Taki Taki

The appeal of ugly men

Gstaad

Lenin Moreno is in trouble, despite his very unchristian first name. For any of you unfamiliar with the name, Senor Moreno is the president of Ecuador, a tiny South American country that I like very much because if you’ve met one Ecuadorian man you’ve met them all. There are 16 million Ecuadorians, and eight million of them, the men, all look like identical twins. One of my closest friends on the tennis circuit back in the late 1950s and early 1960s was Eduardo Zuleta, an Ecuadorian who was the colour of copper and could run all day, all night, 48 hours straight, as long as he was chasing a tennis ball. Those were not colour-blind days and I remember how, one day, an Australian lady watching Eduardo playing a match expressed outrage at the fact that he had a very blonde and pretty girlfriend pining away at the courtside. ‘What does she see in him?’ ‘Well,’ I told her, ‘if you care to sneak into the locker-room shower after the match, I’ll point it out, not that you can miss it.’

Zuleta almost reduced me to tears when he and his partner Guzman beat the big bad Yankees in the Davis Cup, back when the Yankees were a superpower. (And the Davis Cup was the number one prize in tennis.) They played in Quito, the capital, and the powers that be promised Zuleta’s father a peanut concession outside the football stadium if he beat the hated gringos. I think he ran something like 250 miles in the course of two singles and a doubles match, and Ecuador won 3–2. When I asked Barry MacKay, a top player, what had happened, he said it was like being in a bullring, with people throwing pennies and screaming their heads off as he looked up to hit an overhead.

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