Bakke case ruling

A couple of months ago I was taking a plane from a town in Vermont to New York and way ahead of me at the ticket counter was a tall, stringy young man. I mean he was lean, but he also had long, stringy hair which was not, as they say, 'styled.' It looked as if he’d been out in the rain.

He was bunched over the counter talking to the agent and his right arm ballooned out from his side like Quasimodo’s – this was not a natural affliction, it was simply that he was cradling tennis rackets. Six tennis rackets. 

When it came my turn, I said to the agent, 'Looks like he plays a lot of tennis!' And the agent said, 'You bet! So would you if you were Borg'. And, indeed, that's who it was. In that little airport, the agent's firm pronunciation of Borg hypnotised the waiting line of passengers as surely as if the man had recognised, two years ago, say, Bing. There was only one Bing and for the next two weeks, there will be only one Borg, win or lose, though for all I know, the name may be as common in Sweden as Smith or Jones in England. Come to think of it, there was a time when on any golf course in the world, the cry of 'Jones is up!' would send a thousand people scurrying for the first tee. 

Well, I was gobbling up the previews and predictions about Wimbledon when the word came in that the Supreme Court had handed down a ruling in the Bakke case. That's the case of the white graduate medical student who went to court to maintain that he'd been passed over for a medical post and the preference given to a black medical student who was not so well qualified. In other words, Mr Bakke claimed redress on the grounds that he was a victim of reverse discrimination, that he'd been discriminated against on grounds which the constitution forbids – of race. It's the first case to go all the way to the Supreme Court of a white protesting against his racial discrimination. Obviously, whichever way it went, it would be a landmark decision. 

Well, the court came through last Wednesday and upheld him. It’s likely to revolutionise the tactics of whites sitting in open competition with blacks, in more fields than medicine, and it could cause ructions among the black educators who have maintained that because of the time lag, the three centuries of unequal opportunity through which the blacks have suffered, blacks and whites cannot walk into an examination room or an interviewing board and be fairly judged as equal competitors. The decision is new. It has startled the country and we shall have to wait for its repercussions. But there's no question that it could be as historic and controversial a ruling as the court's 1954 decision which abolished racial discrimination in schools, restaurants, theatres and all the rest. 

In the meantime, and allowing that the world is full of grave and dreadful events, I hope nobody will think me frivolous if I revert to Wimbledon. When I was a small boy, I seized the paper every morning to feed on the exploits of Jack Hobbs and our own local hero, Cecil Parkin, a snapdragon comic who could make any cricket field funny, which is a feat in itself. And then I'd turn to the hawk-like pictures of Suzanne Lenglen who came annually from France to massacre most other women tennis players. At that time, I learned very much later, Germany was staggering under a whirlwind of inflation, there was starvation in Armenia, but even the most responsibly sociable person didn't think of cancelling Wimbledon or the Test matches. And it's a cruel fact of life that the best way to handle the cruel facts of life has never been to thrash over them through every waking hour. 

Churchill, on the eve of the threatened first invasion since William the Conqueror, got a sound night's sleep, woke up, zipped up his siren suit and said, 'Where are the Narzies?' And Harry Truman gave his mind and heart to the conflict between dropping the bomb and shortening the war, and not dropping the bomb and running the risk of a half million American casualties in an invasion of the Japanese islands. He made his decision and went to sleep. 

It seems to me that the great usefulness, the blessing, if you like, of games is that they provide a safety valve for the mass of people who might otherwise brood over their troubles and blow up in other ways, though it may be a sign of very tense times that, increasingly, both players and spectators, in soccer more than anything, use the game to blow up the safety valve itself with violence. And if this goes on, in other games, too, then organised sport will have lost its reason for being and the time is surely overdue when the people who run the games – the chairmen and referees and umpires and such – should begin to stiffen the penalties against outrageous behaviour. 

An early taste of Nastase gave a sort of fillip to a game which at one time did seem to suffer from an almost ladylike gentility. But that time is long gone. Unless it's understood by players and spectators alike that the rules, and the courtesies, of a game are what give it its best form of suspense, then the money-grubbing managers and the millionaire exhibitionists will simply take over. And we shall have in our countries the sort of grim, Roman orgy which a famous American sports writer, Herbert Warren Wind, deplored a few years ago when a Davis Cup Challenge round was held in Bucharest between Romania and the United States. 

