It was about 10pm UK time on Friday 19 August 2016, and Great Britain’s women’s hockey team were playing in the Olympic final in Rio de Janeiro. I was in my car on the forecourt of a petrol station in the west of Scotland, crying.
Eight hours earlier we had been for a ‘precautionary’ MRI scan of my wife Helen’s brain. That was to find out the cause of the mild numbness in the fingers and toes of Helen’s right hand and foot since June.
An hour after the scan, and nearly home, the consultant called my mobile and asked us to turn back. An hour after that, we were in his office. I can’t recall most of what he said. I remember the howling wind outside. The rain on his window. A few of the phrases.
“It doesn’t look brilliant … About the size of a lemon … Can’t be certain. But the dyes suggest malignant.”
It was a brain tumour.
Helen was fit, slim, a healthy eater, a lifelong non-smoker. She was 43. With no previous serious illnesses.
Did I mention this was the worst day of my life?
We made the case to the consultant for going home; he wanted Helen admitted immediately. “The girls are 13 and 15, I need to tell them myself,” Helen said.
“Okay, go and tell them, but I want you admitted tonight, even if it’s late.”
We drove home. Our mobiles were ringing every few minutes. It was the girls, and then H’s parents, then the girls again, trying to find out where on earth we were. We ignored every call.
As we drove, we repeated the same thing over and over to each other. What are we going to tell them?
As we pulled into the drive, about 5pm, we’d decided: the truth.
“Mum has a brain tumour. Probably malignant, but not definitely. She has to go into hospital, now. There’s a risk of seizure or brain haemorrhage at any time. Hospital is safest. Over the next few days the doctors will decide what to do. Whatever happens, we’ll do it together.”
Daisy, then 15, asked: “Is mum going to die?” My response: “Daise, we’re all going to die. Hopefully mum isn’t going to die any time soon.”
I don’t remember how Isabel, then 13, reacted. But, aged 17 when I originally wrote this piece in 2021, she recalled the moment: “You and mum came into the lounge. I could tell you’d been crying. I put my hands over my ears. I didn’t listen.”
Helen packed some stuff: pyjamas, toothbrush, knickers, a book, a notebook. We drove to the hospital and the girls came too. They wanted to see where Helen would be. The nursing staff were so compassionate they might as well have been … angels.
Helen was admitted, and it was about 8pm. The nurses said I could sleep in her room, given the circumstances. I drove the girls 45 minutes back to H’s mum and dad.
I turned round and drove back to the hospital. I was wiped out, physically and emotionally. I pulled onto that forecourt. Radio 5 Live was on. Team GB women had won hockey gold, and I was bawling my eyes out.
You can read the full version of this piece from early 2021 here.
Or watch a video that tells the same story here. Warning: you’ll cry.
That Team GB women’s gold is one sporting event from my life that will be indelibly linked to one of my most major “life events” for all the wrong reasons.
But sport has also become inextricably linked to some of my life’s most significant highs. And I’m not even a particular sports fanatic.
Yes, I’ve made my living writing primarily about sports-related subjects for the past 30 years. But once I’d decided for sure that I wanted to be journalist, around 1994, I wanted to be foreign correspondent, ideally covering southern Africa from Nairobi, and / or an investigative journalist.
But life is what happens while you’re making other plans, and while I started my journalism career as a junior foreign correspondent on a Japanese paper covering politics, economics, Shergar’s murder, the handover of Hong Kong back to China in 1997 (and a story about Mao’s last mistress fleeing to the UK), I got offered a role at The Independent sports desk, because, effectively, the foreign desk had just been shut down due to cuts.
So began a life in “sports journalism”, which has actually been a life in journalism where I’ve covered lots of sport but also, mainly, the intersection of sport, politics, ethics, corruption and all that good stuff.
The remainder of this piece is for those paying subscribers without whom this work wouldn’t be possible. What you’ll read below the paywall break isn’t earth-shattering: it’s one man’s recollection of 10 sports events that meant a lot to me. BUT.
For anyone who subscribes today (and I have access to all the analytics, so I’ll know), your money won’t come to me but will be divided between the three charities who helped Helen most as she lived her life to the full with brain cancer from August 2016 to her death in December 2020: Maggie’s, Brain Tumor Research, and the hospice where she spent the last year of her life.
If anything above has moved you, or helped you, then subscribe for a month and then cancel. Or subscribe for a month and stay subscribed until you’re not getting value for money.
In advance: thanks!
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