GASCOIGNE OF GRUB STREET
Vicki Woods on the national
obsession with a footballer's anterior cruciate ligament
I CAN'T think what came over the Daily Mai 's newsdesk last Sunday teatime. Sun- day is a funny day on a daily newspaper: you have to flog around the office with no tie on and the banks closed, trying to make tomor- row's paper look brisk and be-suited for a businesslike Monday morning with very little to go on: features that have been hanging around since Friday night and no `news'. Nothing ever happens on Sunday, so Monday's papers are always full of political headlines set in the future conditional: Ministers May or Will or Aim To do something (first thing Monday morning they may or will). Other than that, what is there? Precious little. Royal pictures. Leftover human-interest stories (killer pit bulls) that have been kept, in the newspaper phrase, to use 'Sunday for Monday'. Reactions to the lunchtime Brian Walden interview (Top Tories Hit Back). Or — simplest of all — a straight rehash of everything that was done to death in the Sundays but with better pictures.
On Monday, the Daily Mail was the only English newspaper that did not put Gazza on the front page. Whatever possessed them? They had plenty of time; time enough to draw a lovingly detailed graphic of his Anterior Cruciate Ligament and have half of Harley Street reporting in from the shire counties on the difficulties of orthopaedic micro-surgery thereon, if they had chosen to. They did not choose to. The Mail put Gazza on the back page, where sporting personalities are traditionally placed, and on the front page they ran only a stock head- shot of him wearing a suit and the line TURN TO BACK PAGE, not a news picture of him holding his Anterior Cruciate Ligament. Every other English newspaper put him on the front, including the Guardian, the Times, the Independent, and the Telegraph. Even the Financial Times put him on the front page. Which just shows you, doesn't it, what a hell of a story this was. A global story, with very big numbers. `Gazza trans- fer in doubt,' said the FT, coolly employing the matey tabloid nickname for headline purposes, though later in the story they called him 'Mr Paul "Gazza" Gascoigne' and went into detail about the Midland Bank and £8.5 million and interest cover and equity injections rather than painkilling injections, as you might expect.
Today showed the best close-ups I'll ever see in a popular newspaper of the Anterior Cruciate Ligament, which looks a bit like a pair of testicles if you crop the picture too tight, as they did. And Today got the best Top Tories. They quoted a spokesman for 10 Downing Street thus: 'I'm sure the Prime Minister wishes Gazza a very speedy recov- ery. He feels very sorry for Gascoigne.' They then quoted the Chief Secretary to the Treasury direct, David Mellor (who is erroneously believed by other Top Tories to be a 'sexy', charismatic figure who appeals to women voters). Mr Mellor went a bit over the top himself. 'It was a great tragedy,' he told Today. But then he recovered himself and grasped the moral issue very firmly. `Gascoigne is a great player but he did commit two extraordinary fouls. The first time he almost kicked someone in the face. The second one was reckless and he could easily have been sent off.'
Nobody quoted the Prince of Wales, who sat at the match looking black as pitch when he realised that 'extra time' meant another half-hour of this puerile kicking-about, but he had troubles of his own in Monday's papers, with the Telegraph and the Express showing him doing a McEnroe with his polo mallet and fouling people and swearing. It was reckless and he could easily have been sent off in my opinion.
Absurd as all this is, I've been happy to read about Gazza all the way down the line through triumph and tragedy, from comedy to comeuppance. He's filled the little gap I've had inside since George Best faded out of my life in the Seventies. I wanted to interview Gazza; I've wanted to interview him ever since the World Cup, when he wept. But you can't interview Gazza; even before he hurt his knee. Ring up Tottenham Hotspur Football Club and you get an answerphone voice telling you that your call will be answered in rotation. After five minutes, an answerphone voice says that queries respecting Paul Gascoigne are being referred to another number. Ring that number and a voice says: 'It's Renee.' I did all that a couple of weeks ago, and asked Renee if I could interview Gazza for The Spectator. Renee said that Paul wasn't doing any interviews for the next couple of months; goodbye. I rang back and airily said that The Spectator would wait a couple of months. She said that Paul was exclusively contracted to the Sun newspaper and wasn't doing interviews with anyone else; goodbye. I rang back and said that I'd just read an interview with Mr Gascoigne in the News of the World, in which he'd stated his intention to help the Princess Royal save the Kurds. (From memory, I think it was the Kurds. It was certainly the Princess Royal.) Renee said that wasn't an interview, it was just Paul answering a few questions, and anyway, Paul hadn't spoken to the journalist con- cerned; he was quoted, yes, and they were his quotes but he hadn't given them to the journalist himself; goodbye. Rapidly, I asked who had given the quotes to the journalist concerned in that case? and Re- nee said, 'I did.' I said Oh. All that stuff about the Kurds? Renee said Yes. I said, well, but you know, The Spectator would very much like to get Mr Gascoigne's own roseate little mouth speaking into his own cordless telephone line for ten seconds and answering a few questions directly, about, well, you know, the Kurds . . . or football, or the price of fame or something — would that be possible? Renee said that it wasn't a publication that would interest Paul. There wouldn't be anything in it for Paul. I suddenly got the feeling that Renee might have the wrong idea about The Spectator. Maybe she thought it was a football fanzine that hero-worshipped Arsenal or Preston North End or somewhere. I said, Do you know the, ah, Spectator at all? 'Can't say that I do,' said Renee. It's a political weekly, I said. Renee said wearily, 'I'm in a meeting, Vicki. Goodbye.' One final question Renee, I said, gabbling into her boredom. Would The Spectator have to, ah, pay Gascoigne for the interview? In the unlikely event of his ever deciding that The Spectator was a publication that might interest him at all? `Yes,' said Renee, and hung up.
I rang Len Gould who used to be sports editor of the Daily Mail and asked him how one secured an interview with Gazza, and he chuckled. He's very jolly, Len Gould, a big Glaswegian with a soft heart and a hard nose. Len said that writing about Gazza was a bit like writing about the Prince of Wales: you had to follow him about for months in a pack of other football journalists and make friends with his driver and glean what little bits you could from his expression when he said Howay the lads or that he could do with a beer. How much would an interview be? `Start at five.' Thousand? 'Oh, yes.' By the time you read this, someone, apart from the Sun, will have `interviewed' Gazza. The tabloids will have been sending teams of journalists to the Princess Grace hospital. Some will be in disguise: the women dressed as ward maids or staff nurses; the men wearing white coats with secondhand stetho- scopes round their necks and mini-cameras strapped to their shinbones. Some will be dressed for seduction: hoping to vamp hospital porters or nurses with handfuls of ten-pound notes. Some will be doing round- the-clock duty on the hospital doorstep and invoicing for umbrellas if it rains.
You may think I'm exaggerating. And I am, but only about the umbrellas.
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