Epic in the gloom
ROGER ALTON
Grass-court tennis eh? A bit boring? Just serve and volley, ace, serve and volley? Well not any more. And sometimes old-style serve-return, bish-bosh, really did get a bit tedious. Go on, admit it. Obscure studies by people with a bit too much time on their hands proved that once you’ve factored in breaks between games, towelling down, or getting ready to bounce balls, top grass-court players would only spend four or five minutes per hour actually playing tennis. Very definitely not any more. Do you know how many times Rafa Nadal served and volleyed in that quite extraordinary, thunderously brilliant epic of epics in the gloom of SW19 last month? Just once, in the last game of the final set.
What’s happened of course is the game has changed. Huge technical advances in stringing and racket sizes have meant that players can return serve with much greater accuracy. And the ultimate physical evolution of the tennis player as supreme baseline athlete is Nadal. But would anyone have swapped this year’s final for a tight three or four sets of serve and volley? I don’t think so. In fact this year we have been uniquely privileged to have witnessed, within a few weeks, two of the greatest events in any sport ever — that Wimbledon final, where you literally had no idea what was going to happen next from second to second, and the US Open in San Diego when Woods played on with his wrecked leg in a Homeric struggle against Rocco Mediate right through to the 91st hole. We’re lucky, lucky people.
There’s a lot of chaff, mostly coming out of the US, to the effect that this year’s Open doesn’t really matter because Woods won’t be there. We’ll see about that. He has only won the Open a mere three times (admittedly out of 11 entries, which is a pretty good strike rate); Peter Thompson managed five, as did Tom Watson, and no one said it was a rubbish Open if they missed it. Woods was a bit part player in last year’s Open, and though the great man has been world No. 1 for 500 weeks straight, it might be nice for someone else to get a look-in. Westwood looks tempting at around 14-1, and you might have a tickle on Australia’s Stuart Appleby, at a mammoth 100-1.
The Open always throws up great stories — stories of glory, human stories, and sometimes very sad stories. The last time the Open was played at Birkdale, in 1998, Stuart Appleby was with his wife Renay on the way to a quick break in Europe after he’d missed the cut. They were outside Waterloo station when his wife was killed in a horrific traffic accident. It would somehow be fitting if Appleby, who is the best of that richly talented bunch of postGreg Norman Australians, and a famously nice guy, was vaguely near the frame on Sunday.
And what a day that will be, right in the middle of the 2nd Test against South Africa at Leeds, Flints and all at long last. How great to have proper Test cricket back. Twenty20 might be spicy fast food, but this is the real thing, all six courses and another bottle of red. Quite how knackered the English bowlers are after three days bowling at the South Africans we will find out.
But if you want to get a sense of real cricket, pre-pyjamas, white balls and $20 million winner-takes-all games, just look up a simply marvellous obit in last Friday’s Daily Telegraph of Bryan ‘Bomber’ Wells, the Gloucestershire and Nottinghamshire off-spinner, one of the funniest county cricketers of the 1950s and 60s. He bowled off two paces if he was cold; one pace if he was hot. And sometimes he just bowled without any run-up at all. The obit is one of the best bits of sports journalism I have seen all year. Read it please.
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