Playing for laughs
Iwas not a sports fan from birth. My parents were both excellent athletes who met playing hockey at college; bizarrely, they produced two daughters who had the physical dexterity and reflex responses of a pair of bungling pandas. I spent much of my childhood baffled by my mother’s tempestuous support for various football, rugby and cricket teams, and indifferent to her extraordinary depth of knowledge on everything from world snooker champions to Olympic decathlons.
My own sporting conversion did not arrive until my mid-teens, when I finally asked her a fairly basic question about the Test match she was watching on TV (“why are those two men dressed in white running up and down in a little box in the corner of the screen?”). That innocent inquiry triggered a chain reaction that led, within a few short months, to a lifelong obsession with cricket, coupled with an insatiable hunger for whatever else was available on terrestrial TV: rugby (league and union), motor racing, tennis, athletics, darts, you name it. I’d even watch Ski Sunday if nothing else was on.
My favourite rugby team—inherited from my mother, who was besotted with their great players of the eighties—was Bath. I lived in the city for 12 months at the turn of the millennium, working the till in the chocolate shop on the high street, at a time when I felt very lost indeed—no friends, no career, no clue what I was supposed to be doing with myself. But as a sporting aficionado, and a huge admirer of the players of Bath’s glory days—from Jeremy Guscott to Gareth Chilcott—I cherished my weekend visits to the Rec, the tiny city centre ground nestled next to the river Avon and overlooked by the abbey. For just a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon, surrounded by fellow enthusiasts, I experienced a rare thrill of belonging.
The rest of my adult life—two decades of it, now—have been spent in London, where I found my home, and the rare occasion that I get to watch my old team is usually at an away fixture. But recently my best friend Ben and his husband John announced they were leaving London and moving to Bath. As they were abandoning me to live in what felt like the other side of the country, I told them that the least they could do to make up for it was to indulge me with a visit to one of my all-time favourite sporting venues.
John had no history with the game of rugby; Ben, whose father and brothers all played and took it very seriously indeed, had emphatically rejected its macho culture as a child. I had to sell this outing hard. I told them that the Rec was one of the prettiest grounds in the country (not strictly true—but its setting is beautiful). I emphasised the cider-glow of camaraderie that
Sporting life
For just a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon, I experienced a rare thrill of belonging
distinguishes a West Country rugby crowd from, say, a spiky north London football derby. I also promised that we could take a thermos flask of hot chocolate spiked with rum to drink in the stands, which, to be honest, was probably what secured their attendance.
By the day of the game, however, I knew I had overpromised: Ben and John’s first and probably only experience of the Rec was shaping up to be a true test of spectator endurance. Bath had suffered their worst start to a season on record, losing every one of their matches, some by epic margins. And it wasn’t just looking to be depressingly one-sided—the weather forecast also promised it would be thanklessly cold.
Worse, I had only managed to get us seats right on the try line. Live rugby can be tough to follow even for fans—you see so little of the ball, hidden beneath scrums, rucks and mauls, that large portions of its progress up and downfield have to be interpreted from referee’s signals. Sitting in one corner of the ground peering at an indistinguishable mound of bodies from 100 yards away does not usually make for engaging entertainment.
I’m used to suffering agonies over the outcome of a match, but I’ve never before been nervous about whether my friends were going to hate me after. For John, a martyr to the cold, I brought a blanket to lay across our laps; for Ben, whom I expected to become bored quickly, I secreted a pair of binoculars in my bag, in case he should complain that he couldn’t see anything. When we bought our burgers from the food truck before the game, I immediately cursed myself: now I’d have nothing to keep them distracted with during a perishing sub-zero half-time.
And then the game kicked off, and the home team, my team, nearly scored a try in the first minute. I momentarily forgot my concerns, and turned to explain to them what was happening, only to realise that they could tell the game was off to a flyer. Perhaps whatever constitutes the communion of rugby saints—the blessed departed souls of Webb Ellis, Jonah Lomu et al—were pleased with my good deeds, and this was their doing. For whatever reason,
Bath put in their best performance of the season. They eventually lost, but held on until a hyper-dramatic final minute.
Eighty minutes never disappeared so fast. John, with only the most limited grasp of the rules, was fascinated; even Ben admitted he’d had a good time. For me, it was a reminder that comes too rarely to those of us already obsessed with sport: the thing we love isn’t a fundamental human necessity, or an outworking of tribalism, or—in the well-worn phrase— war minus the shooting. It’s really just a fun way to spend a couple of hours. ♦
Emma John and Michael Brearley share the Sporting Life column and will alternate for each issue