Tennis

Just when you were thinking that the Premier League had become a much nicer place without José Mourinho in it, here comes another old friend from Stamford Bridge who can be relied on to pollute the atmosphere. Yes, it’s John Terry again, JT, Captain, Leader, Legend, who issued a tear-stained farewell saying Chelsea didn’t want him any more (sob), it couldn’t be a fairytale ending (sob), and he wasn’t going to retire at Chelsea (hysterical weeping). But so loyal was he that he couldn’t possibly be going to another Premier League club (stately music and solemn applause). Oh please, what a load of tosh.

There’s nothing quite like a sporting celebration, but the lash-up after Britain’s (almost) inevitable victory in the Davis Cup tennis final against Belgium this weekend should be unique. For a start, there will be hardly anyone there: just Judy Murray and Andy, with Jamie popping his head in: ‘Have some Irn-Bru boys, and, take another teacake.’ It’s a funny old team, with -pretty much only one man in the team, but it will be a huge personal triumph for Andy, every bit as special as Wimble-don and the Olympics. What a -triptych! And now David Lloyd is -having a go at him for ‘not giving enough back’ to tennis. Oh please: he’s not a product of the Lawn Tennis Association, thank heaven, but Andy Murray is a great British hero.

Serena Williams, according to some commentators the greatest woman who has ever graced this earth of ours, will complete the calendar year of grand-slam tennis by winning the United States Open. At least that is what I expect will have happened (I am writing this column before the final has been played). Even to my trained eye, she looks pretty much unbeatable, although tennis is a game in which one’s mind can play tricks galore. The reason I prefer martial sports is simple: it’s slam, bang, and either you are put to sleep or you give the other guy a bit of a rest. Not much brainpower is needed. I spent 50 years playing competitive tennis, both on the circuit and on the veterans’ tour. I hated every minute of it when I was on court. There was too much time to think.

I have never met an Aussie I didn’t like, but, crikey, their sporting indefatigability is exhausting. Don’t they ever give up? In the past few days, they have pulled one out of the bag against the Springboks in the southern hemisphere Rugby Championship when they looked buried; trailing 20—17 with time up, they turned down a penalty kick and went for the win with an 82nd-minute try. Their Davis Cup tennis boys came from 2—0 down to beat Kazakhstan, with Lleyton Hewitt hauling his weary muscles through the motions once more. Afterwards Hewitt said, ‘I love the back-against-the-wall situation. This is what dreams are made of.’ Now they face Britain, that is the Murrays, not least Judy, in the semis.

I have always been what I suppose one could call a weed, and a cowardly one at that. I never liked sports and was never any good at them. When fielding at cricket at my prep school, I used to while away time making daisy-chains. Of my part in football one prep-school report merely said, to my mother’s great amusement, ‘Chancellor prefers to avoid the ball.’ At my public school, where you had to choose between rowing and cricket, I chose rowing, but only because I was just small enough to get away with being a cox, which only involved sitting in the stern of a boat and bellowing orders at the oarsmen who were doing all the work.

It wasn’t that long ago when the most exciting event in any British tennis fan’s life was whether Jeremy Bates would make the second week of Wimbledon. If he did, cue weekend raptures and much use of a British bulldog holding a Maxply and encased in the Union Jack (copyright all cartoonists). And that was pretty much that. Then came Tim Henman, and the excitement was almost too much. Here was a player who made six, yes six, Grand Slam semi-finals. Years of excitement, almost unbearable tension, and eventual disappointment ensued. Now we have the era of Andy Murray, six Grand Slam finals (two victories), and 16 Grand Slam semis, plus one Olympic gold medal. A superb record in anybody’s book. But how is the old boy treated?

 Gstaad The very end of 2014 laid an egg, and an expensive one at that. I missed David Tang’s bash in London because I thought it too much to fly over for a cocktail party, but my restraint cost me quite a lot. It would have been worth rowing across to see Tony Blair schmoozing my old proprietor Lord Black. Two more wrong choices followed: I skipped Jemima Goldsmith’s party as well as her brother Ben’s wedding for a shindig of my own —one that turned out to be a bust. None of my gels turned up, but a lot of strangers did, and, to add insult to hurt feelings, a waiter told me at 3.30 a.m. that it was time to wrap it up. The party invitation read from 10.30 until dawn. He must have been on a different time zone and I told him so.

Englishmen used to be deported to Australia as a punishment. Now they get sent back to England as an act of mercy. There was not much of a campaign to ‘free the press box three’ after Australia’s immigration services ordered the eviction of the men from the Sun, Mirror and Daily Mail before the winter’s wretched Ashes tour was over. Having arrived with the players for the warm-up matches and watched as defeat followed humiliating defeat, they were the last men standing when the one-day series got under way. Other papers had kindly brought home their ‘dukes’ after the Test series and sent the ‘butlers’, as cricket reporters call each other, to cover the hit and giggle.

Sir Vivian Richards came to watch me play cricket the other day. That’s the sort of sentence you wait a lifetime to write. What’s more it’s true. Sort of. I haven’t been able to say anything like that for ten years, just  a few days before the Rugby World Cup final in Sydney in November 2003. I was at a screening at the National Film Theatre of a nautical epic called Master and Commander, starring Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany. Afterwards there was a Q and A with the actors. After a series of standard questions about the cinematography and suchlike, I put my hand up. ‘A question for  Mr Crowe, please. Who does he think will win the World Cup final on Saturday, England or Australia?’ ‘Are you being serious?’ ‘You bet.

Gstaad I’ve met Stephen Fry twice in my life, both times long ago. The first time at a dinner given by the then editor of The Spectator, Dominic Lawson, in London, and the second time in a restaurant in New York with the writers Jay McInerney and Brett Easton Ellis. The first time I was completely out of it, the second he was, hence we didn’t exactly connect. Fry has been in the news lately for demanding a boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. His beef is Russian anti-gay legislation. Now there’s a hell of a lot of things that are wrong with Russia — first and foremost all the criminal-oligarchs are abroad instead of in jail — but anti-gay legislation is on the bottom of the pile. Let’s start with the hypocrisy of the bleating.

Many years ago, when I used to work for the Guardian, Germaine Greer, who was then a columnist for the paper, wrote a vicious little piece for the op-ed pages slagging off Suzanne Moore, who was also a columnist. Even in the shell-shocked state that goes with the territory of trying to handle egos like that, I realised this could be a problem, so I rang up Ms Greer to wonder whether she felt like toning it down a tad, dropping the reference to ‘fuck-me shoes’ and suchlike. She snorted with laughter: ‘Stay out of this, dear; this is a mud fight.’ Happy days, and a nice fore-runner of the current spat between Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova, who have been cheerfully knocking seven bells out of each other. Prepare to duck if you see them in the same Wimbledon bar.