Getting Away From It All - 24 January 2003

I've often wondered at but rarely questioned fellow journalists as to what they do for a break from the daily grind.

I myself have one rule which is never to talk shop in the evenings.

Shop, for me, being American government and politics. For the past year or more it's been the history of Afghanistan, Iraq, Saddam and more lately still the history of al-Qaeda.

Need I say that over the Scottish twilight I'd rather not bring it all up.

I have in mind a colleague who for the past, I should guess, five, six years has spent his days and nights in the jungle of Middle Eastern politics, which must be rather like having to write a daily piece from the Tower of Babel.

Several times a week, through these tumultuous and murderous years his datelines alone produce a shudder - Tel Aviv, Baghdad, Kabul, the West Bank, Bethlehem - you have to acquire the cold blood of a surgeon to write every day about such things.

One day the man confessed that he too had a rule to keep him sane.

Once a month when he's home in Washington he takes a whole day off and plays golf.

If he can only manage once a month his golf must not be, shall we say, down to scratch.

But I know what he means. When I think back to times of fret and anxiety how impossible it is to stay upset when the cypresses are swaying slightly and you face a choice between a knock-down five iron or a hooded three.

However, just over two years ago, on my 92nd birthday, I found I could stay on my feet and produce a fairly smooth swing only if I had an ambulance standing by.

So as it must to all golfers the day came when, as a fine old amateur golfer and friend of mine just wrote to me: "My game has gone south and left no forwarding address!"

With the actual physical getaway no longer possible, what to do?

For the past three weeks I had spent my days mentally jogging back and forth between the Security Council and President Bush, between Mr Blix and President Bush, between Secretary Powell and Baghdad's senior scientist - "There is absolutely no truth in the rumour that we ever used poisoned gas on the Kurds."

I hope you'll agree that I and you deserve a rest from such preoccupations.

But what to do when the actual physical release is no longer possible?

Go to the image, to the box, the tube, which last week beautifully revealed a choice at a flick of the wrist: either the lush tropical landscape and the blue green sea of Hawaii or the favourite tennis centre of all the professionals - the leafy, spacious grounds in Melbourne, which contain a centre court with a retractable roof that can be pulled over in dire heat or rain.

By the way I hear a secret rumour that Wimbledon - after, what is it, 120, 30 years of meditation - might consider the bold idea of copying the Australians and having a moveable roof over its centre court, surely a brilliant response to the interminable on- and off-again rain breaks at the height of an English summer.

So in great relief from the dark age of the past month - there's been no television tennis or golf - a new season is on us and the first of the tennis grand slams arrived: as usual, the Australian Open, which, over the continuous protest of many players, is always played at the height of the Australian summer, which is a very different experience from the English summer.

Last year's women's final, I'm sure, will remain a painful memory to all who saw it.

Martina Hingis, three points away from winning the match, was also about 20 seconds away from a serious collapse in a court temperature of 105.

Instead of crumbling she lost the points and the match.

So the hope keeps rising and dying down that one day soon the Aussies will take the big decision and re-plan their Open for some time in their spring or autumn.

And one day perhaps the All England Lawn Tennis Club will produce a Napoleon or a Churchill who will ram through the bold idea of a retractable roof.

But before that there are many players from Spain, Central and South America especially, who will never cease urging an even bolder reform at Wimbledon.

For a couple of decades at least the Latinos have been urging, "Join the rest of the world and give up grass."

Well apart from these perennial topics, problems, the tennis story at the beginning of a new season is, as usual, the continuing dominance of the Williams sisters. The mounting stature of Serena.

But the prospect, the possibility, of not their early toppling but eventual succession by the two young Belgian terriers, Clijsters and Henin.

As I speak, days before the women's final, it looks very much as if it'll be the sisters again with Serena again serenely the champ.

The saddest story to come out of Australia, or perhaps I mean Switzerland, is that Martina Hingis, the youngest number one in history when she was 16, is not only giving that injured ankle an indefinite rest but is thinking to quit the game at the ripe age of 21.

Whether she does now or not the decision is bound to come sooner than later.

I think the arrival on the scene of the power game, of Lindsey Davenport and then of the sisters, heralded the early dethronement of Hingis with her touch and subtlety and easy serve and volleying.

And the bellicose arrival of even more power on the male side, even more positively turned tennis into a game of baseline thumping at 120 miles an hour.

This is due, as Rod Laver is the first to testify, to the radical change - improvement if you like - in the equipment, especially of the racket.

It seems incredible now to believe that as late as Bjorn Borg they played with wooden rackets.

But the other deciding factor is that the life, the daily routine, of the top players - or those who want to be among the top - has been drastically amended towards the notion of a tennis player as an athlete who must, to acquire any standing, devote 24 hours a day to the rigours and discipline of a boxer training for the world championship.

Early rising, a four-mile jog, breakfast, work with heavy weights and stretching exercises, two or three hours tennis practice, lunch, more exercises, tennis, some of them into the twilight, showers, possibly a session with the sports psychologist that many of them travel with, early bed, repeat.

I see that the balding Las Vegas victor, Agassi - a marvellous survivor, in his early 30s, number two in the world - who, after four or five years of strenuous what we used to call "physical jerks" is probably the fittest man on the planet.

The old champs shake their heads, as the old do over anything that invites comparison with them when young.

But they can sheepishly admit that if in their day the unbelievable money had been there they too might have consented to jog and sweat and lift weights all day long.

But to us the onlookers it means, I'm afraid, that pretty soon the old, graceful, cunning game will have gone forever.

Neither Martina Hingis nor Tim Henman are going to put on a needed extra 10 pounds of muscle and perhaps they'd prefer to play some tennis and otherwise lead a human life.

That is what is being lost to professional athletes around the world and nowhere more than in the United States.

When you hear the impressive statistics about the enormous number of young Americans who go to college here, compared with the young of any other continent ,it's worth a moment's look into the greatly rising numbers of young people who are spotted in high school by college athletic agents and given football or basketball scholarships.

There are well-known universities in the Middle West that are famous for their football alone, where the chancellor or president earns, say, $175,000 a year and the football coach two million.

It has been recalled that just 70 years ago the young, 30-year-old president of Chicago University, Robert Maynard Hutchins, caused a national sensation when he announced that there was to be no more football at Chicago. Chicago University was to exist as an institution of higher learning.

There were loud cries for his impeachment. There were smaller, but more enthusiastic cries, for him to run for president.

Well in time the hullabaloo died down.

Today, 70 years later, it has been remarked Chicago is one of the half dozen great American universities, with international standing in nuclear physics and in linguistics. It is the world leader in the history of the languages of that troubled region, the Middle East.

Perhaps they could help.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING 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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