SPECTATOR SPORT
Wimbledon artistry
Frank Keating
IT HAS been a mighty relief to skip Wim- bledon this year and stick with more pas- toral cricket. The occasion has long super- seded the sport at SW19. For all its man- nered pretence at 'Englishness' (still calling plastic plates `crockery' and concrete-block precincts `lawns'), Wimbledon is not English at all. It's a numbing international convention. Or an obstacle course to Erewhon. Always has been. Listen to this: `It was frantically crowded and we spent practically all the time queu- ing. We queued for the bus to take us to the ground, we queued for practically half an hour for admission; spent our time queuing for standing-room from which to get a glimpse of the players; queued for ages for a bus to take us to the station and at the station we queued for about ten min- utes to discover that we needn't have queued at all.'
That was Benjamin Britten in 1933, taken from his collected letters. Mind you, I have tried to be near a television set when John McEnroe has been playing. His game against Pat Cash was claimed by old-timers to be the best real tennis match in years, and when the frail, balding, perplexed little Stan Laurel went out first to toy with, then dismantle the seeded, muscle-bound, pow- erhouse hulk, Wheaton — six-and-a-half
feet of elbow-grease and a bludgeon of a serve — well, I had to raid with serious intent the mini-bar in my hotel room to toast alone the genius of the fretful Irish New Yorker and last man to use his racket, not with a bullying axeman's swipe, but with stealth and cunning to conjure angles as if it were as pliable as a baseball glove wrapped around his mitt. (It was nice for put-upon lefthanders, too, that McEnroe's lone reinforcement of tennis's artistic possi- bilities came on the same day as David Gower's Test match recall. Next morning my bare feet clinked over the empty minia- tures as if they were pebbles on a beach.) This time last year I asked an American journo pal what his big feature was going to be for his magazine's second week of Wim- bledon. `What else except "Ivan Lendl: the Obsession"?,' he moped wearily. `Last year I used up the only other possible alternative
— "Bored to Death: the Stefan Edberg Story".'
In the Sunday Times, the splendid Sue Mott quoted the president of the Associa- tion of Tennis Professionals, Vijay Armi- traj, as being very worried about the future: `We must not produce a homogeneous batch of oven-readies with no discernible personality. Today's players should lighten up.' As a shotmaker with a most discernible personality, Armitraj himself was almost an endangered species as his own career came to an end.
The gist of Mott's piece was to warn that dull, colourless, biff-bang tennis was possi- bly being encouraged by officialdom's sup- pression of the slightest exclamation that suggests the guy down there with the racket and the two-ball handful is human. Andre Agassi is given a stern warning from the chair for muttering `Goddammitr, Pam Shriver ditto for just calling out in extremis her own name (`The umpire thought I said "Damn!" Thank God my name's not Puck').
Which brings us back to Mac and those vibrant mid-summers which so entranced us. 'Man, you are the pits of the world! You are a disgrace to mankind!' Fined $10,000. `But, umpire, I was only talking to myself.' Fined $1,500. `Man, you can-not be seri- ous!' Happy days. Long gone.
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