From: Floyd Scarabelli
Category: Amis
Date: 7/8/99
Time: 12:40:33 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.97
FROM *LONDON FIELDS*: "The set went to six-six, to the tie-break. Withdrawn and indolent until now, Dink exploded with a horrible competence, lunging from tramline to tramline to poach his volleys, beetling backwards on tiptoe for the whorfing overheads...At six-zero Dink aced Lizzyboo with shameless savagery, and then half-turned, his mouth white and tight and starkly crenellated, as he cuffed the spare ball toward my chair. Nobody takes a set off the South African number seven. Nobody. Unless of course he's the South African number six. That asshole. It didn't occur to him that Lizzyboo and Hope and Guy would be pretty good at tennis too, if they did *nothing else the whole time*."
FROM *AT THE WIDE-OPEN OPEN* BY MARTIN AMIS: "And the crowd loves to hear all that---about the crowd. Jim Courier has been described as a 'meat and potatoes' kind of guy. Now, meat and potatoes doesn't normally know that it's meat and potatoes. But Jim is a modern American, and he *knows* he's meat and potatoes. Similarly, the Open crowd knows it's a bad crowd. Born to be bad. And proud of it. It wouldn't want it any other way. Essentially, although many of the people in the stand wear tennis gear, and some of them even tote tennis racquets, the crowd at the U.S. Open is not a tennis crowd. It is a sports crowd. What they mainly want the match to be is *close*. They are vociferous, bountiful, and jingoistic. They love Americans and brave losers. When they really get behind a player, they are just as likely to goad him to defeat. For instance, they do the gee-them-up pre-point slow handclap---and *go on* doing it once the point is under way. If a call of 'Out' isn't given, they will give it, and *go on* giving it; while their hero gamely continues the rally, laboring to put the injustice out of his mind, the fans keep yelling, 'Out! It was Out! The ball was out! *OUT!* OUT! *OUT!*' They *love* an ace: an ace elicits the 'Whoo!'s and 'Ow!'s and the double-pinkie whistles. Unlike the connoisseurs of Roland Garros, who hate aces, and unlike the fair-play merchants of Wimbledon, who tolerate them, the Open crowd would be happy with a match that consisted of nothing else. The drop shot, on the other hand, is greeted by soft snarls of 'Faggot'. Yes, it's a macho scene at Flushing Meadow."
FROM *THE COURTS OF BABYLON* BY PETER BODO: "There was also the little matter of the 1975 Wimbledon final, in which Ashe reached the high point of his career at Connors's expense. At the time, Connors was the best player on earth, and he was playing with confidence and unbridled fury. Anybody who picked Ashe to win that final did so not out of conviction or insight, but on the slim chance that if the unthinkable did indeed occur, he would be dubbed either a genius or a psychic.
"Ashe went into that match and executed the most brilliant bit of strategic thinking and playing that I've ever seen. He figured out that Connors had trouble returning a soft, low ball in the midcourt area on his forehand side. He also knew that Connors thrived on pace and relished the challenge of hitting on the run, from the corners of the court, where he had plenty of options to exploit with his precise, powerful ground strokes.
"So Ashe decided to handcuff Connors by taking the pace off the ball and preventing Connors from hitting on the run. He achieved this by employing a dazzling array of dinks, chips, drop shots, and slices. Connors reacted like a skittish horse tied up in a stall during a thunderstorm. He snorted, pawed, bucked, and tried to force his way into a running and hitting match. Ashe kept that from happening, and he won, 6-1, 6-1, 5-7, 6-4.
"And then there were odds and ends, including the Davis Cup fiasco under Ashe in Sweden. So my question to Arthur that day during the Connors-Krickstein match was a simple one, and I'll ask you to forgive its intrinsic vulgarity on the grounds of accurate testimony: 'So, Arthur, what's the bottom line? Is Jimmy Connors really just an asshole?' Ashe pondered the question for a few moments before he replied, 'Yeah. But he's my *favorite* asshole.' "