by Amis, Martin
Seeing his father waver, he added, 'It'll only take twenty minutes.' Though broad of build, Tommy had beardless cheeks and, between thickening eyebrows, a trace of that rounded, faintly baffled blankness babies have, that wrinkles before they cry.
'O.K.,' Foster said. 'You win. I'll come along. I'll protect you.'
Observer, 1987
TENNIS: THE WOMEN'S GAME
The emerging women's game can be imagined — perhaps with literal accuracy - as a transcontinental jumbo, with three classes. In First Class you find the top ten ladies (or bobbysoxers or nymphets), with footrests up, harassed by the courtesies of the cabin stewards: Steffi is playing backgammon with her dad; Gaby is hunched under a Sony Walkman. In Club World, together with the shrinks and physios of the top ten ladies, are the second-string ladies, all of them quite well attended, and wearing those special pairs of Club World slippers. In the chaos of Coach, wedged together in blocks of three and four, are the 'gym rats', the eternal aspirants of the modern tour, on yet another leg of their frazzled quest for ranking points, sponsors, backers. Nearly every girl on board has entrusted her schooling to the correspondence course. They are all enduring, or developing, a variety of injuries: 'always something hurts.' And they all have jet-lag.
It is raining in Boca Raton, to the disgust of the entire resort. The PR machine is reshuffling flights, drivers and schedules; and the ladies are in the clubroom, playing snap and Scrabble. When the action resumes, Jo Durie will go out in the first round, foreclosing British interest in the event. But that's where all similarities to Wimbledon end, The crowd isn't cringing under umbrellas, smelling of damp dog. It is strolling the landscaped grounds, lightly clad and gorging itself on ice-cream and gooey pretzels. For we are in Florida, the global nursery of the women's game, where the girls can conveniently flit from condo to sports ranch to tournament, and to the stratospheric tendrils of mammoth Miami Airport. The county is still mopping its brow from Prince Charles's recent visit to Palm Beach; but lots of locals are rich and idle enough to turn out for the tennis. The heavy sun gives the young flesh of the players a sumptuously toasty tang, and turns the rest of us into various shades of peanut butter and hotdog mustard.
'Nice place, don't you think,' said my driver as we approached, and then added, before I got any ideas, 'You have to be a millionaire to live here, though.' I believed him. Chris Evert lives here, or has a 'home' here anyway. This is polo-club America, with shaved grass, caddycarts, rows of identical modern villas, and fanatical security. I look in on the sodden press tent to collect my ID tag. But there is hardly time to sample the free Danish ('For media Only!'), and to be disabused of the idea that tennis journalism is a glamorous job, before we hear the rumour of play. The clouds clear and the voluptuous raindrops cease to fall. Soon the sky is wearing an outfit of faded denim; at dusk it will don a watermelon T-shirt. This is Florida, and even the sky is in questionable taste.
In the absence of Martina Navratilova (either injured or conserving herself for 'the Slams'), and in the absence of any hard gossip about burnout, grasping parents or lesbian molestation, there was only one big story, one big question, at the Virginia Slims of Florida. The question was: can anybody beat Steffi Graf, who nowadays seems to be losing about one match a year? Pat Cash recently called women's tennis 'rubbish'. Yet many well-informed observers believe that the women's game is now more interestingly poised than the men's - as well as being better fun to watch. The men have entrained a power struggle of outsize athleticism, machismo and foul temper. It's all rat-a-tat-tat, or rat-a-tat, or, on fast courts, simply rat. Where is the pleasure in witnessing an ace? The women's game has become just as powerful while remaining significantly slower, so that the amateur has time to recognise the vocabulary of second-guessing and disguise. Although it's still a fight, it's a woman's fight, settled not by the muscles but by the subtler armaments with which women wage their wars. Women's tennis is Dynasty with balls, bright yellow fuzzy ones, stroked and smacked by the Fallons, Krystles and Alexises of the lined court.
