Right now, somewhere in the world, three events are taking place. Somewhere, a teenager is dying a slow, excruciating death as Happy Birthday is bellowed at him by pimply steak-ranch waiters. Meanwhile, across the globe in a tinsel-festooned Bangkok karaoke bar, a Japanese tourist is listening to a Korean businessman sing The Beatles’ Yesterday: ‘yesseraaay ore my trabor seem saw fa awaaay—”
According to the statisticians who work out these things, those two songs are performed all day every day: indeed, Spur waiters alone account for about 80% of the former’s performances. But the bean counters have missed the third eternal event, because somewhere, right now, someone in dark glasses is nervously chewing on a programme in the supporters’ box at a tennis tournament.
Research done by Nasa and the National Geographic Society reveals that the most plentiful things in the world are (in order) bits of sand, locusts, professional tennis tournaments, lemmings, dormice and Baldwins.
It is probably not an exaggeration to suggest that all the world’s tennis courts cover an area equivalent to Switzerland. (Alas, nobody has thought of improving Switzerland by levelling it, covering it in green concrete and painting white lines all over it — yet.)
And where the ATP tour goes, there go the Significant Others.
The box reserved for kin and loved ones is a curious zoo, combining aristocratic poise with Russian mafia taste. The parents, when on speaking terms or not in prison, invariably sit at the front, leathery and hawkish, their rumps moulded by a billion bucket seats and their osteoporosis-ravaged wrists splintering under the weight of bejewelled Rolexes.
The coach, a ferocious Greek person with a crazed Afro bobbing in the breeze, glowers over what is either a moustache or a Shetland pony glued to his lip. He passes the time nervously plaiting the hair on his forearms.
But Mumsy and Pater, bushy Stavros, all of them pale into insignificance next to The Current Partner. Blushing dewdrops with bouffant hair and false lashes, they sit and agonise for their hero down on the court, glued-on nails ground up between miracles of dentistry. All the greats brought these perfumed meringues to watch them at work: Pete Sampras, Martina Navratilova—
And speaking of Pistol Pete, now that he’s finally retired and can start making a living winning Hansie Cronje lookalike competitions, some of the glorious chintz has disappeared from the game.
Until the late 1990s, when athletic blondes became the necessary accessory, he could be relied upon every year to bring along some new vision in puce, a Liberace dream of shoulder pads and lavender rouge, the daughter of the Katzenjammers of Long Island and three-time winner of the West Egg Ladies’ Quilt-a-Thon. The lovelies came and went like Pete’s hairline, but now it’s all over.
Steffi Graf does clean up very nicely, but watching her root for Andre Agassi one gets the feeling she knows too much: vhy, she seems to be wondering, does der stupit Amerikaner homunculus not drill it up der tremlines instead of zis cross-court forehand foolishness?
Somehow it spoils the illusion of trusting admiration so carefully nurtured by heiresses throughout the 1980s. No, tennis partners should never think about anything more than the next Saturday’s rowing regatta and whether the Bolly in the limo was put on ice early enough.
One must hasten to add that in our egalitarian times the Significant Other up in the box does not have to be female by any manner of means. The current crop of Belgian waffles winning tournaments, 16-year-old matrons with surnames like Clijsters and Henin, all install their beaus in the family booth.
Apart from Lleyton Hewitt, whose outbursts of Aussie joy at Kim Clijsters’s successes cause him to beat unconscious anyone near him and then fart a reasonable facsimile of Waltzing Matilda, these lads are as polished and nebulous as any Samprasian conquest. One would never suspect that behind the perfect hair and the dimples there lurk professional skateboarders called Chad or experimental tag-artists called Mario-X.
The Agassi-Grafs aside, these liaisons rarely last. The tour moves on, and so do its stars. In suddenly empty Park Avenue apartments shoulder pads and dark glasses are packed away, stuffed, fuzzy tennis racquets tearfully burned, and life becomes dull and meaningless. At least for the afternoon. Because this evening there’s bridge, and then that marvellous new show called ‘Crud” by Mario-X—