After close to 50 tennis grand slams and a handful of Davis Cup deciders, a dozen AFL grand finals, Olympic and Commonwealth Games both home and away, Boxing Day cricket and a score of world championships, this is my finish line after almost 24 years at The Age. As for the memories, where do I start?
THE CHICK THING
![Cherished moments: Linda Pearce interviewing Roger Federer.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170627033331im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/w/x/3/4/9/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gwvb4n.png/1498204635360.jpg)
In the early 1990s, women were still a novelty in newspaper sports departments and football changing rooms, despite a decade having passed since the door had finally been nudged open. Back then, there were no emailed invitations to midweek news conferences held at modern, shiny, club HQs, let alone media managers delivering subjects to defined interview areas after matches. In fact, there were no media managers of any kind. Instead, on game days, reporters clutching old-fashioned cassette recorders would huddle around the coach in a spare, smelly corner of the cramped and ancient locker rooms as players wandered to and from the showers in various states of (un)dress.
After one Richmond-West Coast game at the MCG, for example, I'd requested a quick chat with Wayne Campbell and was studiously gazing at the carpet rather than the nude buttocks while an official sought him out when a former Tiger boomed: "Oh, Linda. We know how much you enjoy coming in here. We know how much you like looking at all the guys." Mortifying. Moronic.
And yet, until about 1995, major problems were rare. There was the odd delay at the door before entry was eventually sorted, the occasional exhibitionist flasher and the usual blokey jokes and remarks. All a bit of fun. Among the exceptions, though, was one interstate coach who, in a thunderous mood, joined the small media circle at the old Western Oval with this sole female in his sights and a sarcastic opening challenge about where I'd played my junior footy. Like all dinosaurs, his type eventually became extinct. Otherwise, part of the territory involved shrugging it all off.
When, seven years into my football-writing career, I was finally persuaded to write a column on the subject, there was more going on. Not long before, I'd been singled out of a group of otherwise male reporters in the Carlton rooms after a bitter finals loss and asked to leave for no reason other than my gender. Soon after that, an over-zealous doorman had blocked my path, while all my (male) colleagues were – naturally – ushered directly inside. After the latter incident was reported in a footy magazine gossip column, and sponsors apparently started to make threatening throat-clearing noises, it was the apologies that were coughed up.
Now, coaches are brought into a formal interview area amid the TV lights and cameras, and, however sanitised, there is no distinction, no discrimination, just equal opportunity access for all. Sadly, after my departure this week, and that of Emma Quayle earlier this year, there will again be only one female sportswriter at The Age: the original trailblazer Caroline Wilson (although sports editor Chloe Saltau would still be in the trenches if she was not now running the place, so that's progress of a very significant kind). More broadly, with a greater presence in the electronic media in particular, this is now a career to which many more young women can aspire. Bravo.
Yet cricket, too, took its time working all this out. Sorting through some old files the other day I found a long-forgotten handwritten apology from the great South African Barry Richards, the head of Queensland Cricket when Gabba staff barred me from joining my colleagues in the players' area during a rain delay at a 1990s Sheffield Shield game. Front page news in Melbourne seemed like an over-reaction at the time, and was; the better news is that those days (like, more sadly, reporters travelling interstate to cover Shield games), are long gone.
THE INTERVIEWS
A handful of one-on-one sit-downs with Roger Federer are among the most cherished, not least because such opportunities can be months in the organising. One of my chats with the ever-charming and forthcoming tennis GOAT, confirmed after much hassling of agents and tennis officials, preceded an accidental rendezvous with another personal favourite and treasure, Rod Laver. Officially, that was a work day. Puh. Hardly.
Other champions have proven to be less accessible. Most notably, ahem, Lleyton Hewitt, who took initial offence to a piece written in the late '90s by an Age columnist known for his provocative views, and promptly banned this tennis writer for a period that – after various other twists and tangles, including before and during his 2002 Wimbledon triumph – extended until a Hopman Cup ice-breaker more than a decade later. Things may have thawed now, but MND's Big Freeze had nothing on this one.
Yet if Nick Kyrgios is now favouring a variation of the same with-me-or-against-me theme, there have been surprisingly few others, and it's been humbling to be trusted so many times with the intensely personal rather than just the routinely professional. In 1999, the multi-talented and hugely-likeable Scott Draper granted an emotional interview soon after the death of his wife of just 20 months, Kellie, to the lung-related consequences of cystic fibrosis. The tale was so raw and searingly sad that there was one option: do it justice.
