Here she is, this Nabakovian sun-child, crystal-cold Russian tanned to honey by a decade in the heat of American skin-worship, giggling as she lifts her trophy. Ten thousand Humbert Humberts, comparing over-earnest notes on her forehand, look at the girlish knees, the still-soft calves, hair the colour of a Ukrainian wheat-field, and endure the delicious torment of being old and ugly in the shadows as this new loveliness dawns over the tennis world.
Of course, that’s not the version the women’s game and the protectors of womanhood would like one to notice, and certainly Maria Sharapova’s nerveless performance on Centre Court elevated her at once from pin-up to official Wimbledon highlight, a teenaged winner with a goofiness in her graciousness to match Steffi Graf or Boris Becker or all those other spotty and precocious champions who have come before.
But one can’t blame the Humberts for their undiscerning adoration, because greater forces than even Serena Williams’s neckline are at work here. Perhaps it was the Soviet Union’s last great subterfuge. Perhaps the West’s decadence has addled it. But somewhere in the past 10 years a new and entirely false factoid as been grafted on to the Western male consciousness. From men’s magazines to the lascivious covers of Cosmopolitan the new order has declared: Russian girls are hot.
Of course, it’s just the hair. It was Churchill who first pointed out the immense pull that Russian hair exerted on the Western imagination, declaring the country to be a riddle wrapped in a scrunchie inside a bottle of conditioner.
Anna Kournikova, the original Miami Menshevik with a spring in her steppe, was the prime example of the hallucinogenic qualities of blonde locks. Put a paper bag over her hair, and one finds a nose like a blob of play-dough squashed between little piggy eyes, and pork-chop cheeks subsiding towards a mouth of supreme churlishness.ÂÂ
In fact, Kournikova’s is the kind of face that should be covered in tractor-grease on some far-flung collective farm. It is the face of the Motherland, pretty as a potato and sensitive as a steel-mill.
Which causes one to digress: why did tennis take so long to take hold in Russia? In 1990 there were an estimated 200 tennis-courts in the whole of the Soviet Union. At 10 000km from west to east, one had to sled 50km at a time to get a game. Those who missed the court by a degree or two north or south would have stumbled on into the snow for weeks, finally eating the dogs and burning their tog-bags, their white shorts and shirts making them invisible to rescuers.
Certainly, Stalinist sports lovers would have found in tennis a microcosm of everything they were ordered, on pain of death, to hold dear. Equally matched rivals faced off across a rope curtain. The launch of a small Sputnik-like orb set the enemy scurrying, and the ensuing strategic positioning of ballistic objects compelled both parties to scramble into the far corners of their respective empires to ensure the status quo. Tramlines, baseline, Cuba, all had to be patrolled.
Meanwhile there was the economy to worry about. Scoring was achieved through limited production linked to enormous inflation: one point scored counted 15. But wealth foments capitalist perversions, and when workers acquired 30 points, their earning capability was handicapped by the lone dictator who presided over the match. The next point earned just 10, and the next — the winning point — was an undisclosed number. Did one need 41 points to win?
No one knew: such finite targets were bad for morale, and prevented defections to the West where one could earn 50, 60, even 80 points a year on lush grass courts.
But nothing was perfect except Stalin, and sometimes one’s opponent managed to muster 40 points too, usually thanks to the conspiracy of international Jewry, satanic Cath-olicism and the CIA. This score, known as deuce in the West and as détente in Russia, was a transitory peace, a patently obvious smokescreen behind which the forces of aggression were mobilising. Naturally, this situation required a pre-emptive strike to gain the Advantage. A kick-serve up the middle, or a veto, usually did the job.
And now Russians are free. Free to be poor, free to be blown up by terrorists or Mafia crime lords or leaking gas pipes, free to be alcoholics in the privacy of their own dumpsters. Free to move to Miami when they’re five. Free to win Wimbledon.
I love a happy ending.