The crowd wants something to talk about, and the press must have something to write about; so for the first few days attention fixes on the Latest Sensation — the latest double-fisted infant to be groomed for stardom, Monica Seles from Yugoslavia, who has just turned fourteen. The older girls hate playing the child wonders, and Helen Kalesi, the Canadian number one, is having a terrible time with Monica. 'Better than Steffi at that age,' a coach informs me. 'Look at her nerve. She loves the ball.' The contest looks elegant but sounds barbaric. Helen is a 'grunter', and Monica is a 'whoofer', emitting a duosyllabic shriek with each contact of ball and racket. 'Uhh!' 'Ugh-eh!' 'Uhh!' 'Ugh-eh!' Jimmy Connors started the grunting, with his legendary 'Hworf!' Then, as Clive James noted, Bjorn Borg responded with his own nordic variant: 'Hwörjf!' The idea, supposedly, is to incorporate the strength of the stomach muscles; but the strength of the women all derives from their timing, in at least two senses. Prodigies can't happen in men's tennis because the physique develops later. Hence the money trap of the women's game, and one of its peculiar cruelties: as an earner, a girl can peak at puberty and be 'history' by the age of sixteen. At the press conference after her shock win Monica looks like a startled elf in a Disney cartoon. Her charmingly nervous laugh reveals a garrison of orthodonture. 'What do you feel?' 'Very happy.' 'What is your goal?' 'To be number one.' Later, Steffi Graf strides into the tent, having briskly lunched on her first opponent. Asked about the child wonder, Steffi concedes with a shrug that Monica, while 'very skinny', is 'a good player'. She is especially haughty about Monica's reliance on the two-handed groundstroke, which Steffi clearly regards as a contemptible anachronism, like using your knickers to store the ball for the second serve. As befits a number one, Steffi is visibly impatient with questions about her rivals, and generally shows little interest in disguising her feelings. She quite lacks the PR burnish of the American girls, all of whom have impeccable media manners and a nice tidy image. It makes sense: they might want to diversify later on, like Pam Shriver. If you retire at twenty-five there are a lot of years ahead, and sportscasting may fill some of them.
The next evening, under the lights, little Monica plays Chris Evert, who knows a thing or two about child prodigies, having traumatised them by the dozen year after year. She was also one herself, and remains the only player in the modern game who has paced her hunger over two decades. Given a big build-up by the PR witch with the mike ('Ladies and gentlemin! . . . Wimbledin . . . the US Opin' etc, plus details of her career earnings), Chris steps forward, sternly smiling, as straight and crisp as the pleats in her skirt, and shining with money dignity and hardened achievement. 'Mm,' says Chris as she strikes the ball (for Chris is no whoofer: more a gentle moaner). 'Mm.' 'Ugh-eh!' 'Mm.' 'Ugh-eh!' 'Mm.' Monica cuts a chastened figure at the post-match conference. She broke Chris's serve three times, but she failed to hold any of her own. No laughter now, poor mite. She looks as though she is longing for a refreshing weep with her mother, or five hours with her coach, rewiring that drive volley.
Now that the Latest Sensation is history for the time being, the public eye greedily swivels and fixes with an incredulous leer on Gabriela Sabatini. As she unveils herself for the first match, under the sun's spotlight, a sigh of admiration and yearning wafts through the crowd. Sabatini looks like a human racehorse, a (successful) experiment in genetico-aesthetics, engineered, cultured and conditioned for optimum gorgeousness. Her beauty alone scares the life out of her opponents — because tennis is above all an expression of personal power and, in the women's game, is closely bound up with how a player looks, and how she feels she looks.
Up against Gabriela is the noble veteran Wendy Turnbull, with her gym knickers and boyish bob. It is, perhaps, not too great a trespass against gallantry to point out that Wendy is shaped like a Prince Pro tennis racket. She plays a stubby game, too, while Gabriela, of course, is pure motion sculpture on the court, with her balletic delay in the service action and her bravura — her
toreador — backhand. It looked like a deeply thankless hour for Wendy, facing this bronzed hallucination of fluency and youth. She tried her 'old tricks' (block return, chip-and-charge), but Gabriela's topspin was a torment to her ageing legs. 'Time,' explained the umpire, every five minutes. 'Time. Time.' And it's the operative word. To Monica it says, 'Not yet'; to Wendy, 'No longer.'