Jelena Dokic, too, opened up publicly for the first time during a 2008 phone interview conducted from under a desk in Doha (me – long story) and France (her, when finally back training again) about her paralysing depression, abusive father, the lost tennis years, and the devastating estrangement from her dysfunctional family while still a teenager. Far more recently, the Monica Seles sequel, all these years on from her Hamburg stabbing, was a true pleasure to write, her dignity, graciousness and perspective remarkable during a too-brief conversation in Singapore. Only a departing plane and a hovering media minder curtailed things.
Still, having once overheard the pre-statesman version of Andre Agassi bagging dull old Melbourne and then being granted an official audience in which he said exactly the opposite, one often gets the sense that many of the big names are merely fulfilling their sponsor/tournament/club obligations; desperate not to offend or inflame, going through the motions and recycling answers given so many times before.
Hard to blame them, really, and thus the importance of searching for questions that may lead to a fresh and different insight. At least, whatever else one may think of him, there is an authenticity to the strife-prone-yet-colourful Kyrgios, for example, that surely has to be admired in a sporting landscape dominated by beige and grey.
BACK IN THE DAY
In some ways, how we old-timers yearn for the pre-internet era, when experiences and events could be explored, digested and savoured to at least some degree; when stories could wait longer than the second after match point or the final siren/whistle/act.
Rewind to the 1997 US Open, when The Sunday Age was still a stand-alone publication and the time difference and luxury of the pre-digital age provided the freedom to wander around Arthur Ashe Stadium after Pat Rafter's maiden grand slam success. Mission: to seek out the four holidaying Australian tourists who had driven from upstate New York in their $900 Chevrolet and bought some scalped tickets in the nosebleed seats – their numbers swelling during the match and an ecstatic Rafter saluting them afterwards. For better or worse, the travelling troupe of chanting, singing tennis fans known as the Fanatics had just been born.
Result: all of us ended up being invited by Rafter's brother, Peter, to the celebration party at the Park Avenue Country Club that night. I know. Incredible. Young sports writer, covering just her second overseas grand slam. Keen not to outstay the welcome, eventual departure time coincided with the sight of Newk (beyond John to somewhere in Jock/Jack territory), Tony Roche and Paul McNamee following some odd Davis Cup tradition of wearing napkins as late-night bar hats. The hangover had almost subsided by the time the story went to print a week later. Yes, a whole week.
It was very different when Rafter lost the 2001 Wimbledon final against the similarly beloved and far-longer-suffering Goran Ivanisevic, in a climax delayed by rain until the third Monday and played in an atmosphere so remarkable that tears (OK, yes, mine) were shed in the media seats during the ovation for the two sentimental favourites as they walked ONTO the court. Slightly embarrassing and never before, or again. That moment was really something.
But, alas, there was also real work to do. Back in Melbourne, the paper was being held back for the result. At SW19, back and forth went that extraordinary fifth set, as did frantic updates at every change of ends; the St Pat wins story vying with the St Pat loses version lurking on the alternate screen – ready to send, instantly. If the sweat and stress were not just Rafter's, the match was Goran's: 9-7 in the decider. One for the good guys. Except for the unfortunate detail that there were two.
Football, too, is greatly changed from the world I once knew so well. Hard to imagine turning up to interview a senior coach these days to discover him puffing on a cigarette (well, it was the St Kilda Social Club). Or arriving, as arranged, at the home of one slightly notorious football character who had lost the key to the deadlocked front door and being advised that entry would have to be via the patio door/window.
In fact, so unsettling was that visit, which involved witnessing green substances growing out of coffee mugs on the filthy carpet, that only after a relieved retreat to the car was there another unwelcome discovery: the tape had been on pause. The whole time. Not a word recorded. Could have gone back in. Didn't. No way. Preferred the option of paraphrasing from scrounged shorthand notes. Direct quotes, like real jobs, are over-rated sometimes.
A COUPLE of decades later, this is my last story for The Age. I have watched Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt and Cathy Freeman win Olympic gold, attended a Davis Cup draw manned by Robert Mugabe's gun-wielding guards in Harare, spent a night on the bench at the MCG with the Bulldogs before these "insider" goings-on were commonplace, received a bizarre post-jail call from John "I just want to say that I'm not in the jail" Tomic in Madrid, been a Team of the Century selector for a favourite club still trying to add to its collection of grand old flags, seen Mark Philippoussis savaged as a pariah in Mildura and celebrated as a saviour in Nice, witnessed the 2008 Wimbledon final considered the best of all time...
I could go on, but can't, because time's up. Through it all there has been one great constant, and privilege: the opportunity to recount the experiences of so many, all while accumulating almost 24 years worth of treasures of my own.