High life
Bad call
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Tennis, once a civilised game, is now just another way for those Shylocks that run American television — and therefore America — to pile up their ill-gotten gains. A friend of mine, Sir Gordon White, told me just last week that the trouble with McEnroe was that his breeding showed all the time. Well, I couldn't agree more. When Oscar Wilde wrote that the Americans are great hero-worshippers, and always take heroes from the criminal classes, he was, as always, one hundred per cent right on.
My mentor, Professor Aspinall, is the only man in the British Isles who is not surprised that McEnroe behaves the way he does. Watching the final with him was like having a lesson in genetics as well as history. Borg, according to theall-knowing one from Kent, is a Goth, the epitome of the Germanic race and of the Gothic ideal. (Aspers did flinch a bit when I pointed out that Borg's eyes were like the eye of my ancestor Cyclops, but what the hell? No one's perfect.) McEnroe, always according to the Prof, is an Irish American and shows it as much as he shows his breeding. He is temperamental, treacherous, irascible, unreliable, fiery, and a perfect representative of his race. I believe in genetics and Aspinall, in that order, so I am not surprised either at the way he behaves.
Ironically, when the Home Secretary laid the blame for last week's rioting in Liverpool on the parents of those coarse, hyena-like anthropoids that attacked the police and burnt down the place, McEnroe came to mind. More specifically, his father. I watched him (the father) while he admired his creation but, unlike Dr Frankenstein, he was not appalled. He wore one of those hideous hats ugly Americans wear when they visit ruins, and his only remark during the championships was that the Wimbledon authorities were outrageous in their reaction to his brutish, half-witted, ignorant and self-opinionated son. Granted that he is, on a fast surface, the best tennis player in the world, and on most surfaces better than most, it still is horrible to see that if it wasn't for American television and sponsors selling their anal products he would have been disqualified from competition among civilised people long ago. And it's not simply a case of sour grapes on my part. Let me give you a few examples.
In 1954 Earl Cochell was ranked in the first ten among Americans and the first 20 in the world. During a tournament he cursed an umpire, and when the gentleman in the chair took umbrage and told him where to get off, Cochell pushed him. Well, Earl Cochell never played in a tennis tournament again.
He was banned for life, and he's still around regretting it. You might think that the punishment did not fit the crime. I agree.
But the first thing I heard when I hit the circuit in 1956 — and of course began behaving like a Fifties equivalent of McEn roe today — was what happened to Cochell. And it registered. In 1961, during the Greek national championships, I lost my quarter final match after five sets, won my doubles in four, and was involved in a long mixed doubles. I was playing with a girl that I liked at the time. (Which is very unusual.) What she lacked in tennis ability she made up for in looks, so despite the fact that I was almost out on my feet, I was hustling and running all over the court trying to win, hoping, needless to say, that I would be rewarded afterwards. (Like all rich and pretty girls, she wanted to win, and it didn't matter how.) Well, as Hollywood would have it, on a crucial point the umpire made a terrible mistake. Or so I thought. I was never very popular with the tennis authorities in Greece because, as I was the only player who was also a member of the club, I insisted that my fellow players eat with me, and not in the kitchen as was the custom of the time. When I got the bad call, I was sure it was on purpose. I said to him, almost verbatim, what McEnroe said to the Indian linesman last week. That he was in fact cheating.
Greeks, being atavistic cheaters, don't like that. It also just happened that the umpire at the time was a very honest man; he just got off the chair and went home. I got a two-year suspension, and there was nothing my Daddy's money could do to help. I went to the Sudan, where Daddy had the largest textile mill in the Middle East, but the Sudanese were the only people who allowed me to play in a tournament. The result was that, since that day, I never misbehaved again.
Last week, after watching McEnroe's antics, I called one of his defeated opponents and asked him why he didn't grab the little gangster by the throat and warn him. His opponent, who asked me not to identify him, told me that if he did, he would never play in another big money tournament again, as the sponsors were so anxious to have McEnroe that they would do anything he asked.
I guess if I was making a living from tennis I'd keep my mouth shut too, but that's no reason for the sages of the American press to go on non-stop about his talent. Al Capone, too, had talent with a sub-machine gun.
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