For television, this is the season of repeats. Nowadays the programmers are too canny to flag anything quite so boldly, however. They prefer to tempt the viewer by sticking words such as ”Revisited” or ”Second Helping” on the original title in the hope we’ll spend the whole show saying, ”Have we seen this before? I think we have. I remember those curtains. They’re just like the ones my Aunt Bertha had in the spare room, aren’t they?”
Sport is much the same. That is why we are watching Back To Steven Gerrard’s Contract Talks and Another Portion of Faria Alam.
Which leaves us viewers with Wimbledon, heralded by the reappearance on our screens of Boris Becker with his wild staring eyes and vertical white hair, looking for all the world like a cartoon character who has just bumped into a headless phantom.
Lawn tennis was invented in Wales and patented and popularised by a Welshman, Major Walter Wingfield. Why Wingfield did this is not certain, though it seems plain to me that it was to gain revenge on the English for 600 years of oppression and Gavin Henson being left out of the Lions team for the first Test. As a tool of Welsh vengeance, tennis can only work if the English take it seriously. Unfortunately, for two weeks every year we do. Personally, I hate tennis as the devil does milk but it is a choice between that and Bodger and Badger and frankly, once you discover the latter is not a DIY show hosted by Bernard Hinault, that is no choice at all.
Don’t get me wrong, tennis is a pleasant pastime for foreign girls and the more delicate sort of boy and it is for this reason I regard England’s long-term failure to produce a men’s singles winner as a badge of national honour. The average English woman is likewise far too robust to be bothering with a pastime as unashamedly cardigan-friendly as tennis. True, some have shamefully succeeded in the past but they, thank goodness, are not typical.
After all, Sue Barker is to the womanhood of Albion what the Pekinese is to the world of dogs — all very well if you want something cute to carry around in a shoulder bag but useless at scaring away burglars or herding frisky bullocks.
If the Lawn Tennis Association were to make it compulsory to chug six Bacardi Breezers during the changeovers, then English ladies might get somewhere. As it is, they will continue to fulfil the more physically demanding role of sitting on the sidelines cackling lewdly over Mark Philippoussis.
Imagine Maria Sharapova on a hen night in Newcastle. With her willowy frame she’d not last five minutes before collapsing under the weight of the flashing ”Sperm Donor Wanted” novelty headgear. Nowadays the Russian describes herself as part tennis player, part businesswoman. She even had to break off during her first-round tie to answer a cellphone call about a missing order of wing nuts.
From what I can gather, women players are increasingly struggling in their attempts to juggle tennis with a career. Serena Williams in particular has been badly affected with her fashion, acting and arc-welding activities gradually eroding her ability to synchronise shot and grunt — identified by experts as the key area of the modern game.
Martina Navratilova has expressed doubts whether the American can get her whup-and-huurgh back in whack while she continues to be distracted by the glamorous world of steel fabrication. I’m not sure I agree with Martina.
Incidentally, I feel I can call her Martina because in tennis everyone is on first-name terms. During matches commentators refer to players almost exclusively in this way. It’s like listening to a lot of middle-class white boys talking about Sixties soul singers (and I said much the same to Solomon and Percy the other day). I’d like to see this cosy sense of familiarity extended to other sports. ”Gary surges forward on the right, a deep cross finds Wayne. He tees it up for Roy who cracks it into the left-hand corner. And there was really very little Paul could do to stop that one, Mark.”
It is plain from what Martina has written that she is forgetting her former fellow countryman once removed, the great Jaroslav Drobny, who was not only a Wimbledon champion and an ice hockey international but also a world-renowned taxidermist. As Lew Hoad remarked: ”Drob brought to Centre Court a hint of arrogance and a distinct whiff of formaldehyde.”
Nor did the Czech allow it to interfere with his tennis. He defeated Ken Rosewall in the 1954 final despite having been up till four in the morning mounting a hippopotamus at the Natural History Museum. — Â