For sporting travellers, stadiums are shrines Travelling out of India in the mid-1980s played hell on the wrist. Stand at a bank and sign traveller’s cheques and by the 40th, the Calcutta bank clerk will set down his tea, do the old headshake and say, “Saar, eet ees not matching.”

Wimbledon, 1987, and the tremulous apprentice is shown his place. It arrives in the form of a pass whose label is simply rude. “ROVER”, it says. Oracles with lost hair, who could tell you Big Bill Tilden’s string tension or the specific brandy Suzanne Lenglen chugged before occasional matches, wear “CENTRE COURT” badges. The “ROVER” is dismissed to the outer courts, wandering like an awed, eager canine with a notebook.

The ultimate destination: Madison Square Garden in New York City has hosted many epic encounters. (DT/Wikimedia Commons)

This was my first “foreign travel” as a writer and an introduction to sporting caste systems. Calm down, it happens everywhere. In India, officials at a cricket stadium once told us the first row in the press box was for the visiting English press. It was all eventually settled over a cigarette, tea in glasses and much mangling of the history of the freedom movement. Later, perhaps on this tour itself, an English writer, upset by hiccuping telexes and phone lines full of static, threw his computer on the floor in disgust and left. An Indian, with commendable inventiveness, fixed it, presumably deleted the tired lines about Delhi Belly, and kept it. Travelling out of India in the mid-1980s played hell on the wrist. Stand at a bank and sign traveller’s cheques and by the 40th, the Calcutta bank clerk will set down his tea, do the old headshake and say, “Saar, eet ees not matching.” No credit card. No mobile phone. Off you go with just a typewriter with a slipping ribbon, one dead key and a degree in telexing and overwrought prose.
You gratefully meet Western journalists whose bylines you already know and discover over time that your name they can never remember. You voyage with a colleague who promises a beer at an English train station and confidently strides towards a Heel Bar. You take pictures, grinning like an incoherent tourist before a scoreboard, and then in time wear the conceit of “my third Wimbledon”, till an old-timer nearby nearly suffers cardiac arrest while trying to blow out a cake commemorating his 40th French Open and shows you your place. Again. Lucky bastard, you think, and take a piece.
You live, on tour, in lovely smelling distance of fellows who make sambhar, others who lecture on catches they never saw, some who can find alcohol in nunneries if they have to, and once walk in front of a great player, whose son you’ve gently sledged in print, and hear him say “Who is this sunuvabitch Rohit Brijnath?”, and turn and introduce yourself and become friends. You spend nights with a photographer colleague in a Hiroshima hotel and learn about patient appetites. The blue-movie channel is too expensive, but it has an 8-second preview, takes a minute to reload if you press a button, so all night he sits there, waiting, comforted by repeats of the preview.
And you’re learning, laughing, watching, drinking, arguing and falling in love, mostly with stadiums. To stand in Adelaide’s cricket ground, where a cathedral looks on, its bells seeming to ring in praise, is to be moved. Players come, dazzle, go, but these are custodians of sport who, when mute, hold anticipation; who, when full, are beasts of promise.
What stories the original boxing ring at Madison Square Garden (MSG) could tell us, and when it was retired in 2007, after 82 years, it was as if someone was snuffing out history. Sugar Robinson danced there, Jake LaMotta bled, Jack Dempsey hit, Joe Frazier-Muhammad Ali pounded, and some nights there were so many greats in attendance that the boxing historian Bert Sugar, who died recently, reportedly kidded, “In this room if you yelled the word ‘Champ’, you’d be trampled!”
For sporting travellers—like the grown bankers I saw reduced to babbling boys as they prepared for a maiden visit to the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) last winter—the geographies that matter in sport are not cities, but the arenas within them. The Nou Camp, Fenway Park, St Andrew. Nope, never been to any. Nor to Rio’s Maracana, which is why it would be sinful not to pack a bag for the 2014 World Cup and at least stand in an arena which, during the 1950 World Cup, held 199,854 people.
Stadiums offer sport a frame of reference, they are at once theatres and museums. Of course, in India, they are bare in every way, not just absent of facility but blind to the value of the past; their corridors and walls mostly chronicle no history except of sloppy construction. Still, the bamboo-pole stands of Davis Cup ties; the old-timer who swears “Son, there was no one like Krishnan”, and his friend, a wheezing archive on Anglo-Indian hockey; the small-town tented pavilions and tired scoreboards; the East Bengal supporters and their hilsa bought after famous victories—all this was a blessing, too, amphitheatres and people of another kind.
No journey to a stadium is the same for they are wrapped in various colours, sounds and distinct personalities, reflecting not just a tribe but a sport. Golf fans and boxing spectators, one might say, have diverse vocabularies. No journey to a stadium is the same, for sport never is and neither are we. Boy looking at his father shouting “waah, waah” with hand outstretched towards that ustad called Gundappa Viswanath. Teenager with vodka hidden in flasks—once you could sneak them past indolent policemen—bound to the next man by a community sweat and a love for Bib (how Bengalis said Viv, no surname required). Rookie writer, downing a 10am whisky in Paris because warm clothes hadn’t been packed, waiting for history and unsure how to narrate it.
No journey is the same for those within a stadium. For the home team, the stadium’s aura is their cloak, the turf knows their feet, the wind is a visiting friend, familiarity is their reassurance. They stake their ownership just through their walk. For the visiting player, to enter the Theatre of Dreams, and walk its trophy-rich corridors, and look up and see Bobby Charlton smiling in his suit, is just hell. The stadium looks bigger, lurching, threatening, and for minutes, it is as if body and mind have been dislocated.
Journeys at stadiums don’t end with final whistles for, as a magazine writer, unimprisoned by deadline, there was licence to linger and lurk.
Wait and you might catch Dhanraj Pillay walking and weeping at Sydney 2000 after India’s exit from the hockey, bump into a furious official ready to go on-the-record, slink into the Davis Cup team bus with a wink from the captain, or just get plain lucky and find V.V.S. Laxman, Ajit Agarkar and Rahul Dravid, who forged victory in Adelaide 2003, still sitting hours later in the dressing room even as the team had left. To leave the room was to finish a journey and they were not ready yet.
Politicians can command mass audiences, but nowhere on the planet do people willingly congregate, both joined and separate, as in stadiums. Tribalism can be ugly, abuse is often rife, parochialism distresses, yet strangers also unite, people find silent, reflective spaces within mobs, a public and yet private communion with a sport is found. It is a beautiful madness compressed into a few hours: sweat, sound, spilled beer, the groan at a roar in the midst of a pee, the charm of proximity, the exquisiteness of tension, the flight of imagination: What will happen now? So many of us in one place, yet each one an individual traveller.