Turf wizards, body doubles, and defeating the Twisties
#2: Monthly tales from the fringes of sport and society. The untold and unsung...
Welcome to the September edition of Off-Field, bringing you monthly tales of the untold and unsung.
For anyone new here, I’d recommend reading the introduction post from last month to get a flavour of what this is all about. Essentially, it’s me plugging a couple of my own bits of work before showing you how it should be done with recommendations to others doing it much better.
September is bookended by the return of the NFL season and a gladiatorial Ryder Cup in Rome. So it’s only right that American football and golf feature here, while this tour of the sporting fringes also encompasses football, snooker, gymnastics, and, wait for it… competitive hot dog eating.
But I did promise that this newsletter wouldn’t be solely sport obsessed and so to prevent me morphing into Biff Tannen I’ve put the Almanack down to recommend an illuminating piece from the undocumented world of Hollywood body doubles.
Enjoy the selection and see you next month…
Guardians of the Fairway
Imagine putting eight years of your life into something that will be judged by millions over just three days?
That’s the prospect that awaits any greenkeeper working on the select band of courses chosen to host the Ryder Cup, the biennial battle between the finest golfers from the USA and Europe.
It’s a daunting challenge for even the most hallowed of golfing venues, but especially so for a debut host. Italy has offered the stunning Marco Simone course for its Ryder Cup bow, its Rome location likely to result in coverage that is littered with legions of Gladiator references.
Italy might have the second-best national anthem in sport, but it doesn’t boast the golfing tradition of some of its European neighbours, nor will it have a single golfer among the playing ranks. But France (best anthem, obviously) juggled those same disadvantages five years ago and managed to put on a show that more than matched its prestigious predecessors.
The man in charge at Le Golf National in Paris was Alejandro Reyes, who I spoke to back then - along with three-time Ryder Cup greenkeeper Steve Chappell - for this updated longread on the course superintendents who are the captains of the tournament’s unheralded third team.
The encouraging news is that Alejandro is now the Director of Agronomy at the Marco Simone course. Find out why Italy’s Ryder Cup course is in safe hands, in Guardians of the Fairway.
Coup de Grass: The Grumpy Groundsmen Turned Turf Revolutionaries
Last winter I spoke to Leicester City’s Head of Sports Turf and Grounds John Ledwidge for the Unsung podcast. I first met John the previous summer at the club’s state-of-the-art training ground, where I enjoyed a tour of the UK’s first Sports Turf Academy, a £13m complex that includes classrooms, a canteen, a mechanics’ workshop, and a laboratory. John’s pride and joy is a far cry from the damp and dilapidated sheds where you’d usually find football ground staff.
John was keen to impress that, these days, it takes more than a pitchfork and a mower to get the game’s top turfs up to standard. “There’s a misconception that we’re all just hairy-arsed groundsmen who just cut grass, are all mucky, and smell like sh*t. I defy anyone to come to our building and tell me that’s the case. It’s a genuine career for people. Once people scratch the surface, they see that there’s a lot more science to it.”
John’s revolutionary outlook goes some way to explaining why British grounds staff are widely seen as global leaders in their, well, field. And it also explains why, following Leicester City’s relegation last season, John was swiftly snapped up by Premier League champions Manchester City. To find out why City were so impressed, listen to Coup de Grass: The Grumpy Groundsmen Turned Turf Revolutionaries.
Spotted: Snooker’s Fight Against Match Fixing
Tortoise Media is taking slow journalism to new levels and this podcast is the perfect showcase of what they do best: returning to a story that was afforded very little mainstream coverage at the time and filling in the gaps in an informative and entertaining way.
This episode of Slow News concerns a story from June when ten Chinese snooker players were banned for match-fixing. What starts in an unloved snooker hall in Sheffield spills out into Asia’s frankly staggering betting black market.
Like last month’s book recommendation on the tainted 1988 Olympics 100m final, there’s a nuanced approach to this particular sporting scandal that I find especially admirable, including a look at the mitigating circumstances around why some of the younger players became embroiled in snooker’s dark side.
Two Years After Tokyo, Simone Biles is Coming Back from ‘the Twisties.’ Not Every Gymnast Does
President Joe Biden said that Simone Biles represented "the best of America" after the gymnast made her eagerly-anticipated return to the sport two years after taking a break to prioritise her mental health.
