FROM INDIANAPOLIS TO VICARAGE ROAD, THE PASSION REMAINS THE SAME

FROM Indianapolis to Vicarage Road, the passion for sport, or 'sports', remains the same.

Chargers-Saints

I WALKED over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner.

 It was fall in New York and if I wasn't in love again, I could vividly remember how it felt. Enough to remember that line from The Great Gatsby, anyway. It's still a wonderful town, though I'm a bit less wonderful myself these days. Or less wonder-struck.

My old friend Jim Lawton - as fine a sportswriter as ever smoked a cigarette, and also a great lover of New York - told me about a colleague from another newspaper who got a bit above himself on arriving there.

On the phone to his office in the taxi from the airport, he heard a siren and stuck his phone out of the window. "Hear that? It's the sound of New York. I love New York! And New York loves me!"

A couple of years later I was round about Broadway and 63rd - note the piquant detail - when I too heard a siren and called Jim just in time.

"Hear that, Jim? It's the sound of New York. I love New York!" "And does New York love you, Simon?" "New York doesn't give a flying f . . .". Which is another kind of romanticism about the old place.

My recent trip to New York to cover the US Open felt at times like a pilgrimage to my own past. I hadn't been there since 2004, when I covered (ah me!) Tim Henman in the semis at the US Open. There was a time when I was in the US at least twice a year, always managing to spend a few days in New York.

My old friend Frances Edmonds, wife of the former England cricketer Phil, wrote in her notorious book Another Bloody Tour: "The trouble was caused by brilliant award-winning globetrotting sportswriter Ian Wooldridge, and Simon Barnes." Point taken, Frances, but now I was unquestionably trotting the globe and writing the sport and it felt pretty brilliant.

I covered four Super Bowls, two World Series, one NBA finals, Michael Jordan and all. I covered the 1994 football (sorry, soccer) World Cup. I covered boxing in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, and loathed both. I went to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Laguna Seca raceway. I covered the Atlanta Olympic Games of 1996 and visited Frank Bruno's training camp in Fountain Hills, Arizona.

I flew from city to city with my walkperson whispering sweet music. I said: "Can I get a Wild Turkey on the rocks, please?" Quite often, in fact. It was a line I didn't tire of, and it always brought me a drink as American as an English muffin. I had eggs over easy. I even had tomayto juice. I had all the traditional American meals such as pizza and tofu.

And I knew the difference between a safety and a free safety, I knew what it meant when the bases were loaded, I could recognise a rainbow from three-point land when I saw one, and it was all absolutely glorious. I baked in LA and damn near froze in Chicago.

I remember the very pure joy of the narcissism that comes from travelling America, especially in privileged circumstances, especially alone.

There's the feeling that wherever you are - Minneapolis or the Pontiac Silverdome or watching sea otters in Monterey or catching the Monday Night Game in your hotel room or Oakland, where, as Gertrude Stein said: "There's no there there", or best of all, New York - you are starring in the movie of yourself.

But more than that. The United States was an education in sport, in journalism. At the end of the 80s, the negativity surrounding England and English sport was profound. Football was disgusting, English clubs had been banned from Europe, the cricket team was entering its long downswing and the entire country was in a fit of the glums.

In America, sports - they always use the plural - was or were always great. The optimism balanced you. You did not share it exactly, but you felt less obliged to be cynical and weary.

However, I made the same mistake every time I went through immigration.

"What kind of business are you in, Mr Barons?" "I'm a sportswriter, and I believe you have a little football game in town this week." "You mean the Super Bowl? That's a BIG football game."

But once through the Irony Curtain I was away . . . discovering that although America is not England, sport is still sport, whether you put an S on the end or not. There were two very important truths in this, or rather one big one.

The first was that exotic sports are not the aberrations of a botched civilisation. They are just different understandings of the same thing. There is no point in despising baseball because it's not cricket. We have tea, they have the seventh-inning stretch, people get sentimental about both games and we can all play with the stats - mess with the numbers - to our heart's content.

I had conversations in many bars about tight ends and quarterbacks and bullpen change-ups, and learnt that sport is like Esperanto: a made-up language that works for us all, if only we can be bothered with it.

Thus I learnt the bigger truth: American sports are great but the real point is that sport is a human universal. I felt the same sort of fierce joy watching Joe Montana's immortal drive in the Super Bowl of 1989 as I did for Ian Botham's heroics of 1981; I felt the same unbelieving wonder for Bobby Charlton's goal against Mexico in 1966 as I did for the grand-slam hit by Kent "getta vowel" Hrbek in the World Series of 1987.

To despise a sport from another culture is ignorance: worse, it's xenophobia. The reverse error is to love a sport (or a culture) for its exoticism rather than for itself, and of course I did that a bit. But only to an extent.

Because the greater truth was always with me and it is the thread that links a rainy Saturday at Vicarage Road, Watford, with a baking Sunday at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, or the Arundel cricket ground with the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. The differences enthral, but ultimately it is the similarities that count.

Learning this, my need for exoticism began to fade. I didn't need to go to New York twice a year to be reinspired. Besides, the Mayflower hotel has gone, Coliseum Books has gone, and so has the restaurant opposite the Lincoln Center where the waitresses wore rollerskates.

So I felt a little elegiac as I packed my bag and prepared to take a cab to JFK: for former times, for my younger self. It was time to take a plane back to the present, but I was more than ready for that.

Sport, eh? Parabolas and parabolas: that soaring home run or the pass into the endzone or the three-pointer or the straight six over the bowler's head or the cross-field pass to the striker's feet or the game-clinching dropped goal . . . Montana, Hrbek, Jordan, Botham, Charlton, Jonny Wilkinson . . . I travelled across America and found the thread that links them all . . . and it's not a Great American Dream at all. It's a Great Human Dream.

THE TIMES