Get Her Off the Pitch! Read Free Page A

Holyfield-Lewis was a very big deal. In fact, I was beginning to realise that nothing in the world - certainly not Bosnia - was as important as this contrived fight, for eight-figure money, between two men who (as yet) I didn’t even know very much about. As I sat in my tiny hotel room in the evenings - listening to the exciting parp-parp of the wintry midtown traffic; leafing avidly through boxing magazines; pondering Norman Mailer’s theory that boxing, like chess, is all about ‘control of the centre’ (how true); and occasionally jumping up to practise a combination of right to the kidney, followed by uppercut and left hook (quite difficult without falling over) - I started to share the palpable sense of destiny.
    My first sight of Evander Holyfield was at a grim gym in lower Manhattan. It was a raw, freezing day, and I shared a cab with the chap from the Telegraph , who was stayingat the same mid-town hotel (The Paramount). The coincidence of our staying at the same hotel had really bucked me up, incidentally, because it seemed to me, during my four years in the business, that I was forever comparing travel arrangements with this particular chap, and coming out the loser by a knockout in the first round. ‘Where are you staying, Lynne?’ he would ask, when we met (say) at one of the earlier matches of the World Cup in Paris in 1998, and I would attempt to make light of the appalling truth. ‘Well, it’s quite interesting,’ I’d say. ‘They’ve put me in a hotel that costs a mere £24 a night - which must have taken quite some doing, don’t you think? My room stinks of drains, doesn’t have a television or a lavatory, and the phone has a big dial on it and is bolted to the wall, so I can’t plug in my laptop. But heigh ho, what can you do? It’s incredibly handy for the Musée d’Orsay, and I honestly haven’t been attacked yet walking back up that dark street from the Metro dragging my big heavy laptop after midnight.’ Then, with a huge generosity of spirit, I would ask, ‘Where are you staying, then, Paul?’ And it would always be somewhere stylish, bright, central, fully equipped, expensive, modem-friendly and (all-importantly) served door-to-door by media buses, that would make me want to saw my own head off.
    Discovering that Paul and I were on the same flight to New York from Heathrow, therefore, we had gone through the usual routine on the plane - except, for once, I asked first. ‘Oh, I’m staying at that Philippe Starck place off Times Square with all the funky furniture and the low lighting,’ he said. ‘Oh really?’ I squeaked, trying not to betray my despair. ‘I’m at some dump called The Paramount.’And for heaven’s sake, for once we were in the same place. It was a miracle. For once in my life, I was probably going to get a room with some basic bathroom fittings. Of course, when we arrived, Paul got himself upgraded to a better class of room immediately, while I had to argue for a couple of hours at check-in because the Times travel people had failed to confirm the reservation (this always happened). But still, to be in the same hotel in New York as the chap from the Telegraph for a whole week was really, really something, and I still feel quite proud.
    Back at Holyfield’s gym, I was keen to get a sight of a real boxer by now - which was a shame, because when we arrived (at the appointed time) real boxers were nowhere to be seen. It was a bleak spot, this gym: a high-ceilinged, whitewashed-brick kind of underground space filled with punch-bags and stale air, not to mention huddles of impatient hacks sipping take-out coffees. There were a couple of large murals of famous boxers on the side wall - they turned out to be Joe Louis and Jack Dempsey, so I’m glad I didn’t guess. And as we all hung about, waiting to be summoned through a small door in the wall (like something