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 evening.’ 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.