High life
Golden oldies
Taki
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Athens ico Kalogeropoulos is the greatest tennis player Greece did not produce. I say this because his father, rather wisely, left the Olive Republic for a banana one just before II Duce was given a bloody nose by the Greek armed forces in the winter of 1940. (Another wise and prudent man was Andreas Papandreou, who also left for the safer shores of Florida at the time.) Nico was born 43 years ago in Costa Rica, the country which is a thin, small strip of land dividing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Back in the Forties Central America had no bearded butchers like Castro, nor Marxist clowns like Ortega, and the life was sweet. Nico grew up a good tennis player, so good in fact that by the time he was 18 he had won the French junior championship as well as Junior Wimbledon. In 1962 he and his father arrived in Greece and offered Nico's ser- vices to Greek tennis. John Ketseas, the czar of Greek tennis at the time, pinched himself for a whole week to make sure he wasn't dreaming.
Thus began the golden age of tennis in the Olive Republic, with Greece always winning two singles, and sometimes even the doubles, in most Davis Cup rubbers, with you-know-who doing the winning. Alas, the rest of us who made up the team were not exactly in the same league, so we had to be content with covering ourselves in reflective glory.
Nico was my doubles partner, which tennis experts now acknowledge to be the way to improve one's game dramatically. We almost beat some top teams, but I made sure we didn't, always at the last moment. What we did do was win the Greek doubles championship three years in a row, and we would have won it 30 years in succession had we chosen to do so. I retired in 1976, Nico in 1980. He had won the singles title 18 years running, and had been ranked in the top 30 in the world for those 18 years. He had beaten every big name in the business at the time. When he retired he received an ungrammatical letter from the Olive federation terminating his contract. The words 'thank you' never appeared, even misspelled.
Mind you, the czar had long been dead, otherwise it would never have appeared. The crude philistines who followed, and who are at the moment running the game, did not play tennis on even a club level, but had moved into the tennis world for the root of all envy. Succeeding governments have been pouring millions into the game, and the barbarians who run it at present may be vulgar but they sure ain't stupid. I see them every year lording it around Wimbledon, playing with their worry beads and spitting on the ground in order to feel at home.
Three years ago they hired a Bulgarian, one Nico had never even lost a set to, as national trainer and coach. The poor man suffered a stroke three months ago and is still in hospital. In the meantime Nico and I decided to re-enter the tennis tour through the back door of the 35-and-over scam, in my case 45-and-over. All this week we have been advancing steadily, and are big favourites to win the doubles, Nico an even bigger favourite to triumph in the 35s and poor little me as a tiny favourite in the 45s.
After a week of watching us practise, a man finally approached Nico and asked him if he was willing to train the Greek girls' team for an interim period. It seems that one of our old team-mates, one who did get three games in three sets from Nico once, is going to coach them full-time, but he needed a couple of months off, hence the offer. Nico told them thanks but no thanks and is going back to Costa Rica, Ortega or no Ortega.
Oh well, it does show, however, that we Greeks do have some connection with our ancestors. After all, didn't they also turn against such men as Socrates and Aristides, not to mention Themistocles and Mil- tiades? Now it's Nico's and Taki's turn.
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