Tennis

The picture had been chosen for its utterly gratuitous depiction of female beauty. It showed Justine Henin, the Belgian tennis player who won seven grand-slam singles titles between 2003 and 2007. She was fully dressed for tennis. The gratuitous beauty came from the shot she was playing. It was a single-handed backhand. Henin was five foot six and so slim she had to run round and round in the shower to get wet. She didn’t look capable of hitting the top off a dandelion. But that backhand regularly devastated opponents, fizzing down the line with astonishing power — where did that come from? — or howling across court at a

Sixty years ago this week all hell broke loose: Soviet tanks rumbled into Budapest and put down a nationalist uprising in a very bloody manner. Down south Anglo-French paratroopers jumped into the Sinai and, in cahoots with the Israelis, took over the Suez Canal in a last gasp of colonialism by the Europeans. And in Washington DC a very peed-off President Eisenhower ordered the Anglo-French to go home or else. They went home and only the Israelis howled that Ike was an anti-Semite and many other things. And where was your intrepid foreign (future High life) correspondent while all this was going on? On an aeroplane flying from New York

What a well-behaved Wimbledon. Apart from a bit of racket-smashing (most of the ladies), low-level swearing (Nick Kyrgios), tantrums (Kyrgios), and egregious non-trying (Kyrgios again, of course) it has all gone pretty-smoothly. So whatever happened to top-class gamesmanship? The master of this, you may be surprised to learn, was the greatest British player of all, the three-times Wimbledon champion Fred Perry. With great natural charm and remarkable good looks, Perry —who was from humble origins — fitted effortlessly into the very upper-crust world of 1930s tennis. His sexual prowess was on an Olympic scale and he bagged some of the most-beautiful women in the world, from-Marlene Dietrich downwards. And few

The boys at Radio 5, bless ’em, are now including the EU referendum as part of their sports trailers. As in: ‘The European Championships; England versus Sri Lanka; Wimbledon; the EU Referendum; the Rio Olympics… don’t miss a second of this glorious summer of sport on BBC 5 Live.’ Nevertheless, the normally excitable world of sport has remained strangely immune to the dramas of the Brexit debate, though Sir Ian ‘Beefy’ Botham has put his considerable bulk behind the ‘outers’. Not surprising really. It was once said that cricket has the only trade union where the workers are to the right of the employers. But keen Brexiteers should note that Serbia

Write about things you really know was the advice Papa Hemingway offered wannabe writers, so here goes: the French Open is still on, Wimbledon is coming up, and I’ve just read a lament by some French woman about how professional tennis and big-time sports have become ever more ubiquitous and ever more out of reach. Duh! A former model by the name of Géraldine Maillet has made a documentary about the 2015 French Open, not exactly a stop- the-presses kind of story. It was released on DVD just as the 2016 Open began. The French Championships, as they were called before the Open era began in 1967, was my favourite

A few years ago a motivational speaker brought out a smart little book called Legacy: What The All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life. Everyone wanted to know how a tiny country miles from anywhere could dominate the world’s hardest team sport for so long. A lot of it, the book said, boiled down to humility, believing in the collective, going the extra yard, and, crucially, ‘no dickheads’. Better people make better All Blacks, was the message. Now the world is trying to learn from the Leicester City playbook. The key factors in the Foxes’ triumph were a strong, well-balanced squad; a tough but charming manager; a

   New York I went downtown to Katz’s the other day and had a pastrami sandwich that made me want to shout. God, it’s good to be bad and eat bad, but not necessarily act bad. That’s the trouble nowadays. People take care of their health, eat properly, exercise obsessively, do mental gymnastics such as crossword puzzles, and then go out and act like slobs, use the F-word non-stop and talk with their mouths full. If I hear one more time that 60 is the new 40, I will punch the first octogenarian, male or female, who crosses my path. Some buffoon who recently took up tennis has written a

I have always been intrigued by the scoring systems for different sports, and the degree to which they contribute to the enjoyment of any game. As a friend of mine remarked, had tennis been given the same scoring system as basketball it would be tedious to play, and even worse to watch. Once you glanced at your TV and saw Djokovic leading Murray ‘by 57 points to 31’, you would shrug and change channels to something more gripping, like an unsubtitled version of Last Year at Marienbad. Tennis scoring isn’t quite socialist — one player can demolish -another — but in such cases the contest is over in a mercifully

My old friend and one-time doubles partner Ray Moore has stepped down as chief executive of the Indian Wells Tennis Tournament for telling the truth. As Rod Liddle wrote in these here pages a couple of weeks ago, ‘There is nothing more damaging to a career than telling an unfortunate truth.’ Ray Moore was a very good South African tennis player and is a very nice guy. He once partnered me to a final in a major tournament and we have stayed friends for 40 years and more. The man who owns the Indian Wells tournament, multi-billionaire Larry Ellison, is a pretty disgusting individual, who among many other horrors has

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. This was Terry, in his inimitable

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/whysexmatters-thedeathofsportandistheeusinkingwhetherbrexithappensornot-/media.mp3″ title=”Simon Barnes and Alex Massie discuss the crisis in sport” startat=830] Listen [/audioplayer]Like religion, sport can take any amount of passion in its stride. It’s indifference that’s the killer. Sport can be bubbling with incontinent hatred, poisonous rivalries, ludicrous injustice and the most appalling people doing the most appalling things: but as long as people still care, as long as the sporting arguments still echo, as long as newspapers are read from back to front, then sport’s future is safe. But now, as we look forward to an Olympic year, a Wimbledon with hot British contenders in the men’s and the women’s competitions for the first time in

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

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

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,