I turned on the TV to watch Wimbledon for a few minutes and ended up watching for two days. Since I’d last watched tennis a couple of years previously the players seemed to have attained new, almost superhuman standards. Not that this made it more interesting – on the contrary it was the sheer tedium of the game that made it so compelling. If you tuned in for five minutes you wouldn’t see much at all, especially in the men’s game where a thunder-flash serve had become so essential that the players had to put themselves in a state of deep trance before they could even think about hitting the ball. One guy took ten bounces of the ball, two finger sniffs, a couple of forehead wipes and a dozen racket twists before smacking the ball into the net. After pausing for two minutes he repeated exactly the same ritual and sent the ball flying into his opponent’s service court. Unfortunately the ball was judged to have touched the net en route and so, to complete what was perhaps the most elaborately time-consuming double-fault ever attempted, he went through the whole routine again before thumping the ball down the opposite tramline. No wonder he was angry.
No wonder, either, that some of the line judges found it difficult to stay awake and had to take pot luck on close calls. It actually seemed that the conflict between players and officials had reached such a pitch of animosity as to constitute the chief interest of the match. As far as the line judges were concerned their job was to goad a given player with unjust decisions until he was forced to concede sufficient penalty points for bad behaviour to leave the match hopelessly beyond reach. Once that had been achieved the officials switched their attention to the other player. As for the players, their behaviour had degenerated to the point where the commentator found himself looking back fondly on John McEnroe as quite a gent. Even unseeded players were now quite capable of the kind of sustained F-ing and Are-you-fucking-blind-ing that used to be the preserve of only the most talented players. I imagined some young player plumbing new depths of unpopularity by threatening the umpire with his racket or taking a swipe at a docile ballboy who’d had the misfortune to hand him an unlucky ball. The stage-managed nastiness of one or two players was almost as ritualised as wrestling. I half expected to see someone whipping up the crowd with a chant of Ea-sy! Ea-sy! after a particularly vicious forearm smash.
Inspired by all this tennis I called Steranko to see if he fancied a game but he was out. So was Carlton. As a last resort I tried Freddie.
‘There’s no point. I can hardly even hit the ball. The only bit of the game I’m any good at is the drinking afterwards – as long as the barman keeps serving I can keep knocking them back,’ he said, laughing enthusiastically at his own joke. ‘Let’s just go out for a drink instead. We can take our rackets if that makes you feel better.’