The Big Difference Between Real Tennis and Lawn Tennis
A couple of days ago, Andy Murray beat the giant two metres six centimetres, John Isner, in the Australian Open in Melbourne. Andy Murray himself is not short being about 1.96 metres. If you do want it in those useless Imperial measures that only cause confusion, that six foot three. Rarely, do you see a male tennis player, who is not tall, with some very much like Isner in the giant category.
Last night, I played a man on the Real Tennis court at Cambridge University and he was probably about two metres tall, compared to my 1.71m. We had a very good game, which ended up as an honourable draw over the hour we played.
When I first took an interest in tennis in the 1950s and 1960s, players reflected society. Ken Rosewall, who is probably one of the top ten players of all time was actually shorter than I am at 1.70m. His compatriot, Rod Laver, was just a bit taller at 1.72m.
So why is there no smaller players at the top in tennis?
In my view, high-tech rackets have taken over from the old wooden ones, that incidentally are still used in real tennis, and a crashing serve is now all important. Height makes that serve even better with the new rackets and the whole playing process has been dumbed down. Mainly in the name of money for the sports goods manufacturers, rather than entertainment for those who watch and play the game.
I still like watching the game on television, but I can understand why others are turned off by a spectacle that has got slower and is much more about power than skill, artistry and athleticism. If it doesn’t watch it, tennis will become just another game for freaks like basketball and American football. Rugby Union had better watch its image as well, as size and power are becoming more important than skill. I used to watch it quite a bit, but now it just bores me.
So to return to tennis. I may play the odd game of lawn tennis on holiday, but give me the old game played for centuries any time. It is a game of intelligence, that all ages, sexes and sizes can enjoy equally. It’s even got a handicapping system, which means that players of quite different abilities can have a very competitive game.
Happy Christmas
It’s 6:30 on Christmas morning and I’m just up and getting ready to go to play real tennis in Cambridge. After that I’ll be driving to Sussex to have Christmas dinner with friends. At least the weather looks better.
Happy Christmas everybody. If there is anybody there!
Sathnam Sanghera
Sathnam Sanghera is one of The Times columnists.
He is also someone who I try to read each week. I suppose that despite his background from an Indian family in Wolverhampton being very different to mine of a group of London mongrels, that we have a lot in common. He usually makes me laugh a bit and always makes me smile.
Take this first paragraph from his piece yesterday which was ostensibly about cats and their relationship with men.
If you’d asked me, at the age of 10, what my life would be like at the age of 33, I would have probably mentioned a semi-detached in Wolverhampton; the 2009 equivalent of a Ford Orion on the drive; a Punjabi wife of ten years or so; a couple of spoddy kids who, like me, were good at maths, but crap at English and sport; a job at a local building society; a garden; male pattern baldness, and a cat. That I have none of these things is not a cause of distress or concern — they might still come and, besides, more thrilling things, such as houseplants, have taken their place. But it does puzzle me that I still don’t own a cat.
If you’d asked me the same question at about the same age, I would have probably thought something similar, except that I’d be running my father’s printing business in Wood Green.
So we do have a lot in common.
The most interesting thing is that Sathnam says, that he was good at maths, but crap at English and sport. And here is Sathnam writing well-crafted articles in one of the world’s premier newspapers. In fact, as his column is probably syndicated, then it might be several.
I was the same! Maths good, English bad. But now, even if I say it myself that is not true. The maths and its usage is still good and that of those around me sadly gets worse. Does teaching not instill the joy of maths, physics, chemistry and the other sciences into students any more? But it is my English that has improved so much!
Why? I don’t know. Perhaps, Sathnam could tell me, as it’s probably the same reason his has improved.
I was crap at sport too. But now I play a lot of real tennis and was actually a National Champion a couple of years ago. Don’t tell anybody, that it was in my handicap group and only five people entered!
So there is hope for Sathnam’s sport too!
Oxford
I went to Oxford today to play real tennis for Cambridge University Real Tennis Club against the old enemy.
I’m afraid that the captions aren’t up to the usual standards, as I don’t know Oxford very well.
I did win the tennis though!