Biles' return could not have gone any better, winning her eighth all-round title at the US Gymnastics Championships, breaking a 90-year record in the process. It's a formidable comeback from the country’s most decorated gymnast, whose last appearance saw her withdrawing from five of her six finals at the Tokyo Olympics.
She'd been suffering from the "Twisties", which is basically gymnastics' version of the yips. Only instead of struggling to putt a golf ball or throw a dart, this condition results in gymnasts losing their sense of space while in mid-air. It's a frightening and serious mental block that can - and has - ended careers. Like Gage Dyer, the gymnast who opens up about his ordeal in this AP article.
How Shallow Hal Almost Broke Gwyneth Paltrow’s Body Double
It’s rare to read anything about those whose job it is to be a faceless body double in the movies. In an age where so much progress has been made in terms of body positivity, the role of the double - a job that you get solely based on your proportions - seems a little incongruous with modern society. I imagine the casting calls for those make for interesting reading…
As did this piece from Amelia Tait, which documents the mental and physical struggles of Ivy Snitzer, the actor cast as Gwyneth Paltrow’s body double alongside Jack Black in the 2001 comedy Shallow Hal.
‘It’s Heartbreaking’: Malala Yousafzai Meets Exiled Afghanistan Women’s Football Team
Ignoring the idiot at its culmination, who continues to do his best to undo years of progress, the Women's World Cup was an undoubted success on the pitch. But not every team was permitted to take part.
The emergence of the Afghanistan women's football team was fast becoming one of sport's good news stories, until late 2021 when the country once again fell into Taliban control. The team fled to Australia, but have been denied a place in international football since. Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai recently paid a visit to the exiled team, and The Guardian’s Suzy Wrack was there.
The UK's First Official Hot Dog Eating Contest Was Kind of Sweet
This month is going to be hard to beat in terms of elite sporting competition. The Ryder Cup and the NFL have already been mentioned, but there’s also the return of the Champions League, and the Rugby World Cup gets underway in France.
But because you’re unlikely to have competitive eating on your 2023 sporting calendar, here’s an epic write-up of the competition held in the UK for the first time last week. As you might well imagine, some of the contestants are what we might diplomatically term, characters. Superbly done by Eloise Hendy.
Paper Lion, George Plimpton
“The pleasure of sport was so often the chance to indulge the cessation of time itself - the pitcher dawdling on the mound, the skier poised at the top of a mountain trail, the basketball player with the rough skin of the ball against his palm preparing for a foul shot, the tennis player at set point over his opponent - all of them savouring a moment before committing themselves to action.”
Hunter S. Thompson might have earned his stripes as the king of gonzo journalism when infiltrating the Hell’s Angels, but would he have been quite so plucky squaring up to an NFL linebacker? He certainly wouldn’t have done it sober.
Instead, it was George Plimpton who, in 1966, turned up to the Detroit Lions to register as their third-choice quarterback, squeezing into an ill-fitting helmet and slumping under shoulder pads four sizes too big for him.
The concept of playing alongside the very players you’re usually only allowed to watch from afar is a sports writer’s dream, and the access Plimpton enjoyed is unprecedented compared to today’s PR-vetted interviews. But what’s especially commendable is Plimpton’s sincerity in his role. He’s not playing the stooge or gurning for laughs, but putting in a proper shift and taking the hits - and the mockery that comes from the sidelines.
The result is Paper Lion becomes not only a rare and revealing look at the internal machinations of a leading NFL outfit, but an endearing depiction of the camaraderie and mutual respect that develops among the players, coaches, and unassuming scribe.
I’m pleased to say there are a few dozen new subscribers since last month’s opening salvo, so many thanks to those of you giving this a shot, as well as to those who’ve stuck around for this one.
Despite Substack’s default efforts to upsell (which I’ve since managed to switch off), this newsletter is completely free and always will be. So if you know of anyone who might like to read or listen to one or two of the selections above, please do share the love by forwarding them this newsletter or hitting the share button below.
I’d also like for this newsletter to be a bit of a collaboration (why do the work when others can do it for me, right?), so if you read or listen to anything over the next month that you think fits the bill, do get in touch at alexisnjames@gmail.com.
Until next month, I’m going to make like a tree and… get out of here.