Soon, the Sabatini charisma is devastating the press tent. 'Still got the red BMW, Gaby?' asks one tennis expert from the floor. 'This Argentine singer friend - what's his name?' 'Elio Roza.' 'How do you spell Elio?' 'E,l,i,o.' 'Great. How do you spell Roza?' What did you feel? What will you buy? At the best of times the press tent is hardly a fortress of shrewd inquiry, and when a superstar is near, the Sports Department quickly collapses into Features or Lifestyles. All week the girls troop in and tell the corps that they're crazy about their new coach and are now doing ten thousand pull-ups a day and eating nothing but alfalfa. It is an obligation, and a ritual. 'Have you dreamt of this moment all your life?' 'Yes.' This exchange will go into the paper as follows: 'I have dreamt of this moment all my life.' Thus a cliche is thrown up by the press, and printed by the press. The closed circle suits everybody. And if you put in a 'request' and secure a private interview, if you try to look 'behind the scenes', then all you'll find is another scene, another layer of press patter. This shouldn't surprise anyone. And besides, it has never been a particularly fruitful business, asking teenage girls what they feel.
'5 to 11 — Complimentary Champagne for all ladies,' says the sign, rather desperately, in the bar of the official hotel. Needless to say, Gaby and Steffi are not to be seen here, enjoying six hours of complimentary champagne. There used to be a few ravers among the better-known players; but tennis girls are compulsive types, and once they started raving, they soon stopped being among the better-known players. All that is of course out of the question these days. Fun and boys and free champagne, like everything else, is scheduled to happen 'later'.
Steffi and Gaby are not to be seen in the hotel. They are cordoned off elsewhere. Only the Coach Class players dwell here in Park Place. They wander around with their sausage bags. They drink milk with breakfast (suggesting childish tastes as well as sensible nutrition). They sleep three to a room and talk worriedly about how they will split the tab. They are not yet — and may never be — on the other side, the place where everyone is suddenly dying to give them money. Their numbers remorselessly dwindle as the week goes on.
For things are getting serious. The plucky underdogs and the eyecatchers are all falling away: Gigi Fernandez, with her vociferous flair and fecklessness; Rafaella Reggi, the glamorous grunter; squawlike Mary Joe Fernandez, the unforgiving baseliner; Sandra Cecchini, dynamically butch and spivvy; the Czech pylon Helena Sukova, borne everywhere on the shoulders of two little bodybuilders (which turn out to be her legs): the shriekers and whoofers and hworfers step aside, revealing the handful of players who are capable of winning it - or of worrying Steffi Graf. All week, as tickets get pricier, the seat allocations for the press have become more and more disadvantageous. For the final, a further spasm of sponsorial greed lofts us up into the bleachers. It is the match everyone wants to see: Graf v. Sabatini. Fräulein Forehand meets Bonita Backhand.
On the big day I breakfast within eavesdropping distance of the TV crew that has flown down for the match. 'Do we do a pre-match interview?' one of them asks. 'With Steffi? I don't know. She goes into like a trance before the start.' The upside of interviewing Steffi in mid-reverie — or of at least televising the trance — is briefly discussed. Can they get the pre-match interview? They think so. In no other sport will two individuals be given up to three hours of screen time, and TV is the fount of all the real tennis money. It is why each square inch of Steffi's shirt is worth a million dollars.
'Ladies and gentlemin!' Seen from on high, the demeanour of the show court clearly reflects the narrowing gap between top tennis and show business. The flags, the floodlights, the VIP boxes, the camera gantries, the officials in candy stripe (pompous Pancho Gonzalez lookalikes, fully convinced, like the TV people, of their vital contribution to the spectacle), the rockhard PR girl with her interminable plugs and mentions and personal thanks to all the allegedly wonderful Dekes and Duanes and Sharons and Karens who have made all this possible. The crowd, too, is participatory in the American style. What kind of clothes do Americans wear when they watch tennis? Tennis clothes. And they join in with their aggressive questioning of calls, frequent demands to be reminded of the score, and continuous and deafening cries of 'Quiet!'
Steffi Graff is something unbelievable on the tennis court, a miracle of speed, balance and intense athleticism. She looks like a skater but she moves like a puck. During changeovers she gets up early from her chair, and she is always exasperated (hands on hips, head bowed) by any delay from opponent or ballboy. After a great shot she doesn't wait for the applause to start, let alone stop, before she is striding back to the baseline, twiddling her racket like a sixgun. She never smiles.
She wants to win every set to love and get on with the next one. You feel that the only player she would enjoy facing is herself.
