Tag: Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player

So here I am, sat on the veranda of my penthouse luxury suite on the Thames, clutching my SPOTY 2013 trophy in my right hand and my Wimbledon Singles Tournament Men’s Champion Final urn in the other.

Behind me, quaffing champagne and endless supplies of Hawkeye bitter are the highest of the highest of the glitterati and celeberati. Sir (Sir!) Ben Kingsley has just parked up on the jetty below in his sailor’s dinghy and waved to me with a traditional maritime greeting of respect, the two fingered salute made famous by the one and only Winston Churchill whose grandson, Winston Winston Winston Churchill, dropped by not five minutes ago to collect the rent.

In my kitchen, the world’s political elite are arguing over global warming, economic meltdown and the recent death of Lou Reed. As far as I know, Lou never lifted a tennis racket in his life, although a little bird in the shape of Hannah Cockroft no less, tells me he was party to a lot more racketeering than he would have had us believe.

But tonight, after this glorious success of all successes, surpassed only by…. Well, surpassed by nothing actually, tonight has just taken the biscuit. 

Mine is not to reason why, count the cost or favour, fortune or fight anyone on any beaches anywhere. Mine is to lap it all up, big style.

I have to admit (no, really I do) to feeling some moments of sympathy for my unlucky rivals in this year’s SPOTY competition (which I won by the way, just in case you didn’t know). AP McCoy (who he?) is still trying to get people to recognise him and is floating from guest to guest at my party, trying to persuade them that they really do know him – or would do if they had been following the results of the 2.15 at Uttoxeter on that last rainy Bank Holiday Monday. Leigh ‘Weatherspoon’ Halfpenny has rendered himself a few pennies short of the full shilling tonight in the only way that rugby players know – by the downing of vast quantities of vodka followed by the obligatory tossing of each other into the River Thames. Disgusting behaviour for a supposed ‘personality’ never mind a SPOTY for 2013!

Chris Froome has taken himself off in a huff and is sitting on the kitchen barstool, his legs going round and round furiously in vain – he’s getting no-where.  You can take the boy off the bike, but you can’t take the bike out of the boy as Stephen Gerrard reliably informed me when we shared a bowl of twiglets together.

Mo Farah and Christine Ohuruogu have continued to do what they do best: run around in ever-decreasing circles ad infinitum until everybody has developed neck pains watching them. 

There’s no getting away from it: in order to win the most prestigious sports competition in the world, the Sports Personality Of The Year, on the world’s most prestigious broadcaster, the wonderful BBC1, one needs to have a bucket load of personality. 

And that ladies and gentlemen, is why I, the Soon-to-be-Lord Andrew John Paul George Ringo Murray of Kirkintilloch, have secured the prize in such emphatic style.

Now there is only one thing left to complete my universe. Recognition of my achievements by my local club, which has, as you can imagine, been less than effusive in its praise in recent weeks.

No matter.  The time is now right for the club secretary, Grace, to phone me and inform me that the club is ready to bestow the ultimate accolade upon me. 

The Chairmanship. 

Grace, I am ready for your favours.

More from the Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player here!

I awoke on the dew drenched field of my alma mater this morning with a headache the size of Concorde. Clutching my tennis racket firmly to my Fred Perry adorned bosom, I realised in the vicious light of day that it was all over, once and for all, between me and the club. Not on the short list of SPOTY, no invite to the awards ceremony, not even a half-eaten chicken thrown my way out of sympathy.

How the mighty are fallen.

Even the club moggie had deserted me I mused as I trudged out of the ground. But such is the way of all things feline and racket-shaped. They may love you when you’re up there – struggling, winning, bathing in the showers afterwards – but when you’re down and out, flat on your back on a dew drenched rugby field? Then you realise who your real friends are. 

And Spoty, the club moggie is clearly not one of them.

But – and this is a big but – one that combines all the ‘on the other hands’, ‘howevers’ and ‘they think it’s all overs’ that are possible in any sports mythology, including mine – what did I see as I slumped past the newsagent this morning? On his bill board? Written in thick black felt tip marker? 

Only the short list for the BBC’s Sports Personality Of The Year 2013 programme! 

And who is on THAT list, alongside Mo Farah, Christine Ohuruogu, Hannah Cockroft, Chris Froome, Justin Rose, Sir (Sir!) Ben Ainslie, AP McCoy, Ian Bell and rugby union player Leigh Halfpenny? Yes, that’s right – little old moi! 

Yours truly has been recognised by the true sporting elite and he is there in the public eye once again, despite being snubbed by the cultural pygmies of his own club!

The public will vote for their favourite on Sunday, 15 December – giving me just a few weeks to practice my personality so that it stands the best possible chance of success. 

Sports Personality Of The Year?! 

Last night you may have been ‘avin a larf, but this morning is a very different place in the sports cosmos and I for one intend to claim what is rightfully mine. 

