Writers at the Hay Festival discuss their greatest sporting memories or achievements
ANDREW O’HAGAN
People who find it hard to believe the findings of Charles Darwin probably didn’t go to school in Ayrshire in the 1980s. At St Michael’s Academy, the PE teacher, Mr Scullion, would routinely choose the fittest and most popular of the young footballers to pick the players they wished for their side. For those who hated football it was always a humiliating condition on the field of play. Shivering on the touchline, the less sporting among us – though a dab hand at trig and photosynthesis – would find our deeper ineffectiveness brutally confirmed. But one day, after a written submission from me to Sister Dominic Savio, the school’s presiding moralist, I was permitted to choose a team. I took my time inhaling the Pyrrhic scent on the cold morning air, then, one by one, I selected the ugliest, the smallest and the un-fleetest of my comrades, leaving the overconfident to wait. Ally’s Tartan Army had not long since crashed out of the World Cup in a blaze of self-delusion, and my newly spirited cohort of chess players and Walter Scott fans just smiled as we went down 11–0. I like to think we learnt that defeat can be quite congenial.
Andrew O’Hagan is the author of Caledonian Road
JOHN BAILEY
Ihave always struggled to convince the world that angling is a bona fide sport and not some watered-down hobby. A fishinspired journey I led to the fringes of Tibet proves my point. Six of us, men and women, were in search of the legendary chocolate mahseer, a fish whispered to inhabit the headwaters of the Brahmaputra river. We took a single-prop plane from Kolkata into the lower Himalayas, Jeeps for five days, then we trekked three days more. We were arrested and charged with being a Chinese invading force. Once cleared, we made camp by a high-altitude river almost certainly never fished before with rod and line. For weeks we explored the valley, hacking jungle paths, scaling cliffs, wading in torrential waters, returning to camp to exist on a diet of rice, fruit and whiskey. These were the sessions of a thousand casts, day after day, always tired, hungry but never losing our rhythm, our spirit or our desire. Then we caught chocolate mahseer, big brutes of fish that fought like bulls in the snow-melt water, and so we proved our belief to the angling and scientific communities. We arrived back in Kolkata battle-hardened, weary and triumphant. How can anyone call that a hobby?
John Bailey is the co-author of How We Fish: The love, life and joy of the riverbank
TOM HOLLAND
My sweetest, most golden sporting memory is one so vivid that I experience it as something almost synaesthetic: a translation of the intensest emotion of happiness into the green of
