Summer sports

During my book party one month ago — rather surprisingly, the thing is selling well — I spotted Ferdinand Mount in the crowd and asked him to meet a friend of mine. Ferdy recognised the name immediately. ‘You brought cheer to the plains of India,’ he told Naresh Kumar, quoting a headline of more than 50 years ago. Mount then went on to quote from one of his own dispatches: ‘As the shadows lengthened in the Centre Court of Wimbledon, the soft touch and tricky lobs of Kumar–Krishnan tied their opponents in knots,’ or words to that effect. Naresh Kumar was one of the most popular players on the tennis circuit during the mid and late 1950s. A gentleman through and through, he played in 101 Wimbledon matches and actually did bring cheer to the plains of India. He and I were friends on the tour, although I was more often than not unemployed after the first round, whereas he was always working, including the weekends.

In a tournament in Deauville in 1958, Kumar drove his French opponent crazy with dinks, slices and top spin, something extremely hard to do with wooden rackets and the dead gut of the day, and the Frenchman quit. Naresh was surprised, but shook the quitter’s hand and never talked about it. I compared it to the ghost of the Ligne Maginot returning, and my Indian friend thought it unkind.

Last week Naresh and Sunita Kumar gave a wonderful dinner at Mosimann’s, where we ate like kings and reminisced about the good old days on the circuit. (Sunita is a leading painter in India and she’s having an exhibition here on 30 June.) The chairman of the All England club was there, as was my old friend Lord (Greville) Howard, as mad about tennis as he is about politics.