“Imagine the pressure,” I thought as the last game of the men’s final at Wimbledon wound toward its torturous conclusion. I was thinking of Andy Murray, of course, but I also had another famous London sports figure in mind. There, a few rows in front of me in the press tribune, was the trademark white ponytail and golden vest of Simon Barnes, chief sportswriter for the Times and noted poet of playing fields everywhere. While Murray would try to make history, Barnes would be, in most people’s eyes, the first to write it. Who knows, maybe Murray’s celebration in our direction was really just a pep talk to Sir Simon.
So how did he do? Were the mythic battlefields of yesteryear properly invoked? Did Murray take his place next to Lancelot at the Round Table? Did anyone bestride anything "like a colossus"? Personally, I think Barnes was a little too understated and low key with his opening:
“Arise, Sir Andrew, knight of the Holy Grail. Impossibly, dreamily, unbelievably and yet somehow almost easily, somehow almost inevitably, Andy Murray won the Men’s Singles final at Wimbledon yesterday.”
Yeah, I guess all of that is true, and the Holy Grail is kind of a big deal. But I would have chucked “miraculously, gloriously,” and maybe even “uproariously” into that sentence for good measure. I mean, at moments like this, the editorial rule of thumb is that the sky’s the limit as far as how many “ly” words you can use in a row.
Naturally, unsurprisingly, perhaps inevitably, Barnes the Brit is at his best when he describes the gut-twisting fear that Murray’s final game engendered across the land:
“He held three championship points. Did he wonder again, how awful it would be to lose from there? He was pulled back to deuce, saved three break points, and it degenerated into one of those anguished tests of character that send the nation back to that place behind the sofa, cowering from the television until it’s safe to come out. At one stage Murray turned and I caught an expression so anguished that it was as if some real and dreadful horror were being perpetrated before us.
But no, it was tennis, only sweet mad, impossible tennis.”
Barnes believes that the face Murray made when he looked toward us in the press box was “something heavenly, transcendent, unconfined; this was beyond all earthly concepts of joy.”
There was joy, but as I wrote yesterday, I also caught a tinge of madness in Muzza’s eyes. Click here for a rare close-up photo of the moment, snapped by a fan. See if you don’t agree with me.
