KICKING OFF

Sport has always been part of my family’s life.  My great grandfather was a county tennis player, his son - my grandad - played tennis until he was in his 80s and my dad, now in his 70s, still plays tennis, runs regularly on his treadmill, and swims three times a week. 
I played for various teams at school and love a good yell at the telly when the Olympics or World Cup is on. My husband claims to have two left feet but he runs a lot and he’s a very loyal football fan - whether that’s for Stoke City (I know!) or for the local clubs our sons play for. But I don't know why we do it.  So I was really interested to read Lynne Truss’s book “Get Her Off The Pitch” about her inauguration into the world of sports reporting - as someone who knew nothing about the subject prior to that experiment.  She made her first foray into the profession by writing sports columns for The Times from 1996-2000 and was later shortlisted for Sports Writer of the Year in 1997.

Previously best known for giving the red card to those who fail to punctuate their sentences correctly, as author of “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”, she says this new book is "a mixture of memoir, essay, whingeing after the fact, and recollected drama."

She said: "When I met the sports editor and his deputy to discuss their Euro 96 idea (that she write about sport from an 'unknowing' viewpoint), they were very, very impressed - and not entirely in a good way - by the extent of my apathy and innocence where football was concerned.

"I asked myself - Does sport educate the emotions, or just make you miserable? Does it broaden the mind, or the opposite? Does it help with geography, or does it just make you feel terrible that you've now been to Coventry umpteen times and still never seen the cathedral? Do facts about sport displace other knowledge? I know for a fact that football warped my brain, because there was a day when I saw the headline "Adams in talks" in a newspaper and I assumed it was a story about Tony Adams, the footballer. When I realised it was about Gerry Adams (and merely referred to a breakthrough in Northern Ireland politics), I was actually much less interested."

Lynne is from Petersham in Surrey and worked as a librarian, for the Times Educational Supplement, the Radio Times, as literary editor of The Listener and as a writer for the Independent on Sunday and then The Times. She's been team captain on Radio 4's The Write Stuff, written three novels and numerous radio plays. This book was serialised as Book of the Week in 2009, but it’s out in paperback in time for the furore building up to this year's world cup.

She got into sports’ writing and football reporting in particular because of the drama involved, which she said applied as much to darts as to dog agility.  Week after week, history was made and added to that team’s statistics and anecdotal storytelling - especially in cricket.  

But it was a tough and lonely job for a "middle-aged and practically friendless woman in profoundly alien territory”.  She said she initially had zero respect from fellow sports writers.

Luckily, she wasn't expected to write like the other people in the press box. 
"No one wanted me to deliver terse 600-word match reports about how Giggs volleyed from 25 yards and grazed the crossbar in the 19th minute. But I relished the fact that every sporting occasion contained so much potential for commentary and analysis."

It’s a very personal book, she says, and in the end, it's about perspective - and how sport ultimately isn't a good enough place to hide from the realities of life. 

She said: "They say no one ever went to his grave wishing he'd had less sex. But I think it would be right and proper for many people to confront death accepting the fact that they really, really should have watched less football. I don't for a second regret saying "Ooh, why not?" when I was invited into this world.

“I fell in love with the fact that sport is the best subject in the world to write about, if you like seeing how little things relate to big things (which I do). But I was wrong to think the job wouldn't change me, because it did.

"Looking back, I think I was jolly reckless with my mental wellbeing: it took a huge battering over those four years on the road. But the trouble was, sport turned out to be the best subject matter in the world.

"Ultimately, my book is about the tribulations a writer will willingly endure once she realises that rereading Clarissa is a very, very poor substitute for watching Dennis Bergkamp score a last-minute goal against Argentina.”

A great book and a real insight for anyone who’s married to or parent of or friends with someone who’s a sports fan in any shape or form!