that abides within us all. It is sometimes stultifyingly dull, although you’re not encouraged to say so. I have been all day at a Test match at Headingley and seen only 14 runs scored; I have been at Wimbledon and seen only two points played, leaving the game tantalisingly poised overnight at no sets to none, no games to none, 15 all. One night I paid £27 to see Chelsea at West Ham and the only exciting bit was when I dropped my pencil. It isn’t remotely comfy, and the food is often dreadful - and as the chap famously said about the battle of Waterloo, ‘The noise, my dear! And the people!’ Even when it’s good, it’s agony. In fact, agony is very largely the point.

  Yet I look back at Holyfield-Lewis and I am immensely glad I was there. It was a privilege to see this particular bit of history being made, and it doesn’t matter to me that I subsequently never watched another fight after Lewis-Botha, and have only just found out for certain that Lewis retired - evidently with dignity and his brain still intact - exactly as he planned, while reigning champion. To many people, this battle between two overpaid and overgrown men in an artificial context counts for absolutely nothing. It is entirely trivial. In a world where real wars are going on, and people suffer under tyranny, what can it possibly matter that Lewis won the fight but didn’t get the decision? To other people, the Holyfield-Lewis fight was a landmark event about which they cared deeply. No one keeps stuff in proportion; it’s not human to do so. Sport’s main claim to significance is that it acknowledges this great human failing, and provides an official outlet for it. Years ago, Boris Becker famously said, after losing at Wimbledon, ‘Nobody died. I just lost a tennis match.’ And while some people applauded him for his healthy sense of proportion, it didn’t ring remotely true. While I was writing about sport, I was caught on the horns of this dilemma for the whole bloody time. I was like the poor confused jurors in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland who sit in their jury box, writing emphatically on their little slates, both ‘important’ and ‘unimportant’, because both words are equally valid.

  Football and the Thrill of Knowing a Little Bit

  Towards the end of May 1996, the sports editor of The Times asked me out to lunch, which was a bit weird. Sport was another country, as far as I was concerned. At the time, I was 41 years old, had been a columnist and TV critic on the paper for five years, and had once written a piece for it concerned specifically with women’s apathetic attitude to sport, in which I’d confessed that I routinely tipped the second section of The Times (the bit with business at the front and sport at the back) into the bin each morning as it was quite clear that the basic qualification for a reader of this section was possession of a pair of testicles.

  It had never occurred to me, by the way, that by expressing this viewpoint I might hurt anybody’s feelings. It seemed like a harmless statement of fact. And, in mitigation, I did go on to explain that I was always obliged to retrieve the second section of the paper from the bin later on - with a squeal of annoyance and a pair of tongs - when I suddenly remembered that the arts pages were in there, too. Anyway, when I met sports editor David Chappell and his deputy Keith Blackmore, and they started off by helpfully reminding me of the column I’d written (Keith said one of his sub-editors was so outraged by it that he had cut it out of the paper and pinned it on a noticeboard), I didn’t know what to say. I wondered briefly whether they had been appointed by their colleagues to take me out to a public place and there strike me ab
out the face and neck with rolled-up copies of Section Two.

  Whether what subsequently happened to me was an enormous and Machiavellian Grand Revenge on Miss Hoity Toity is a question that I still ask myself. Because, as things turned out, these chaps were to control my life for the next four years and change me for ever. At the time, however, our meeting merely seemed a bit odd, as we obviously had so little to talk about, professionally speaking. For example, they asked me what I knew about the forthcoming ‘Euro 96’, and I said, cheerfully, absolutely nothing, never heard of it, but probably something in the sporting line was my present guess. They seemed pleased by my unfeigned ignorance (and helpful attitude), but they nevertheless found it hard to believe. Had I really not noticed that England was about to host football’s European Championships? That’s honestly news to me, I said; and (no offence intended) not very interesting news at that.

  I then politely asked whether this Euro thing took place every year - and it was at that point that Keith rubbed his hands together and ordered another bottle. What did I know about Terry Venables, then? ‘Some sort of crook?’ I ventured. Ever heard of Alan Shearer? Nope. Although, in an effort not to sound clueless, I think I mentioned a coach company called Shearings - which might not be strictly relevant (especially as it was, um, a different name). How would I feel about going to some matches and writing about the championships from this blissfully innocent point of view, Keith said. And I said, well, I suppose I could. Journalists do all sorts of peculiar and unnatural things in the line of duty don’t they? Personally, I had once undergone colonic irrigation for Woman’s Journal. Football could hardly be worse than that.