Midsummer madness
FRANK KEATING
1 t is a precise half century since I was aware of Wimbledon. On the first Friday of July 1954 we were given a half day off games to cram into the common room to watch 01. Drob flickering about on a fuzzy little monochrome screen. Jaroslav Drobny was a tubby myopic leftie the English had taken to their hearts, a displaced Czech who played tennis under the banner of Egypt but, as a 33year-old Kingston accountant, to all intents was suburban Surrey right down to his Bentalls. gym-shoes. Drob had a flakily fallible backhand but his whizzbang bazooka of a forehand kayoed the sulky teenage Aussie prodigy Rosewall in the four-set final (13-11 in the first, 9-7 in the last). Drobny had been a losing finalist twice, and through the Fifties there had been a line in a long-running West End comedy which unfailingly brought the house down: 'Anyone for tennis? I fancy old Drob's got a real chance at Wimbers this year.'
It was 10 years later that I actually went to SW19's strawberry fields for the first time, and now the home boy Home Counties chal lenger was the effete and upright strokemaker Bobby Wilson, who had made the quarterfinal the previous summer. We were told he had a real chance in 1964, and everybody was sad when Bobby boy was nastily clobbered in the first round by a pouting crew-cut German whom the umpire deferentially addressed as Herr Kunkhe. Since when, nothing changed till recent years and the annual hysterics over the rise and inevitable falls of Tim Henman.
Once the European soccer, for the English, had ended last week in torrents of tears and recriminations, even more than usual expectation was humped on Henman. By all accounts, no end of flag-flying St Georges, conned by the media's frenzied jingo-jangle, had bet huge sums on a soccer-tennis double. The Guardian even wheeled out a novelist, Tim Lott, to ruminate on the presumption of such a triumphant twosome. Even as he dared unwisely to trumpet that England's time had surely come, Lott did caution that a football victory alone taunted the idea that the gods had 'finally tired of emptying their celestial chamberpots' on English heads, and that doubting up on European footer glory with a Henman win was not merely defying ye gods 'but marching up to them and blowing a raspberry while wearing a sign that reads "Kick me!" The fuss each midsummer over Henman is always followed by wailing and gnashing about his successor as best Brit. Zillions every year gush into youth tennis training but still the cupboard is empty. Twenty years ago two pals of mine, Stan Hey and Andrew Nickolds, wrote a terrific BBC comedy, Hold the Back Page, which had a tabloid sports editor demanding that his paper 'discovers' a working-class English boy who can serve overarm and whom they will train up to win Wimbers the following year. Duly, a bright, black and athletic teenage lad named Ben Smith is unearthed, messing about on the Brixton public courts. And he has an Arthur Ashe poster on his bedroom wall. 'Great, but we've gotta change his name,' insists the editor — to a mix of short-'n'-sweet black-is-beautiful Brit bulldog. 'What about Robinson Barley-Water?' `Nah, think of a male equivalent of Zola Budd.' They agree on Winston as first name — 'and, for surname, something on all our readers' minds, c'mon, c'mon, yes, I like it: Bingo!' Thus did Ben Smith become Winston N'Bingo — 'your next certain and sizzling allEngland Wimbledon champ'. Well, the most telling satire must always be shameless — and, anyway. didn't Old Drob once win Wimbers for real?
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