Aussie Battler Heads for Loneliness of Locker Room
First, Casey from Perth, now Lleyton from Adelaide. The Aussie fighters have gone down fighting. Unlike the Brits, who just went down, or, in the case of one junior (look under "Tennis"), was sent home before playing his match for failing to bring his rackets to a practice session. Perhaps it was all a misunderstanding, and Marcus Willis was guilty of nothing more than taking "double-handed backhand" too literally.
Willis's headmaster, Roger Draper, chief executive of the embattled British Lawn Tennis Association (LTA), took a different view. "You see the Slovaks and the Croats and the Serbs and they work hard and have the right attitude," he said.
Like Newcastle United Football Club, only on a national scale, the LTA exists to prove that money (the millions they make from Wimbledon) doesn't make champions. Talent and hard work is what's needed (preferably in that order), as Novak Djokovic (the talent from Serbia) demonstrated when despatching Lleyton Hewitt (the worker) straight past Jim Courier to the loneliness of the locker room.
At least, the Aussie battler could take consolation from the fact that his never-give-up style took him to two grand slam titles in the hiatus between the Sampras era and the Federer-Nadal era. He could also take consolation, I would imagine, from the prospect of an early night tucked up with his cover-girl wife after his previous match had ended at half past four in the morning on the previous day.
Poor old Lleyton had been on the wrong end of a decision by the money men to let his match against Marcos Baghdatis begin at midnight, ruining his sleep patterns, as commentator Peter Donegan kept reminding us. It was left to fellow Aussie and former pro, Geoff Masters, to point out what was obvious to everyone else, that the mountain man from Serbia was better than Lleyton and would have beaten him even if he'd been subjected to sleep deprivation and waterboarding by the cream of the Stasi and the CIA.
Clearly a bit of an Aussie battler himself, Donegan tried everything in his power to put the big Serb off his game. A perceived weakness in making challenges to line calls was detected early and ruthlessly exploited, as Donegan sledged the number three seed from his gantry perched precariously under the retractable roof of the Rod Laver Arena. ("There are no poor viewing seats in this stadium," he added patriotically, aiming a double-fisted cross-court at the bombed-out craters that pass for tournament venues in Belgrade.)
"We've learned never to write off Lleyton Hewitt," came his stentorian call to arms when his man stood at 2-5 in the third set. And when the cat let the mouse have one more game, weaker minds might have been persuaded that we were about to see a triumph of the will of Nurembergian proportions.
Digging as deep as a bloke with dyed hair in a back-to-front baseball cap running from side to side in vain pursuit of a tennis ball, Donegan saved his best till last, falling back on the dirtiest trick in the book – Surname Abuse. Skipping to the last chapter of Steve Waugh's Notes on Mental Disintegration (with a Foreword by John Buchanan), Donegan started calling the 20-year-old "Jokervitch".
Beside Donegan in the gantry, Geoff Masters tried in vain to stem the flow before issuing a Code Violation and the threat of an on-court interview with Jim Courier. When even this didn't do the trick, there was only one recourse left to Geoff: "Look, mate, you keep this up and you'll be doing the final with Liz Smylie".
That shut him up.
Willis's headmaster, Roger Draper, chief executive of the embattled British Lawn Tennis Association (LTA), took a different view. "You see the Slovaks and the Croats and the Serbs and they work hard and have the right attitude," he said.
Like Newcastle United Football Club, only on a national scale, the LTA exists to prove that money (the millions they make from Wimbledon) doesn't make champions. Talent and hard work is what's needed (preferably in that order), as Novak Djokovic (the talent from Serbia) demonstrated when despatching Lleyton Hewitt (the worker) straight past Jim Courier to the loneliness of the locker room.
At least, the Aussie battler could take consolation from the fact that his never-give-up style took him to two grand slam titles in the hiatus between the Sampras era and the Federer-Nadal era. He could also take consolation, I would imagine, from the prospect of an early night tucked up with his cover-girl wife after his previous match had ended at half past four in the morning on the previous day.
Poor old Lleyton had been on the wrong end of a decision by the money men to let his match against Marcos Baghdatis begin at midnight, ruining his sleep patterns, as commentator Peter Donegan kept reminding us. It was left to fellow Aussie and former pro, Geoff Masters, to point out what was obvious to everyone else, that the mountain man from Serbia was better than Lleyton and would have beaten him even if he'd been subjected to sleep deprivation and waterboarding by the cream of the Stasi and the CIA.
Clearly a bit of an Aussie battler himself, Donegan tried everything in his power to put the big Serb off his game. A perceived weakness in making challenges to line calls was detected early and ruthlessly exploited, as Donegan sledged the number three seed from his gantry perched precariously under the retractable roof of the Rod Laver Arena. ("There are no poor viewing seats in this stadium," he added patriotically, aiming a double-fisted cross-court at the bombed-out craters that pass for tournament venues in Belgrade.)
"We've learned never to write off Lleyton Hewitt," came his stentorian call to arms when his man stood at 2-5 in the third set. And when the cat let the mouse have one more game, weaker minds might have been persuaded that we were about to see a triumph of the will of Nurembergian proportions.
Digging as deep as a bloke with dyed hair in a back-to-front baseball cap running from side to side in vain pursuit of a tennis ball, Donegan saved his best till last, falling back on the dirtiest trick in the book – Surname Abuse. Skipping to the last chapter of Steve Waugh's Notes on Mental Disintegration (with a Foreword by John Buchanan), Donegan started calling the 20-year-old "Jokervitch".
Beside Donegan in the gantry, Geoff Masters tried in vain to stem the flow before issuing a Code Violation and the threat of an on-court interview with Jim Courier. When even this didn't do the trick, there was only one recourse left to Geoff: "Look, mate, you keep this up and you'll be doing the final with Liz Smylie".
That shut him up.
4 comments:
An Aussie myself, this is very funny. No doubt you've read the Clive James' takes on BBC football commentary back in the 70s ?
G'day, Maxie! Clive James is one of my heroes and influences. I often reference him in my witterings. Here's one example, in which he refuses to let an evil Nazi off the hook just because he's reached an advance age and speaks good English: http://ulaca-es.blogspot.com/2007/11/lest-we-forget.html
I've got his three books of TV crit from 1972-1982 but can't recall any stuff specifically aimed at football commentary. His Wimbledon reports of the early 80s were terrific, with beauties like McEnroe serving "round a corner" and Connors's grunt getting earlier so that opponents played the grunt and not the ball.
Of the always entertaining Murray Walker's Grand Prix commentary James famously said "In his quieter moments he sounds like his trousers are on fire"
LOL
Classic James. Commenting on Murray's "For once in my life, I am at a loss for words", he writes that Walker had never 'realised that the reason why he continually screams like a bat out of hell is that he is always at a loss for words'. A few of those in Hong Kong.
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