THE KICKER:EVERY YEAR TENNIS fascinates me, for about a month. Not so much the game, which is only as compelling to watch as snooker and far less so than hurling and golf, but I appreciate the mental fortitude of tennis players.
I was an armchair viewer when Andy Murray recently won his first Masters tournament on a squeaky sun-bleached blue court in the American mid-west. This, the commentators assured me, was a momentous afternoon in the life of the truculent Scot, the joyous culmination of a lifetime spent smashing the felt clean off tennis balls spat at him by a tube connected to a basket, discarding barely used sports equipment and playing Yahtzee in anonymous hotel rooms with swarthy American coaches wearing Oakley shades and backward baseball caps.
During the presentation of some hideous cut-glass plates, the vanquished - a giant Serbian by the name of Novak Djokovic - was invited to say a few words and duly obliged, thanking the fans in the generic mid-Atlantic twang of tennis players the world over, before announcing that he had a plane to catch, and that his speech was now. . . over.
What a neat and touching way to wrap up his speech. I'm sure the fans concurred. My own tears had hardly dried when the winner stepped to the mic. I'm a big fan of Andy Murray, and I particularly appreciate his nasty streak. He seems to me like a winner, and having won, I expected his cúpla focailto be slightly more fulsome, reflecting on the long trek to the summit, an oration which would omit reference to private jets waiting in line for take-off at Cincinnati International Airport, at least. But no. After thanking the fans, Murray frowningly reminded them that he, too, had a plane to catch right after Novak. As he spoke, he seemed utterly pre-occupied with the fact that his jet was the runner-up, behind Djokovic's.
I guess that level of permanent dissatisfaction is a component element of the born winner. Woody Allen famously remarked that a relationship is like a shark - it has to move forward constantly or it will perish. A loser would have regaled the crowd with stories from his youth; anecdotes about that one time Roger Federer put itching powder in his jockstrap. When Andy Murray bemoaned the fact that he was going to miss his take-off slot, he was displaying the shark-like dissatisfaction of the winner.
It's such a bind. Only the most insanely competitive, unfulfilled people win, but only losers know how to savour victory. I don't know who's better off when the pleasure derived from success is so fleeting. It may be apocryphal, but the story goes that in sliding on his knees towards the corner flag in celebration of his winning goal in the third minute of extra time in the 1999 Champions League final, the Manchester United striker Ole Gunnar Solskjaer tore his knee ligaments; the first in a catastrophic series of injuries that led to his eventual and premature retirement from the professional game. His tenure at the summit, his moment, lasted from the moment the ball crossed the line to the moment he dropped to his knees in celebration - all of two seconds. If ecstasy lasted forever, it would stop being ecstatic.
Recently, at the end of my annual month-long fling with tennis, I played a game - my third in three years. On the adjoining court, a stocky Australian man in his forties with towelling headband, luminous racket and bulging calf muscles was taking a pasting from an incredibly graceful Indian boy of about 15. Each of these players was gifted - the Australian obliterating returns into the corners with barely legal violence; the Indian kid gracefully stroking them back. With each lost point, the Australian would scream to himself and the Indian kid would bounce a ball and wait for the squall to pass.
In imitation of the guys on TV, I danced on my toes in front of the net and spun a racquet between my hands. It had been 40 minutes since we strolled onto the court and popped our tube of balls, and I had yet to break a sweat.
Either the serve hit the net or the return hit the net, or the serve was unreturned, or the return was unreturned. The howls of anguish from the Australian contrasted sharply with the polite compliments and "after you's" on our court. Every so often, I would get to scoop the ball out of the net and roll it back to the server, and I was doing this well, but it was not ecstasy.
As another epic point was prepared on court number two, on our court I stood at the net waiting for the pleasing thunk of strings against ball behind me. It came and I took a baby step to my right, anticipating my response - perhaps a devastating drop-shot in which the racquet would turn like a key in the lock.
I felt a sharp sting on the base of my neck, and the three other people on the court howled with laughter as the ball cannoned off my neck, departed our court and sailed clear of the 20ft fence separating us from the Australian. He was preparing to vaporise an uncharacteristically weak second serve from the Indian when our ball bounced comically in front of him. As he swung, our ball caught his eye and he missed the serve entirely. Howling primally, he sprinted across to where our ball lay, grabbed it and smashed it a few hundred yards into the air.
"Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser," Jack Nicklaus famously remarked, but he clearly never saw a winner on a life-long losing streak.