The spectators, to a man and woman, had been trained not only to cheer every stroke of the Romanians but to hiss and boo every good stroke of the Americans. 'There was no pretence,' he wrote, 'of a sporting contest. It was them against us. A form of mass psyching-out deliberately exercised as a distorted form of patriotism.' He got the impression that there was not a Romanian present who dared to applaud an American shot. And the overseas reporters who were present soon discovered, too, that it was better for their physical safety to sit on their hands. Herbert Wind said sadly, at the end, that he had never seen a more obscene spectacle in 30 years of covering sport. No wonder he beat it back to his next golf tournament, a sport in which, still, a thrown club can invoke a penalty and a warning. 

I suppose this weekend and next there will be millions of people within the sound of my voice, people in Australasia and India and the Caribbean and wherever, who are mooning over the impossible dream of getting to Wimbledon. The dream has, by now, become a legend. The other day, the London correspondent of the New York Times wrote a lyrical report about the leafy month of June in England and gave it the fetching title of 'Ascot, Wimbledon, Henley, Strawberries, June.' He talked in ecstasy about the sudden intense greenness of the grass, the psychedelic intensity of the rhododendrons, the sheer size of the roses of late June, the blue of the sky and the length of the days and the lingering golden twilight. And this, of course, is enough to feed the illusions of all the people three, six, eight thousand miles away, like me, who won't be there. 

Luckily, as an antidote, let me quote – at, I trust ,legal length – a bit from a piece written on the spot by an Englishman, Frank Keating, who has been there and seen it and is able to introduce a touch of realism into everybody's dream of the Centre Court. 

'Wimbledon', he writes, 'is midsummer madness gone mad. It's hard to get there in the first place, it is a too- far walk from the tube station, so are the car parks, the taxis are a rip-off, so are the vaunted strawberry teas, the commissionaires growl, it's either too hot or too cold, the concourse crush is unbearable, so is the stench of feet when it rains and of armpits when it doesn’t. Anyway, even when you've crocodiled the queues, you can't hope to see much once you're in. Less than a third of us have a guaranteed seat and of the other 20,000 blobs of milling millinery around the outside courts, it's a fair bet they will see nothing over the hats in front. Nothing but the occasional swish of a racket by a very tall server. But, to anybody at Wimbledon, it is simply enough just to be there and I'm afraid to say that I agree with them a hundredfold.' 

I must say that this not only cools my feverish desire to be there, but makes me bless the name of the man who invented television which, as every Briton knows, was J. L. Baird. As every German knows was Paul Gottlieb Nipkow. As every American knows, was Charles Francis Jenkins. As every Swede knows was Jöns Jakob Berszelius. And, as every Russian knows was nobody but Andrei Gromyko, I guess. 

If the... if the conditions of watching sports in the flesh go from bad to worse and we get soccer played on fields enclosed in wire netting and 20 foot walls of cement (and it's been suggested), then it seems to me the sponsors' revenue will come entirely from closed-circuit television and the man to bless here is the German, nobody else, who invented the Zoomar lens. This has transformed the watching of all sports and made the televiewer the most privileged of all spectators and I think a more accurate judge of what's going on than anybody there in the flesh. 

The Zoomar lens is what makes it possible to see a right wing footballer at a distance of 200 yards and then to zoom in and see one foot dribbling the ball. Or to see in long shot the exact stance of Jack Nicklaus as he sets up for a pit shot and then a close-up of his club face. And then the ball soaring through the air and on to the green and then the anxious midget of Nicklaus growing into his whole face as he registers the appropriate emotion of triumph, anxiety or disgust. 

Excuse me now! I must pluck my own fat, Long Island strawberries, deposit a dollop of ice cream, lie back in an air-conditioned room and watch the twitching mouths and nostrils of Jimmy and Chris and the rest. And the week after, I shall be in the same place, but I'll also be at St Andrews. To the poor, benighted fans who paid to get in and stumble through the heat or cold and crane their necks to get a glimpse of the ball, rots of ruck!

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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