Sport, say those who write about it, is only the toy department of daily journalism. They don’t really mean it. Some of the finest wordsmiths in what may still be called Fleet Street earn a crust by writing about games, and the people who play them. In some cases — the late Ian Wooldridge comes to mind — they transcend their specialism. People bought the Daily Mail to read Wooldridge, just as they buy it now to read Quentin Letts.
In recent years sports journalism has been invaded by outsiders who, to borrow a phrase from Paul Hayward, one of its finest practitioners, display nothing more than ‘strident ignorance’. They don’t attend events, or know very much about the performers, yet hand out opinions like parking tickets. Rod Liddle, a colourful writer, can get away with it. Others, who seem terribly pleased with themselves, struggle to hold a tune. Perhaps the worst current example is the former rugby international, Brian Moore, whose long-winded attempts to write a general sports column in the Telegraph read like the jottings of a provincial Edwardian solicitor.
Not all interlopers from the field of play are unwelcome visitors. The two outstanding cricket correspondents on national titles, Mike Selvey and Michael Atherton, played for England, Atherton as captain in 54 Tests. But the best sports writers are, almost without exception, specialists who have spent years of close observation refining their craft: Stephen Jones on rugby, Patrick Barclay on football, Simon Barnes and Richard Williams on many things, Patrick Collins on virtually everything.
Lynne Truss came to this largely male world from a cosy billet in arts and features, where reporters do not file ‘on the whistle’. To say she was wet behind the ears is only a slight exaggeration. Her book is full of niggles — not knowing where football grounds are in major cities, rarely feeling settled in press boxes, the sort of things that television critics tend not to worry about. Yet she adapted, and, by the time she bade farewell to her new colleagues, she had won most of them over.
Not every one. Of Brian Glanville, the magnificent football writer — and, like Truss, novelist — she noted ‘a haughty intellectual condescension’, a quality which may surprise scores of reporters, once young and green, who can testify to his generosity. Old-fashioned chap that he is, Glanville has always assumed that those who attend matches know something about the game. Unsurprisingly, the Truss experiment did nothing for him.
Like Manuel in Fawlty Towers, Truss claimed to ‘know nothing’ when the Times sports desk approached her in 1996 with a view to sending her to the European football championship, which was being staged in England that summer. Just what we’re looking for, they said. Write from an outsider’s perspective. Tell those readers who do not open the paper at the back pages about the batty world of sport, and do not feel afraid to display your ignorance.
She liked it so much she stayed for four years, by which time the joke had run thin. This memoir, recollected in tranquillity, written extremely well, and often very funny, works better than her daily pieces did, for a reason so obvious it hardly needs to be made. If you insist on making a virtue of ignorance, or ‘curiosity’, you can do it only once: one Open, one Wimbledon, one prize fight, one FA Cup final, one Lord’s Test, one Six Nations championship, one Derby.
For, as Sondheim wrote: ‘Once, yes, once for a lark. Twice, though, loses the spark’. And Truss’s reporting did lose its spark, as anybody could have told the people who deployed her (as a colleague at the time, and an admirer of her work, I feel obliged to say that I did). After all, if the tables were turned, and an outsider had been dispatched to cover opening nights at Covent Garden and the National Theatre, the results would have been equally predictable.
The most revealing chapter in this getting of sporting wisdom recalls, to borrow a line from another great New York songwriter, Larry Hart, ‘a prize fight that isn’t a fake’. Except it was. Lennox Lewis was denied an undisputed world title at Madison Square Garden by cack-handed judging, and the author’s bewilderment opens a little daylight on the mad, bad world of John O’Hara’s ‘sweet science’.
She is good on golf, the sport she came to enjoy the most, but is slightly sniffy about cricket, the game best suited to a writer’s temperament, because the chaps, a civilised bunch, tended to talk about Mahler. Bruckner, too, I can exclusively reveal. It’s best not to let sport take over your life and, deep down, she knew that all along.
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