Whenever I hear the name Wimbledon I am reminded of those interminable hours spent watching sepia tinged images of Tim Henman delicately slicing yet another backhand into the net. Many people fondly look back on those days through rose tinted spectacles but not me. Mine, I’m afraid to say, are opaque with shit. His stubborn inability to win was like a menstrual cycle; regular as clock work especially when you’ve just been fucked in the ass. Yet every time Henmania deluded a perennially hopeful nation into believing that this was the year. This time he would surely break free from those shackles of meek reserve, that had bound him to failure so many times, to finally hold aloft that golden trophy like King Midas himself. But no, the meek shall not inherit the earth and they definitely won’t win Wimbledon. This strangely weak acceptance of defeat does seem to be a relatively modern malaise in English sport. You can’t imagine Englishmen of old surrendering so readily. The immortal line that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton should reverberate around the minds of every English sportsman today. That unquenchable inferno of pure will required to win on that Belgium field is also required on the fields of SW19. Would The Iron Duke have accepted defeat at the hands of Sebastian Grosjean every time? No he bloody would not. He would have happily flogged every man woman and child in centre court if it could have helped him to win and probably even if it couldn’t. But alas no longer. No longer may a man with a title and a prominent nose gallivant around Hyde Park corner beating children with gay abandon, and more’s the pity. Maybe if Tim had a little more Wellington and a little less Henman he might just have won it.
Wimbledon, I think you’ll agree, is as quintessentially English as a Constable landscape. If John had been around you can bet that he would have come, easel at the ready, to capture that particular atmosphere that seems to take over the entire country for those two weeks in June. One will never know whether he would also have painted Lleytton Hewitt’s less than silken skin, or Marat Safin’s undoubtedly enormous package but we can safely assume not. Lleytton in particular is a man after my own heart; he turns up every year and never fails to act like a johnson. What in the name of Paul Hogan makes him think it’s alright to loudly ejaculate “Come on Rusty” every time he wins a point? Who the fuck is Rusty and what does Hewitt think someone named after iron oxide can possibly do to help? (Slowly erode his opponents watch……great.) I propose that we start a campaign this year whereby everyone who happens to be watching Hewitt lose shouts “Fuck off Rusty” just as he exits the court. I am confident we can get McEnroe on board, Barker may be more difficult but I know if you give Inverdale a couple of shandys he’s yours.
Well there you have it, the good, the bad and the ugly of Wimbledon. I do hope you all enjoy watching it this year and try to remember those typically poetic words of Andy Murray after crashing out of the Australian Open “A wallaby pooed on me, so that wasn’t very nice.”
Thanks for listening.
A. Johnson
