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 about 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.
I’m always glad that we had that conversation, those nice sports editors and I, because it fixes a moment for me perfectly: a moment when football was just a kind of noise that came from the television in other people’s houses. I knew that some of my friends were married to men whose passion for football was indulged domestically (or so I believed), but it was something that took place behind closed doors; it was easy to turn a tactful blind eye. In those far-off days, football news was rarely in the headlines, or on the front of newspapers, and mainstream television critics such as I were rarely exposed to the game as a subject on the main channels. Reviewing telly since 1991, I had probably seen three significant pieces about football: the first was a very funny drama by Andy Hamilton called Eleven Men Against Eleven (with Timothy West as a club chairman); then there was a documentary about Diego Maradona, focusing on the ‘hand of God’ incident, the significance of which seemed to me to have been absurdly over-exaggerated, given that football was only a game. The third was the now famous ‘Cutting Edge’ documentary on Channel 4 (An Impossible Job) charting Graham Taylor’s last year as England manager, with its hilarious touchline swearing, ghastly scenes of not-qualifying-for-the-1994-World-Cup, and the buffoonish and frustrated Taylor exclaiming, ‘Do I not like that!’ and ‘Can we not knock it?’
What else? I remember my female boss - the literary editor of an academic weekly - once on a Monday morning in the early 1980s saying that she had watched some foot-ball at the weekend, and that she had generally approved of what she saw. ‘You’re kidding,’ I said. (Her usual leisure activities were playing tennis at a rather exclusive North London club and practising the clarinet.) ‘No, it was quite balletic,’ she said, her eyes wide in self-amazement. Apart from that, the footballing event that had impinged most on my consciousness was the Heysel disaster in 1985 - not because I understood how truly awful it was, but because I didn’t. At this time I had a crush on a chap in the office who made a perversely big show of adoring football, especially Italian football; and for some reason I always felt that he was putting this on. I thought he carried copies of La Gazzetta dello sport around just to annoy me (or possibly - which was worse - to arouse the interest of other men). Either way, I did not respect, understand or believe in his passion for football, and I remember a couple of days after Heysel asking him why he was still depressed.
The Times’s idea of sending an agnostic, literary, 41-year-old female survivor of colonic irrigation who’d always minded her own business to cover a bit of football in 1996 has to be set in context. And it’s quite simple, looking back. In the mid-1990s, football was mounting its bid for total domination of British culture - a domination that it subsequently achieved. Nick Hornby’s 1992 book Fever Pitch was responsible for making football respectably middle-class; Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Sports channels (launched in 1990) for flogging football as a seemingly limitless source of home entertainment. Everyone could see that football was breaking out in unlikely places in the 1990s. In the London Review of Books, for example, Karl Miller (the Northcliffe Professor of English at University College London; not the German footballer) wrote a hyperbolic essay on Paul Gascoigne’s World Cup performances in Italia 90, in which he described the flawed-heroic Gazza as, ‘Fierce and comic, formidable and vulnerable…tense and upright, a priapic monolith in the Mediterranean sun.’ At the other end of the mythologising scale, on Friday nights