Amelie Mauresmo
I thought she was just a good tennis player. But now I read in The Independent that she is gay.
Does it matter? Not one jot!
I suspect too, her fellow professionals, the sports writers and tennis fans didn’t bother either, as she is quoted as saying “I lived 10 magical and unbelievable years.”
Valencia
Just watched Murray win in Valencia.
It was our last holiday. It rained and rained until the Monday, when we had to take the flight back to Stansted.
I wrote this soon after she died about Valencia.
We had not intended to go on holiday again in 2007, especially as we had already booked a fly-drive holiday in Thailand for February 2008. But my wife suffered the worst professional nightmare a barrister can! A case settled unexpectedly and she had a hole in her diary. So she felt that a weekend away before winter set in would not be a bad idea.
So why did we go to Valencia?
I searched easyJet and Ryanair for what was available at a sensible price from Stansted in three or four days time.
Valencia was either first or second for value and convenience and there appeared to be a good five star hotel called Las Arenas on the beach. The value for that was good too.
So we booked and flew out at lunchtime on Friday. The hotel was stunning, friendly, extremely comfortable and very much worth the hundred and fifty pounds a night we were paying.
But you couldn’t say that for the weather! It rained cats, dogs and hippopotami until the Monday morning, which was the first day my wife was able to have one of her beloved swims.
Valencia is an architectural gem, with buildings ranging from the classical and religious to the ultra modern.
Valencia is unusual in that after catastrophic floods in the 1950s, they diverted the River Turia around the city and created a linear park that runs from the city centre to the coast.
It would be interesting to know what fuss would be created if a city these days decided to divert a river as big as the Turia.
We ate very well in Valencia.
The most amazing and perhaps one of the best restaurants we ever visited was Ca Sento, which according to the guides is one of the best in Spain, let along Valencia. I can’t remember what I ate, but it was a spectacular gluten-free meal without any compromise to taste.
But we also ate in a tiny tapas bar behind the cathedral, where we sheltered from the rain. Superb red wine was a couple of euro a glass, food was tasty and wholesome, and the atmosphere was best described as Spanish and local. They knew about gluten too!
And then there was the incident in another fine seafood restaurant in the city centre. My wife was wearing the red tee-shirt dress with the stars, she’d bought in Nice. When we had finished, she needed to pay a visit and climbed a spiral staircase at the side of the dining room to the toilets upstairs. As she came down, I walked over to meet her and I heard a fat English lady at my side say something like, “Who does she think she is in a dress like that? She must be nearly fifty!”
Not a bad compliment for someone of fifty-nine.
I shall always remember Valencia. But I may never go back!
Perhaps I will and perhaps I won’t.
Murray in Montreal
I watched Murray last night. He was awesome.
It’s funny, but I generally in the evenings watch some sport on Sky or one of the other channels, than watch some of the endless drivel we get on the main channels.
Real Tennis
I play real tennis and this morning I’m off for a game.
Membership costs me about the same as I would pay at a normal gym, but it is so less boring.
Real tennis sometimes gets the reputation as an elitist game, but if they let me play then that must be far from the truth. You have to remember too, that every player has a handicap, so you can play any other in the world and have a level games with a fair winner. It’s all computerised and on the web too!
Golf Clubs
I bought my son, who works in Manchester, a golf club for his birthday. Some I noticed cost about £500 and I couldn’t see any difference between those and the ones at a hundred pounds or so.
But what do I know about golf?
At least with real tennis everybody uses the same basic rackets.
Federer Roddick and a Lotus Elan
As I left Suffolk yesterday at the same time as the Wimbledon Final started. It was a lovely day for a drive in the Lotus with the top down and I sped up the A1 to see my old boss in York. I’d actually worked for him at ICI and I’ve known him since before our first child was born, almost forty years ago.
The A1 has been improved over the last year or so and I made Doncaster in just over the two hours, when before all the roundabouts had gone, it used to take two hours and a quarter. You wouldn’t have thought, that just removing these five bottlenecks would have improved things so much. But then you would sometimes wait for perhaps up to ten minutes at either the Gamston or Worksop junctions. Now you just sped through.
