TV loves tennis
FRANK KEATING
The Wimbledon tennis begins sharp at 2 p.m. Monday and, as has often been the case, competes with a haughtily oblivious lack of concern against the football World Cup in Germany. The tennis will make for far better telly, and see if I’m not right a fortnight today when what Wimbers still refers to as ‘the gentlemen’s singles final’ will serve as afternoon overture to the evening’s clamorous soccer climax in Berlin. I find it hard to believe now that some years ago when the two championships coincided I had to fly back and forth to cover the pick of the matches in the so incongruently different games.
Other times, assigned only to Wimbledon, with Grub Street mates I enjoyed infuriating the battalions of earnest US tennis-writers with a surreptitious blanket switching of the television sets in their foreign press room from the tennis to the footer. We’d stifle our sniggers as the Yanks went potty with rage. Pathetic schoolboy stuff, I agree, and proba bly caused by the fact that, in those days anyway, there seemed to us to be no freemasonry more goody-goody pious than specialist US sportswriters. They took their ‘craft’ and the events they were covering so terribly seriously; at the same time we knew well that generally they were far more on-the-ball than we Brits, certainly more conscientious and literate; we might have had an edge only in the doubtful fripperies of over-the-top ‘colour’ writing, dodgy jokes and the manipulation of players’ quotes.
A couple of weeks after the tennis, our unconscious jealousies would have us inflicting similar puerile wheezes and teases on elders and betters when a fresh corps of US writers would fly in for the Open golf and in the press marquee (tee-hee) we’d keep switching to the Test match at Headingley or Old Trafford precisely as Nicklaus, say, was lining up his crucial long putt at the tricky tenth. One reason for their fury was that American sportswriters had long been brought up to rely on the television monitor as their aid, ‘crib’ and comfort. Never such facility here, of course, and I still recall my wonder and astonishment — back in the 1960s at my first big-time US sports event — to find every press-desk came with its own individual, inbuilt television monitor, with action replays to savour and confirm in close-up what you had just seen down there with your own naked eye. It seemed to me to be cheating, somehow — and, grumpy, stubborn old codger that I am, it still does in a way.
And three football matches a day for three weeks has confirmed for me that, for all the frenzy, football on television remains tediously two-dimensional and hollow; it can only distantly, messily transmit the overpowering spiritual ‘feeling’ of actually being there in the throng. Golf, too, is hopeless on television and once you have stopped admiring the camera’s dead-eyed focus on the tiny white onion flying through the sky, picture foreshortening conveys no remote sense of either the intricate geometry of the game or its epic and ever-changing geography.
Cricket is pretty good on television, but for boxing they purposely tone down the cruel crack of clenched leather on bone. Tennis is best: every thwack, every grunt, every sigh is heard (almost every spit). The spatial confines of the court even enhances, on screen, the realities of the game’s cockpit passions, its oomph and its angles, its aesthetics and oneon-one personal tensions. So: ‘Quiet, please ... thirtay-fortay... ’.
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