SPECTATOR SPORT
The wrong stuff
Frank Keating
ONLY a couple of challenging, stirring finals will make this humdrum Wimbledon memorable. An American, Rostagno, was docked a penalty point for what they call 'code violation' when he shouted 'Kiss me!' after missing a shot, and another, Curren, was fined £312 for kicking a copying machine in the referee's office. Most of the tennis has been far less explosive. Perhaps because All-England doesn't fancy another championship repeat by two kids with the ginger eyelashes of the House of Hanover, the two US-based Czechs in their thirties suddenly became the sentimental choices this week — Navratilova, of the Popeye left arm, because she's won it eight times and a record nine would be nice; and Lendl, of the Yorick stare, because he's never won it once.
We asked Martina about her obsession: The dictionary says "obsession" means "unrational preoccupation". Well, mine is a rational preoccupation, OK.' Ditto to Ivan the terribly po: 'No, I am not obses- sed, OK: just say I am very much into it, just stubbornly into it, OK.' OK, man, sure thing, OK.
Whenever I come across Lendl, I re- member coming down to breakfast one morning during the Moscow Olympics, where we weren't encouraged to mix with the natives, so they gave us free tickets each night for the ballet or opera. 'What did you do last night?' I casually asked an
East European journo in the cafeteria queue. 'I went to hear Ivan the Horrible'. 'Terrible', I corrected him. 'No, on the contrary, it was very good',. he said.
Golly, that was ten years ago this month. We had piled over on Aeroflot as soon as Wimbledon had finished, all of us still recovering our.breath after the tie-break — Borg v McEnroe, the last truly great final. It was the end of Borg, his fifth and last title, and the announcement of the flawed genius who was to win three of the next four. That epic palpitation (the tie-break lasted longer than some sets) outdid even what common consent had reckoned the best final in memory, in 1972 when the good soldier, Stan Smith, prevailed at the very last against the scuffing, sly, sensa- tionally gifted gypsy, Nastase.
That was the very essence of the drama, goodie v baddie-you-love-to-love; but for my money it didn't riddle the spine like three years later, the day old Arthur Ashe beat Jimmy Brash. I was doing a long piece on Ashe for the Guardian and spent some
days up in Nottingham where he was practising. He calmly said he intended to win the biggie, which was a joke because the exhuberant, cocky Connors (Borg was yet to come) looked set to keep the title for a decade.
Anyway, Arthur duly gets through to the final and that Saturday morning, after his eggs Benedict at the Westbury and a browse of the papers writing him off, he goes out to hit up, still insisting he will do it. So out they go — and, glory be, Arthur, a traditional biff-and-volley merchant, sud- denly starts slowballing the grunting hitter opposite him. It took Jimmy a time to twig.
He was the champ after all, the all-action crowd-pleaser, and his game was vibrantly on song and as sharp as a lark on the wing. But Arthur was popping everything back at him in a gentle variety of parabolas, and the more Jimmy swiped, the more he began to seethe.
At every change now, Ashe turbanned his head with a towel in a trance of concentration, and alongside him Connors would pull from his socks a note his grandma had written him just before her death a few months before. It said some- thing trite like 'get stuck in, m'boy'. But Jimmy couldn't. Wimbledon, having sold out and sani- tised itself as a mere happening on the social calendar, desperately needs an injec- tion of 'right stuff' sport like that.
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