I should say a bit about my transport.
I always describe my Lotus Elan as the second best car in the world. That is not an arrogant claim, as in many terms, now as the car approaches it’s late middle-age, it is maturing like an old bottle of wine.
My late wife bought the car new in 1991 to travel to courts all over East Anglia in her work as a barrister and somehow it never got sold as she replaced it first with an Audi A4 Avant Quattro, a Mercedes sports car, a Mini and finally a Porsche Boxster.
When she died, it was sell the the three year-old Boxstern or the sixteen year-old Lotus. It was no contest. As the guy who services my cars, said after driving the Lotus back from it’s MOT, if you gave him the choice, he’d take the Lotus too. He wondered if anything handled so well?
I suppose an Elise does and my wife did try one. But as she tended to wear a skirt most days for work, an Elise is a no-no, as a lady can’t get out of one in a skirt, without showing all and sundry to passers-by. It will be interesting to see what the new Evora is like. I can afford one, but whether I want to spend over £55,000 on a car is another matter.
But knowing Lotus, I might get seduced at some time.
In my rules on what is the best car, you can’t judge it as of now. So if you think that your car is best, what will it be like when it is twenty years old, has nearly 110,000 miles on the clock. Will it still perform in the same way as it did, when you first bought it?
The Lotus does. Last summer, I let her (Lotuses or should it be Loti are all female) loose on the German autobahn. You’d be stuck in a queue of traffic doing seventy or so and there’d be some German hard on your bumper, flashing you to get over. (It is actually not a good idea to do that to any Lotus, as when they stop, they stop a hell of a lot faster than most cars and totally under control.) When the traffic cleared, it was just a matter of flooring the throttle and the car behind was left standing. Usually I’d pull over into the slow lane after a mile or so, as I don’t want to trash the engine. (I suspect I won’t incidentally! Like most Lotus engines they are tuned just as much for reliability, than power!) My tormentor would pass after a minute or so, with a German version of “What’s the fuck’s that?” on his face.
But perhaps where the Lotus is so different to other cars, is that drive anywhere and heads turn. Admittedly mine is Norfolk Mustard in colour, but what other car that is a twenty year-old design does that? I once remember a Lamborghini P400 Miura doing that in the 1960s in Oxford Street. But then that was possibly the noisiest car ever made.
So there are two things in my life, that I will protect with everything; my Rolex and my Lotus.
I stopped at York for tea with my ex-boss and his wife, admired their lovely garden and then set off over the Pennines towards Blackpool. Incidentally I filled up with petrol at York and the Lotus had averaged just over 31 miles per gallon. Not bad for a sports car, that hadn’t been driven for economy on the way up. I’d done the 171 miles from my home in two hours forty minutes, which is perhaps about twenty minutes faster than the last time I drove to York for the races. But then we’re back to the A1 roundabouts.
As I started off for Blackpool, Federer and Roddick, were still at it and it was 3-all in the fifth set. They were still at it, as I skirted Leeds. As I left the centre of Bradford on my way towards Keithley and Colne, the good weather was holding and the Lotus was still top down, but Roddick had finally succumbed.
What a match!
I was pleased though that Federer won, as he is such a gent and he deserves to beat the record of Grand Slams.
Will Murray ever get one? Probably! But nothing in this life is certain. Don’t I as a widower just know it?
If there is one problem with the Lotus, it is rain.
There I was driving through Colne in the sunlight and all of a sudden, just as I was about to join the M58, it started to rain. And it wasn’t drizzle.
Luckily, I was able to put the car into a side street within about twenty seconds, so I didn’t get that wet. And remember too, that to put up the hood on a Lotus is possibly the fastest of any car. You do need to get out, pull one handle, lift the roof from under the hard cover, throw it forward, jump in and click the latches. Usually, I can do it in a third of the time, it takes one of those fully electric jobs.
I didn’t get as wet as I might have!
Finally at the allotted hour of eight, I pulled up outside the hotel in Blackpool.
It had been a drive that I won’t forget. And all because of two modern and civilised gladiators.
The Anonymous Widower 