Great male hope

Today Andy Murray lost his third major tennis final. He’s the best tennis player Britain’s produced for a long time. He’s also a lot better than plenty of people who have won majors, but he seems to be a victim of the ruthless consistency of his contemporaries. The days when Gaston Gaudio or even Carlos Moya could rock up and win the French Open seem to be gone. If you’re in a major final and you’re not Federer or Nadal then the chances are your opponent is, and as a result Murray may never get a better chance of winning a major than he did against Novak Djokovic today. Seeing him blow it in such unspectacular fashion must have been disappointing for his fans, though personally I wasn’t that bothered.

What does bother me is that the media seem to think it a cause of acute shame to British tennis (whoever British tennis is) that the last British man to win a major singles final was Fred Perry in 1936. They say it all the time. They said it when Henman and Rusedski teased us in the 90s, and for all I know they used to say it about Jeremy Bates and John Lloyd. Well I think this whiffs of sexism. We’ve had six major singles champions since Perry. Courtesy of Wikipedia, they are: Dorothy Round Little, Angela Mortimer Barrett, Shirley Bloomer Brasher, Ann Haydon Jones, Virginia Wade and Sue Barker. They are, of course, all women. But so what?

As an experiment, imagine what you’d think if John Isner got to the Wimbledon final and the American media remarked ruefully that there hadn’t been a white American major singles champion since 2003. If they said it gleefully, you’d think they were making some kind of point about African-Americans being better tennis players than white Americans. But if they said it ruefully, as the British sports media do when they mention Perry, I suppose the point would be that what they want is a white champion, and the achievements of Venus and Serena Williams are either a shaming contrast or an irrelevance.

Now, when I hear people moping about Fred Perry it doesn’t sound quite the way it would in the racial case, partly because I’m used to it but partly because in tennis men and women compete separately. I’m glad they do. But it isn’t like football where the level of professionalization is very different in the men’s and women’s games, and I don’t think the achievements of female tennis players are less impressive than those of men. If Anne Keothavong starts wiping the floor with the Williamses, the Russians and Kim Clijsters then British tennis should stop moping. Maybe it would, but this means it should shut up about Fred Perry. Given the amount of money it spends, it’s embarrassing enough it hasn’t had a major champion since Virginia Wade.

How do you feel about boxing?

Last night I watched the eagerly awaited mismatch between David Haye and Audley Harrison. I wanted the better boxer to win in style, and he did. I like watching boxing but I always feel slightly strange when I do, because I’m torn between three ways of feeling about it.

It’s not hard to make the case that boxing’s barbaric. We pay people to punch each other beyond the point at which it starts being quite bad for their health, purely for the entertainment of millions. It’s not unheard of for someone to die. I can’t feel completely comfortable being one of those millions, because I suppose I’d like society to have been able to progress beyond that sort of thing by now. I’m not saying boxing is barbaric, but if you didn’t know better it’d certainly sound that way.

On the other side there are all the reasons why boxing is called the noble art. There are the obvious things like it being one of the few routes poor teenage boys used to have out of poverty, but the more I think about boxing the nobler it seems. It’s got a rich history, some great movies and Muhammad Ali. It also fairly obviously taps into something visceral about human nature which it might be a great shame to give up. We haven’t given up eating for pleasure, and maybe we’d miss getting people to fight each other too.

The third thing, which can’t really be reconciled with either of the other two, is that boxing is hilarious. It’s hilarious in almost exactly the way that professional wrestling is hilarious. We see all the hype, trash-talking, cartoonish bodies and silly sums of money flying around, and the focus of it all is seven minutes of squaring up followed by one minute of a good boxer taking a mediocre one to pieces. So when I’m watching boxing I don’t know whether to be appalled, edified or amused, and you can’t easily be more than one of those things at once.

How many people is David Mitchell?

I like David Mitchell. I’m impressed by his output. Acting, writing opinion pieces for the Observer, doing staged rants on TV panel shows and even more staged rants on his Soapbox (and one or two in Peep Show as well!): he seems to have it all. But he’s not quite got it all, because contrary to what I assume to be a common confusion, he isn’t the author of Cloud Atlas and those other books whose names nobody like me remembers. That’s a different person with the same name. I’d be surprised if the actor doesn’t have publishers queueing around the block to give him book deals, but he hasn’t published any novels to my knowledge, and if he has they’re not as praised as Cloud Atlas and those others. And if he had and they were, that’d be impressive. I’m told they’re pretty good. If that’s all it’d take to catapult him into the Stephen Fryosphere of national admiration then he should definitely give it a go. Though he wouldn’t want to risk turning into Will Self.

Now the French seem to think that even though they haven’t produced a playwright as good as Shakespeare that’s fine because they have Racine for the tragedies and Moliere for the comedies, and if that’s not enough for you they’ve got Corneille too. But isn’t that cheating? Part of what’s so impressive about Shakespeare is that he did it all by himself. When we find out he occasionally called in Marlowe or Middleton when a deadline loomed, it’s less impressive. It doesn’t make the plays less enjoyable, and indeed I was actually pleased to be told that the silly first scene of Macbeth wasn’t from the pen of our greatest writer. But it does (in other cases) make it slightly less impressive. I suppose what we’re looking for is heroes, and we want our heroes to work alone. When you find out Hercules did one labour with the help of a couple of rivers (which were presumably gods in disguise) and one with the help of Iolaus (blatant cheating) you send him off to do another two to make up. So while the French dramatic canon may be as good as ours, when it comes to literary heroes you can’t cobble together a Shakespeare out of a Moliere here and a Corneille there. All of this is rather a shame for me. One of my favourite heroes is Jason and that’s because he really knew how to put a team together in a way that makes Danny Ocean look like Rafa Benitez. Perhaps I should stop rewatching Peep Show and read Cloud Atlas.