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The years teach much which the days never know. This weekend Boreham Wood FC go to Wembley fighting for a place in that treasured home of the global game, the English Football League. Why will I be watching 7,000 miles away? Well, the experience of riding the Wood’s team bus 50-odd years ago taught me much that I have carried across our world ever since. So, I’ll be somewhat possessed this Sunday, Boreham Wood versus Rochdale, even though I live in that footie mecca on the other side of the world, Argentina.
The memories are rich. Back then I’m on a gap year before university, a football captain at school sees an advert in his local paper for a reporter, urges me to apply, and I do, convincing one of the best editors I ever worked for (by the name of Roger Norman) to take me, and I spend a golden period reporting for the Borehamwood and Elstree Post. Elstree, with its film studios, the poor man’s Hollywood. Borehamwood, a working-class hinterland of my north London, with not much to celebrate.
Except, that is, for a football team, in those days amateur, playing in a decent stadium off Broughinge Road, drawing maybe a few hundred spectators, but giving a semi-faceless place a sense of community, identity, even pride. If you beat Hitchin Town or Bishop’s Stortford, fierce local rivals, well that spoke, right? And, of course, my job was to articulate that journey of the team in a local, weekly paper read like the Bible in that town.
Given the lack of resources on the paper, I would journey to away games with the team, editor Roger reminding me “without fear or favour”, such a principle I have carried ever since, certainly to the Arab-Israeli conflict, but likewise to African dictators, or American presidents who lied to grand juries.
It was never a problem calling the team out for a poor performance, let alone a player who had a stinker of a game. It was a little trickier as you rode a bus that had lads complaining about their “boot money”, the fiver or the tenner left for them in the dressing room afterwards (remember the game was “amateur”). Or then consider a goalscorer who took bets on how many he’d get that day, then have us all asking how on earth he missed that sitter late on, as he cleaned up money-wise on the way home. Let’s leave well alone the player apt to have young, female groupies at the back of the bus. Not a word about that.
Truth be told, you didn’t report a slice of what you knew, and we did well that season, beating mighty St Albans in the Amateur Cup, then pushing majestic Leatherhead (The Tanners, as they were called) to a replay in a later round that had those Surrey aristocrats of the amateur game buying up two of our best players in the bar afterwards. Not very amateur. Shush, don’t say a word.
So fast forward with me, to the world of Robert Mugabe seizing power in Zimbabwe by intimidating folks to vote his way, or Israel’s then defence minister Ariel Sharon telling the world he knew nada about the massacre of Palestinians in Beirut, or Boris Yeltsin leading the revolution via a stiff glass or three in old Russia, even quizzing George W Bush on Air Force One. What did you learn on the Boreham Wood FC bus?
You learned, on your better days, to call it the way you saw it. You learned how to ask questions, of others and yourself. You recalled that, so long ago, one somewhat proud moment in journalism lay in asking that goalscorer, hoovering up his winnings, how could he be trusted.
You came to appreciate that, while you wrote the first and largely positive biography of Mugabe, the man himself castigated you because you dared to suggest that he won power through violence, so much so he declared you persona non grata in his country. A badge of some honour.
You came to admire the way Sharon, the eternal Israeli warrior, changed tack and listened when you pestered him on the Palestinian issue. You challenged Bush, respectfully, about whether he had any plan for peace in the Middle East after his invasion of Iraq. You sat with Donald Trump for an afternoon, long before he became president, and diagnosed he had a certain, mad genius that could bring him to power.
My point is that riding the Boreham Wood FC bus 50-odd years ago taught me so much. To listen, learn, not be judgmental, but to think for myself, and then ask what mattered.
Of course, my heart is with The Wood on Sunday, but I won’t be too unhappy if Rochdale return to the big leagues, a place that was once a cotton boomtown, needs a taste of success too. And I’m reminding myself, after witnessing a war or three, not to mention famines that had people die in front of you, that in contrast there will be such joy for whichever of those two small towns emerges victorious. Now there’s our beautiful game at work.
David Smith was an award-winning foreign correspondent for ITN/C4News in Africa, the Middle East, Moscow and Washington DC before becoming an adviser to the UN secretary general. He lives in Argentina, runs a small vineyard in Mendoza, and plays midfield occasionally for the veterans team in the town of La Consulta.
