Читать книгу You Cannot Be Serious!: The 101 Most Frustrating Things in Sport - Matthew Norman - Страница 34

73

Lleyton Hewitt

When it comes to mellowing arguably the least charming sportsman even Australia has yet produced, nothing has succeeded like failure. Now that he has been reduced to a journeyman, tinkering about in the lower reaches of the world’s top thirty, and occasionally making a Grand Slam quarter-final, Lleyton Hewitt is little more than a minor irritant, where once he was a pustulating, septic boil on the buttock of professional tennis.

It seems almost surreal today that this cocky ball of ocker bumptiousness was the tour’s leading player in the early nough-ties. Yet, inexplicable as it now appears, in the thankfully brief interregnum between Pete Sampras and Roger Federer he twice ended the year as world number one, and snaffled two Grand Slam titles (Wimbledon in 2002, and the US Open the following year). The mortifying prospect then was that he would dominate for years, and perhaps he might have done so, but for one poignantly minuscule slice of bad luck. He had exceedingly little talent, judged by the standards of those who so quickly supplanted him, for playing tennis.

What he did have in spades was speed, footwork, energy and reliable passing shots off both wings, and for a little while that amalgam of the lower-range attributes was enough to take out less dependable baseliners, and serve-volleyers such as Tim Henman (whom he ritually slaughtered whenever they met) and Sampras, whom he dismantled in that US Open final.

And then, the Lord be praised, the quality of men’s tennis surged with such startling rapidity that Hewitt went swiftly from number one to also-ran. It was no longer enough to be a latterday Jimmy Connors, all effort and sweat and what George Galloway knows as indefatigability. To have a prayer of coping with the Fed, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray, you needed variety, cleverness and a nuclear weapon – an A-bomb serve like Andy Roddick’s, for example, or an intercontinental ballistic missile of a flat forehand in the style of Juan Martín del Potro.

Hewitt had nothing of the sort. What he had, and has still, is what I would call typically self-conscious Aussie cussedness, but he would boastfully identify as ‘heart’. Hence that endlessly repeated gesture of the fist banging his chest, en route to losing another love or ‘bagel’ set to the Fed, as he looks up to his box screeching ‘Come awn!’

Heart’s fine, if that’s what it is, but brain is better, and a combination of both best of all. Cerebrally, alas, Hewitt is the amoeba of the tennis world, the personification of the classically Australian conviction that it doesn’t matter a jot if a nine-year-old can’t tell the time so long as he shows promise at Aussie Rules football or she is in the right swimming team.

Thus it was, during the US Open of 2001, that he told a press conference that there wasn’t a soupçon of racist intent in the incident for which he will be remembered. He was playing James Blake, the Harlem-born black American, when a black line judge had the impudence to foot-fault him twice at important moments in the third set. Hewitt approached the umpire’s chair, and the microphone captured the following remark: ‘Look at him,’ said Hewitt, gesturing towards the line judge, ‘and tell me what the similarity is [gesturing now towards Mr Blake]. I want him [line judge again] off the court.’ The umpire, the Swiss Andreas Egli, didn’t oblige Hewitt there, but nor did he announce: ‘Code violation, paranoiac racist idiocy, warning Mr Hewitt.’ Perhaps Mr Egli figured that, what with coming from a land down under where Abo babies were plundered, to borrow from Men at Work, allowances must be made. In the pool halls of the outback, after all, Hewitt’s remark would have struck the regulars as restrained and studiously polite, if not political correctness gone mad.

So it says something important about Hewitt’s personality that even in Australia he was loathed and regarded as an embarrassment by the media and a fair chunk of the population long before he disgraced himself in New York.

Still, to his lasting credit, let no one claim that the fury of the US Open crowd, which booed him off court, and the condemnation of the wider world didn’t teach him a lesson. Not only did he come to see how repugnant the accusation of racially-motivated collusion between a player and an official might appear, he made dramatic strides in mastering the wider lexicon of non-offence. At the following year’s French Open in Paris, he addressed that same Mr Egli as a ‘spastic’. His apology the following day to the Spastics Society of Australia, which curiously took umbrage, showed yet again that, while he had very little else to offer, there was never any doubting Lleyton Hewitt’s heart.