Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions by Martin Amis Read Free Book Online Page B

of silence. The world of the athlete — where unnurtured youth is confronted by adulation and money — provides opportunities for yahooism rivalled only in the rock-music business (of which more later). Off the field, and especially away from home, footballers behave so outrageously that it's a full-time job looking the other way.
    And yet, one by one, the Watford squad approached the Hall of Preserving Harmony, peered into the Pavilion of Universal Tranquillity and passed through the Gate of Benevolence and Longevity. Somewhat reluctant, homesick and disorientated, they broached the Forbidden City, and emerged as creditable ambassadors.
     
    The man responsible for this, as for so much else at Watford, is the manager Graham Taylor. Six years ago Watford were a nothing club in the dregs of the Football League. Elton John, a fan since his schooldays in Pinner, took over the chairmanship, injected a good deal of money (the usual estimate is £1.6 million) and hired Taylor from Lincoln City. In 1983 Watford finished runners-up to Liverpool in the First Division. But Taylor wants more than success from his players: he wants to form them as individuals. It is a little-known fact, for instance, that the Watford team are contractually obliged to do seven hours of community work each week. Footballers are often no more than chattels to their clubs; and when the game is finished with them, they blunder out into the world like stranded adolescents. But Watford remains a paternalistic, smalltown outfit, as I saw for myself. The stands and terraces are dotted with women and children, not with National Fronters and bald hooligans. Compared to most other grounds in the First Division, Vicarage Road is a vicarage tea-party.
    The day after our arrival Watford turned out for a joint training session at the Workers' Stadium, the 80,000-seater where they would play China the following night, the first of two meetings with the national side. Taylor was wearing full strip and throwing off as much sweat as anyone in the ninety-degree heat. 'Work! One touch and go! Give it. Go. Give it. Go.' Stocky, grinning, intense, Taylor puts his men through their hoops with a spurring candour, a flattering brutality. There is intimacy in his bellowed orders: he is the canny schoolmaster who knows your vanities and soft-spots, who forces you beyond your limits and then sues for peace with a slap on the back. Taylor told me that he had had to gear himself to use the hefty obscenities of the footballing idiom — that he wasn't accustomed to 'the industrial language' that is the language of the game. Well, he seems accustomed to it now, jovially effing and blinding as he stokes his players to the boil.
    Elton John (also present, in Humpty Dumpty outfit, baseball cap and purple shades) would later admit that it was Taylor who had saved him from the traditional immolation of the rockstar life. Elton had showed up to a Watford match, looking more like Big Ears than usual, and bearing all the signs of bodily abuse. Taylor summoned him to his house that night and offered him a pint glass brimmed with brandy. 'Here. Are you going to drink that? What the fuck's the matter with you?' Elton mended his ways, and not before time. All superstars, it seems, must get off the fast lane before they crash. Some find religion, some find family life. But Elton has found Watford F.C. He delights in his team; and he also enjoyed the anonymity of China, where his music is unknown and he is no more than an exotic curiosity, like a video game or a Beefeater. Only the tourists recognised him.
    As Taylor set about exhausting the China goalkeeper ('Catch and roll. Catch and roll. Again. Again. Again.'), I strolled across the pitch and talked to Shen Xiang-fu, the team's number eleven and major star. In what looked like size-two boots, with his square, vigilant face (and with that strange, glassy distance between eye-surface and lid), Shen answered all questions with the same laconic