Peter Bromhead: Feasting as fists fly

Illustration / Peter Bromhead

In my shallower days, I kept a permanent spectator box at the Stanley St tennis centre, solely for the purpose of watching the annual New Zealand championship events.

With full dining service, this created a unique opportunity to stuff oneself full of calories, while watching tennis combatants taking them off.

On reflection, it was a harmless if slightly decadent pastime, consuming chicken and lobster daily, washed down with bubbles, all on the premise that it was a legitimate public relations exercise for entertaining clients.

In reality, most of my business associates were away on their summer holidays, leaving me to fill the allocated seats with fluffily dressed, idle young women, who I misguidedly believed enjoyed my company, rather than merely craving the moment when the TV cameras would alight on them between sets.

While food and some sports go hand in hand - like baseball and hotdogs - I don't know how widespread the practice of munching while watching really is. Certainly at many international matches, such as the Paris Open, nobody is encouraged to view the players while armed with bottles of Bordeaux and plates of foie gras and Delice de Bourgogne cheese. Even at Wimbledon, the traditional strawberries and cream are consumed off-court.

What has brought on this little wander down memory lane was my recent experience viewing people doing their best to render each other comatose in a series of boxing bouts in Invercargill. In one match, a Polish boxer called Izu Ugonoh knocked out his opponent, Will Quarrie, with a huge punch to his jaw, sending the boxer tumbling halfway out of the ring to land face up on the ringside judges' table.

What caught my eye was the fact that ringside spectators and judges were all busily indulging in fine dining, when suddenly they had a victim of severe concussion crash among their freshly laden dinner plates.

On television, I think I spotted Sir Bob Jones anxiously trying to push dishes of food away from the unfortunate boxer's sweating and bleeding head.

The thought that people can consume food while watching their fellow men beat the brains out of each other raises a philosophical debate that is beyond the imaginative resources of this correspondent.

However, I am curious to learn what they serve at such events. Surely it's nothing too dainty, like lobster or chicken? I presume followers of the sport known as the "sweet science" expect to dine on thick slabs of steak, very underdone and oozing with blood.