Today she is facing Gabriela, who has never beaten her in eleven meetings. And it looks like the same old story. Steffi's forehand is booming, and she is slicing her backhand under the breeze. Instead of retreating twenty feet for the high topspin (as Evert had done in the semi-final), Steffi adopts the ploy of jumping waist-high to make her drives. Steffi is one set up and serving at 3-2 in the second. The crowd (strongly Hispanic, or strongly Jewish and therefore anti-German) groans and sweats for the wilting, shamefaced Gaby. Then something happens. And we'll never know what. Steffi collapses in a blizzard of errors, losing all but one of the next eleven games. An instant after the last point Gaby has the snout of a TV camera in her face. Then a microphone in her hand ('It's hard to talk right now'). Soon she is in the press tent, being asked what she feels ('It's hard to say'). And then she is packing her rackets and heading down to Key Biscayne for the Lipton, where she will lose to Mary Joe Fernandez in the quarters, and where Steffi, as tennis writers say, will return to her winning ways.
The person to ask about modern tennis stardom is not a modern tennis star, who will probably be seventeen and speak little English, and who will have attended a course on how to handle herself with - or, more simply, how to handle
— the media. The person to ask, if you can get past her agent, is Tatum O'Neal, who is married to John McEnroe and, more importantly, was herself a prodigy, a thoroughbred of the star system. The system prescribes a life of unique enclosure, in which every contact is featherbedded, insulated, mediated. Fixers, helpers, PR people, guys with guns everywhere: these extras are just part of the scenery for the gazelles and snow-leopards of modern tennis, a protected species
— priceless specimens — in their bijou theme park. Of course, for the virgin millionairesses there will be life after tennis. But there was no life before it — before they sank into the strange obscurity of stardom.
Vogue, 1988
ST LUCIA
St Lucia — land of contrasts! Patched, mottled, sickly-looking white people sprawl on the fronded patios. Meanwhile, beautiful young black people hover in attendance, making snacks, making drinks, making beds. It is the West Indian reality, obvious and inescapable: the Catering Society. Charming youths with charming nameplates on their breasts (Bently, Regis, Hillary, Justas) fondly anticipate your needs and whims; in the distance, the pretty maids flap and chatter like birds of paradise. With their security guards and pest-controllers, the hotels are townships, fortresses of inflation and entropy. They are protectorates. But what do they protect you from?
The gulf between holidaying and travel is a wide one, and gets wider every day. The big hotels were a part of travel, once upon a time. Yet who uses them now? Who are the five-star people? The prestige of St Lucia is at present undermined by an association with the British package holiday. Some of the older waiters have be
en known to walk off the set when they saw the people they would have to be waiting on. The typical five-star couple will never stray from the premises, except on some Jolly Roger Buccaneer Bar 'B' Q excursion or chaperoned shopping tour. After lunch it's Limbo Demonstration by Vince; before dinner it's Reggae with Ronnie. Against an attractive spattering of palms, they sit and drink by the pool, frowning at buxom paperbacks or miming along to the canned pop. How can they afford the five-star prices? Are they all betting-shop nabobs or coin-op kings? Have they scrimped and saved for that 'holiday of a lifetime' canvassed in the brochures? After a while I developed the fantasy that they were all highly successful criminals. I moved among train-robbers and jewel-thieves, among industrious burglars. I imagined that an extradition agreement between the UK and the West Indies would, at a stroke, bring the tourist business to its knees.
Cunard La Toc, near the capital of Castries, has recently spent $6 million to 'redefine luxury vacationing in the Caribbean'. This costly redefinition, it turns out, is an attempt to emulate the 'villa' holiday that has effectively preempted the role of the big hotels. The main difference is room service. Anyway, the experience has the authentic torpor of brochure prose. Your suite, ideally designed for comfort, offers plunge pool, personal bar and a panoramic view of the ocean setting. In the restaurants you sample genuine Creole or continental cuisine, together with the island's finest entertainment. Here sports abound: snorkelling, tennis under the sun or the stars, golf on a challenging course cooled by easterly tradewinds. An oasis of natural beauty, created for those who want to 'get away from it all', to relax and unwind ... In the meantime you wonder whether Paul Theroux would be satisfied by this elegant breachfront resort set in over 100 acres of unspoiled magnificence. Would James Fenton or Bruce Chatwin? Would V.S. Naipaul?