Lynne Truss - Get Her Off the Pitch! - How Sport Took Over My Life

As the day of the fight approached, I tried to keep track of things, and to remember what I formerly hated about boxing. It was getting difficult. There’s that very funny thing in Douglas Adams’s The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , when Arthur Dent finds out how unpleasant it feels to be ‘drunk’ - and it turns out this doesn’t mean what it feels like to be inebriated, it means what it feels like to be swallowed in liquid form, and it’s very unpleasant indeed. Getting close to sporting events, I often felt drunk in exactly this Douglas Adams sense; it was extremely disorientating. The world beyond the event shrank to a dot; I felt my perceptions flipping inside out; time expanded so that a week seemed like a month; I got hotly impatient with loved ones at home who said on the phone, vaguely, ‘Is it over? Did I miss it? Did anyone win?’; I danced in sidelong manner around my hotel bedroom practising my feeble left jab and making ‘Toof, toof’ noises; and most weirdly of all, I read the work of Norman Mailer, nodding wisely, and even underlined it with a pencil.

In short, I was a different person. A few weeks before, the name ‘Lewis’ would have made me think of maybe C.S. Lewis, Sinclair Lewis, the John Lewis Online customer services department (damn them), or Lewis Carroll. Now I wanted to chant that there was only one Lennox Lewis, and I wanted him to keep his hands up, use his jab, block Holyfield’s left hook, keep breathing, protect that lovely skin, and above all remember what chess teaches you about controlling the centre. On the day before the fight, I did something completely out of character, and it makes my heart-rate accelerate just to recall it. I phoned the office in London from my mobile - furtively, outside on 34th Street in the face-shrinking, slab-like cold - and said that, come what may, I must see this fight. I think they were a bit surprised by my vehemence, but the Garden had been prevaricating about press tickets; they kept promising and then delaying, and I had started to get very anxious. What if they gave The Times only two seats? There were three of us in New York! Oh no, not again, I said. Not this time, buddy. I’m not getting bumped this time. The problem was, the office always liked the sort of ‘colour’ piece I wrote about being banished to some nasty sports bar, to watch an event on TV with the locals. But they could whistle this time, I said; they could whistle up their god-damned ass . ‘If we only get two tickets, you’ve got to send Rob to some bar, not me. He hates boxing. He keeps writing pieces about the death of Joe DiMaggio instead. He doesn’t attend the press conferences. He’s spending all his time with Pelé. His heart’s not in this the way mine is!’ (Rob was the chief sports writer, and he outranked me in every way. There was no possibility they would accede to this demand.)

Luckily they didn’t quarrel with me; they just said, ‘Why don’t we wait and see what happens?’ But had they taken issue, I fear I would have quoted Joyce Carol Oates at them: ‘Like all extreme but perishable actions, boxing excites not only the writer’s imagination, but also his instinct to bear witness.’ What a genius this woman was. She was reading my mind. Because, yes, yes, I must bear witness to this extreme but also perishable action. I must . This fight might not be dedicated to women (or if it was, it was never mentioned again), but this woman was now totally dedicated to it . On the Thursday night, with the ticket situation still unresolved, I briefly entertained the idea of pushing Rob under a cab, or paying someone to lure him to a lonely dock on the East River and blow him away. It also occurred to me that the lobby of my fashionable hotel was so absurdly dimly lit, Rob’s lifeless body could lie undiscovered for quite some time amid the trendy Philippe Starck chairs, so the sleeping-with-the-fishes option might not be necessary. But on Friday, finally, I got my fight ticket, and so did he. We had seats together, as it happened, and we went on to have a very interesting and remarkable evening in each other’s company, marred (for me) only by crippling feelings of guilt and shame. I never told Rob that, had it come right down to it, I’d have done anything to get him out of the picture, or that being present at the Holyfield-Lewis fight on March 13, 1999 now meant so much to me that I’d considered it worth committing murder for a ticket.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.