Dispatches From a Dilettante by Paul Rowson

‘celebrities’ on the decline with even less. Predictably this produced car crash results. There were a few really interesting moments and my one encounter with then cricketer Geoff Boycott was one of them. I had managed to blag my way into the Yorkshire dressing room after a game and button holed Boycott who looked suspiciously at me, probably with some justification.
    I have no recollection of the interview that followed because my eyes were drawn to his appalling hair transplant. It was as though someone had got an old pop rivet gun and run it along his forehead inserting a few strands of hair along the way. What was even worse was that these hairs were now there in splendid isolation as his baldness had increased to the back of his head after the first effort to conceal it. As I fan I had always admired Boycott but up close in conversation he represented everything that was wrong with Yorkshire cricket at the time - that is to say stubborn, introspective, out of touch, and self important. A suggestion to the sports editor that we should cover the demonstrable racism in the Yorkshire County Cricket Club hierarchy at the time was swiftly rebuffed.
    What was required by the sports editor was bland hyped up and often falsely created excitement which was almost inevitably more that the occasion merited. I took consolation in the fact that I was watching, and being fascinated by, low grade northern professional sport and being paid for it. This was sport in the raw and, with a few sporadic exceptions, was far removed from the glitz of European Cups and World titles.
    It was guts over glamour at places like Castleford. It was graft over gold on freezing winter afternoons at Hull where I once saw a rugby league player stretchered off during a February blizzard and later diagnosed as suffering from exposure. It was grind over glory when I could feel the pain, while simultaneously being spattered with sweat from my ringside seat, at professional boxing bouts in smoke filled halls.
    Oldham used to play their Rugby League at the quaintly named ‘Watersheddings’ and I had been sent to cover a junior international between Great Britain and France. I had the usual press pass and an additional gold embossed one from the Rugby League which said ‘VIP reception – Admit One’. On arrival at the ground I asked the Commissionaire where this might be. Without any sense of irony he scrutinised the pass and then pointed to a wooden hut with disconnected guttering hanging limply down one side of a wall. “You’ll get a cup of tea in there”.
    The Old Showground was where Scunthorpe United used to play and a less glamorous venue in a less glamorous town would be hard to imagine. On the few occasions I visited I could not help but be reminded of the very crude graffiti which used to adorn one of the rickety old grandstand walls. There was a long running and well known television advert for Typhoo Tea that had the tag line ‘Typhoo puts the T in BriTain. An away fan, I presume, had scrawled ‘If Typhoo puts the T in BriTain who put the CUNT in Scunthorpe?’.
    One my third and final visit there I noticed that Ian Botham had slipped into the ground just after kick off and was sitting in the press box behind me. I tried to get him to come on air but he had just been castigated for making derogatory remarks about Pakistan and wanted to lie low. He did however give me the juicy mini scoop that he would be playing soccer for Scunthorpe United the following week, which he did.
    One of the last big fight nights held in Leeds was at the now defunct Astoria Ballroom. Yorkshire favourite and journeyman heavyweight Neil Malpass had won on a technical knockout in the eighth round of brutal and bruising encounter. Both fighters were warmly applauded at the end and both had bloody cuts as they left the ring. I followed to get an interview with the winner.
    After battering each other relentlessly for eight rounds they were now chatting amicably in