Tennis For Free already has an enthusiastic supporter in Andy Murray’s mother, Judy, who recently attended a session in Merton and tweeted: “Absolutely brilliant. 3 tarmac courts, nets held together with plastic bags, grass growing up tramlines, couldn’t see lines (need paint). Over 100 people there from 3 to 70. Real community thing.”
Murray finished up by saying, “We need more of this” and suggested that the LTA and Tennis Foundation should be backing the project.
Hawks is more than just an armchair follower of tennis; he is an accredited coach and an expert player who aims to spend every Saturday morning guiding players at his Tennis For Free events.
He is also the author of the book Playing The Moldovans at Tennis, in which he bet his friend, fellow comedian Arthur Smith, that he could track down every member of the Moldovan football team and beat them on the tennis court.
The book is due to be released as a film next year and Hawks will also have to fit in his presentation to the LTA around a national stand-up tour, which begins in Lincoln this year.
Supreme talent meets the cream of the crop
The All-England Club sent out a block invitation to England’s Ashes-winning cricketers for Tuesday’s play. Andrew Strauss, Kevin Pietersen and Alastair Cook could all be seen in the Royal Box, and Strauss found himself two seats away from singer Diana Ross. “Nobody tried to explain the rules of cricket to her,” said Gemma Broad, the team analyst. “She only had eyes for Serena Williams.”
As for Strauss, this was his first visit to Wimbledon since his student days, when he sold strawberries in the food court. “We were the lowest of the low,” he said of his temporary job. “I just had a few days, when they didn’t have enough senior staff to hand out the strawberries and cream.”
Milestone memories
A neat statistical quirk has produced a windfall for the Wimbledon shop, which has stamped all its latest memorabilia with the legend ‘125 years’.
The merchandise is marching out of the shop so fast that supply could well dry up by the end of the first week.
“People really like the ‘I was there’ element when they buy souvenirs,” said retail director Jean Cooke. Perhaps they should be consulting Messrs Isner and Mahut about a T-shirt reading “I saw the endless match”
Simona Halep gets it off her chest
You won’t find many athletes, male or female, fessing up to cosmetic surgery. But one who will is Simona Halep, the 19-year-old Romanian who breezed through her first-round match on Tuesday. Halep – who won the French Open junior tournament in 2008 – had breast reduction surgery on her 34DD chest the following year. “It’s the weight that troubles me,” she explained.
“My ability to react quickly, my breasts make me uncomfortable when I play. I don’t like them in everyday life either; I would have gone for surgery even if I hadn’t been a sportswoman.”
As Anna Kournikova’s sports bra campaign put it, “Only the ball should bounce.”
