SPECTATOR SPORT
The net Profit
Frank Keating
4 0
n the ball, City', an old Corinthian touchline exhortation, has a more general- ly literal connotation these days. The teams are out for the second half of the `corporate hospitality' season. The soggy frock and freak show at Ascot has come and gone, so has the Lord's Test match; one week down and one to go at the appalling bunfight that Wimbledon has become; and the social-climbing City corps of rats and moles and weasels have hired their glad-rags ready for the riverside junket at Henley next week. Midsummer sport is big business — and business is business. And business is booming.
No more standing room at all on Centre Court. The Taylor Report, following the Hillsborough tragedy, has forced a cut of 4,000 in Wimbledon's overall capacity from last year, to 28,000. The show court itself has lost the 2,000 places where the plebby hoi-polloi — who had queued for hours to get in, and were passionate about the game — always gave the great matches the necessary, rowdy, vibrant buzz. They stayed right through, from overture to curtain, fully twigging the ebb and flow, the dramatically critical punctuation points, and the extended narrative line that makes up any half decent match.
Not any more. This week those intense cockpit atmospheres have been sanitised, and the new seats seem more full of corporation men and their clients freebie Freds and their mascara'd Molls, many of whom know not, nor care a fig about, the difference between a net-cord and a tennis elbow. They might pop into a match for an hour or so between lunch and tea. To be sure, the grandest parade this week has taken place every day, long after play has officially begun. When the cap- tains of industry — saliva-soaked, chomped-on cigar in one hand, parasoled Poll, looking pert, on the other — have stepped blinking and briefly from their candy-striped, pot-planted, waitress- service marquees and into the real world of Wimbledon's jam-packed concourse crush, and frayed tempers, and plebeian pong of armpits and damp, suburban sandals. They sit to watch a bit of tennis, but their eyes are forever oystering down at the Rolex, not at the scoreboard; and soon they are haughtily promenading back to their can- vas retreat for tea. Or, as the Goon Show script used to have it, 'round the back for the old brandy'. Or three. I suppose, to line the players' pockets, Wimbledon has to sell out to big biz. Next week's male champ will get £230,000 £40,000 more even than last year. Dammit, Monday's first-round losers caught the bus home with £3,500 tucked into their jock- straps. Just for turning up. Apart from any prize money, the champion Boris Becker banked well over £5 million last year just for endorsements on his kit for Ford, Muller Milk, Deodora, Fila, Polaroid, and Ustech.
The first Wimbledon final of my little life was played in 1938. Don Budge beat Bunny Austin. A couple of years ago, twinkling old Bunny, bow-tied and bushy- tailed still, poured the tea for the two of us in his handsome little flat behind Victoria Station. For that final, daringly flash, he had come out in shorts — the first time ever at long, cricket-flannelled, Wimbers. `It cost me 5s 6d to have my tailor run them up', he said. Today, his bloke would pay him hundreds of thousands for the pri- vilege.
His runner's-up prize 52 years ago was a voucher worth £2 10s, to be spent at Mappin & Webb, the jewellers — there- fore, I suppose, Wimbledon's first corpo- rate sponsors. Bunny took them on: 'I asked if, instead, my voucher could be made out to Tooth's picture gallery. They agreed. Awfully decent of them, don't you think?'
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