Spoty – club moggie – and all you club apparatchiks – you have been warned!

You, o wise, astute reader, will know the significance of what I am about to reveal as you are well versed in the trials and tribulations of village pump politics, bruised egos and sporty tantrums. (None of which are mine I hasten to add.)

You will also recognise, due to your hard won wisdom over the years, that my challenges have not been without merit, that my battles are of the most deserving kind, and that my stand against the forces of mediocrity and institutional inertia is a stand borne of optimistic idealism rather than one of self-serving, craven realpolitik.

I accept my idealism has sometimes been wayward, my optimism unwarranted and my belief in the underlying goodness of all humanity may have been misguided, but you – o wise, astute, and intelligent reader – will wave aside these flaws when it comes to assessing the rights and wrongs of the debacle that surrounded the so-called Sports Personality of the Year Awards Evening, and agree that I have been cruelly and unjustly treated in a year when, after all, I did win the 2013 Men’s Singles Tennis Final at Wimbledon – the greatest colossus among tennis tournaments.

There is no point beginning at the beginning. You will, because you have an excellent memory o wise, astute, intelligent and attractive reader, and know that I won a wild card to Wimbledon. That I struggled against the collective might of the Balkan youth. That I was spurned – rejected, ridiculed, by all the guys in the locker room. You will recall with great acuity how I made my way through all the qualifying rounds to the final. You will remember the final and you will know the result. The first British men’s win at Wimbledon since Arnold Ffanshawe succeeded – against much lesser opposition – in 1808.

You will also be aghast – as I was – at the terrible snubbing I received at the hands of the sub-humans who make up our so-called club committee when I was left off the list of nominations for the Sports Personality Of The Year competition. 

Now, like you, o wise, astute, intelligent, attractive and mature reader, I took this news on the chin and reacted magnanimously.

I resigned with immediate effect and took my racket and Wimbledon balls to the club down the road where I promptly joined their august institution, and where I have been happy ever since.

Except. I didn’t. And I haven’t.

To be honest, o wise, astute, intelligent, attractive, mature, and fun loving reader, I took the news very badly. I yearned to be on the short list. I hungered to be acknowledged as the immense tennis player I am. I would have given my left non-serving arm to have even been invited to the evening. But my coach, Hac, advised against this sacrifice claiming it would jeopardise my ranking in the world’s elitist of the elite.

But the fact is, o wise, astute, intelligent, attractive, mature, fun loving, and sympathetic reader, I didn’t get a look in. Not one call, not one email, not one text. Nothing.

So here I am, nose pressed against the window of the grand room of what was my former club looking in at the cavorting that is going on inside, all in the name of praising so-called ‘sports personalities’.

I see huge turkeys, stuffed with chickens, themselves stuffed with quails which in turn are stuffed with baby pigeons paraded around the dance floor – not live I hasten to add, but cooked to roasted perfection. I hear tarantellas, waltzes, minuets – all played to within an inch of their lives – and see committee members dressed up in their Christmas finery, adorned with hats in the shape of tennis rackets, rugby union posts, referee whistles, any number of sports accessories masquerading as the highest of high sports fashion.

But where are the achievers, I hear you ask, o wise, astute, intelligent, attractive, mature, fun loving, sympathetic, and discerning reader? Where are the signs of achievement? The true victors of the summer? And you would be well to ask such important questions.

The answer is here in front of you. 

He is here, shivering in the icy cold, wearing his Fred Perry singlet and Rafa Nadal shorts and Roger Federer golden trainers (the ones with RF17 embossed in golden thread on the ankles) and asking himself, “why, oh! why?”

And I know dear reader, that you are unable to answer, being the club cat that you are. 

You stare at me; I stare at you. You miaow; I for once am speechless. I can’t let you in. I am the committee blocking your entrance to the not so great and not so good. The world needs spirits such as us o wise, astute, intelligent, attractive, mature, fun loving, sympathetic, discerning, and feline listener. The trouble is, it doesn’t know it yet. 

Sports Personality Of The Year? From now on I shall call you, the club moggie, Spoty. Your secret is safe with me.

So said the heavy athlete slumped on the bench in the men’s changing rooms, gazing at his cracked up trainers, sodden t shirt and pale blue shorts strewn across the floor. He’d had a difficult match on a squash court, being raced around by just a strip of a lad who had humiliated him over 3 games, 27 minutes and never ending memories of how things used to be, back in the day.

True, we sympathised. There was a time, back in the day, when we did indeed get younger with the passing of the days.

There was a time, way back when, when getting older really did feel like you were getting younger: as the days passed, your skin shone a bit more, your hair grew faster, and your torso shed pounds quicker, the longer you stood looking at yourself in the mirror.

At what point did the days do a volte face and far from getting younger as we got older, did we actually get older as we got older?

Answers to this and other vital sporting questions here.