15 July 2026

Tennis is great – and it’s even better on the telly

Since a woman in her fifties exposed my service game,

Phoot by Leo Mason/Millennium Images, UK

The weather continues glorious. The scaffolding outside the Hove-l is still up, and I am now resigned to its remaining there forever, and I still have no fridge. I think once you have demonstrated that you can live without a fridge for four months during the warmest part of the year, then you can put up with pretty much any hardship ordinary life can throw at you. Harder, and more worrying, is surviving without money. I ran out yesterday but someone should be paying me tomorrow.

So what is there to do but watch sport? There might be no more Test cricket until August – which is in itself an outrage – but a quick look at the schedule reveals that there are other ball games available. My esteemed colleague Hunter Davies is writing about the World Cup, so I leave that to him, except to say that so far the nerves of England supporters have been tested to the point of maximum stress.

But what I love most about this time of year is Wimbledon. And what I love most about Wimbledon is the supreme artistry of the tennis on display; the drama of key matches; the way it’s still taken seriously by the players; its cunning use of tradition; that it is still free to watch on the BBC – to the point where it is so hard to avoid you might as well give in; its personal associations, even though I’m rubbish at tennis (my father was very good, switching between left- and right-handed play at will, and his uncle played in the Davis Cup, whereas I am one of the few men who can claim to have been thrashed, at tennis, by their mother-in-law); and that, especially on the weekend, you have an excuse to get mildly sozzled earlier than usual (or, during the week, to bunk off work). A confession: I should have filed this column the day before I did, but I was too engrossed in watching Arthur Fery play against Flavio Cobolli. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

I have always been mildly surprised that I am not better at tennis than I am. When I was a child, I played every day, for hours, summer after summer with my friend Dom from over the road at Cherry Tree Wood, East Finchley. My racquet had a normal-sized head but the handle was shorter than usual for some reason. I never thought to ask why; I just accepted it as the natural order of things – a disappointment, and an inconvenience, but one that had to be borne stoically, a bit like not having a fridge. The racquet was wooden, of course. When Dom turned up with one of the modern ones I gawped, as if a time-traveller had materialised in front of me. This would have been about 50 years ago, so I think they’ve advanced even more since then. Cobolli was playing with a racquet that was a shocking pink. Whatever next? I’d like to have seen the reaction if I’d pulled out a pink racquet in Cherry Tree Wood in 1976. Actually, it doesn’t bear thinking about.

Anyway, bop, bop, bop, back and forth, every sunny day, for years. They say if you practise something for 10,000 hours, you become incredibly good at it: I am living proof that this is not necessarily the case. I don’t remember ever getting tired, or collapsing from dehydration. But I don’t remember my game getting much better either. My service game, in particular, was distressingly bad, and when it was exposed, in all its fragility, by a woman in her fifties at Harpenden Tennis Club, I realised it was time to hang up my Slazenger and concentrate on the life of the mind.

But every so often I feel a twitch in the fingers and for a fleeting second I wonder what it would be like to play again. Then I think about it and the urge dies. I tend to get a bit short of breath getting out of bed – the walk up the hill from Waitrose, followed by two flights of stairs to the Hove-l, can unman me completely. And if I’m having a bad day, I have to take a breather halfway up the hill. It’s been more than ten years since I’ve played cricket, and though I wasn’t too bad – out of the ten matches I played for the Rain Men, I top-scored for the team in three (although, to give you an idea of the standard we played at, one of those scores was 12) – the whole business of running between the wickets was getting too much for me.

So, like most of us, I take my sporting pleasures at one remove, watching it on the screen. And Wimbledon is the best. There have been some epic matches so far. What I find about watching the game is how, unless one is deeply invested in one of the players, whether because of nationality, or looks, or the fact that he or she isn’t wearing their cap the wrong way round, one’s allegiances can shift during the course of the match. I spent most of the time wanting Novak Djokovic to lose his match against that nice-looking Canadian with the long name that already escapes me, until it started to look like he was going to lose. I always want whoever’s losing to win. It is not psychically healthy, is it? It would be so much better if I could have a cold beer by my side to take the edge off, but, well, that’s not going to be happening for a while. Anyway, back to the telly.