Kevin Curren and Flushing Meadows - 30 August 1985

He looks like an intellectual trying to look like a San Francisco hippy of the late 1960s sixties and not making it.

He slouches. His hair is a tousled Robin Hood effort that also doesn’t succeed. He has a thoughtful, musing look which doesn’t go with his thighs, which are of the dimensions of Apollo’s. His thighs let him down on Wednesday but he finally gave vent to those thoughts and that musing.

“I hate New York,” he said, “the environment. In Flushing Meadow there’s noise, the people in the grandstand are never seated and it takes an hour and a half in traffic to get here. It’s sickening that with all the money they get from TV they don’t build a better facility. The United States Tennis Association should be shot and they should drop an A bomb on the place.”

These are the words of Kevin Curren, the native South African and now an American citizen who will not look back on 1985 as his finest year in his chosen profession of tournament tennis. Less than two months ago he loped on to the centre court at Wimbledon as the obvious, the experienced, favourite against the chunky teenager from Germany, Boris the Becker. He left that encounter deeply dazed to wind up the Becker’s first star victim.

On Wednesday he played in the first round of the United States Open tennis championship and this time we knew that against a promising but fairly obscure young Frenchman, Guy Forget, Curren would unloose the thunderbolts that so recently and so astonishingly disposed of Connors and McEnroe. But on Wednesday only eight of the terrible Curren thunderbolts seemed to be available, whereas the young Frenchman had the gall to release 16 of them. The result was a fairly easy win in 90 minutes and Mr Curren was slouching off home, which is in Dallas these days.

His views on New York and its tournament centre are, of course, being called an outburst, but there was nothing explosive about them. They were spoken quietly, thoughtfully like the confessional of a man who was at last glad to get something off his mind and I’m glad to say that there were sports writers who applauded him.

One of the best, Peter Alfano of the New York Times, wrote “It would be easy to dismiss Curren as tennis’s grey cloud but there’s something refreshing about his honesty, even if he doesn’t always say things we like to hear. There are too many people in public life who smile only for the cameras. Curren doesn’t even smile for them and considering his views on New York and the Flushing Meadow tennis centre we shouldn’t be surprised.”

New York, of course, is too vast a place to generalise about. Like all metropolises it’s a huge collection of small towns bunched together to give the residents the agreeable feeling that they are much more sophisticated than the residents of small towns that are separated by a stretch of countryside. But the relatively new home of American championship tennis is surely a fair target for anyone, even non-tennis players. Who could picture in their mind’s eye the sort of stadium that would be an improvement on the ivy-clad charm, but also, eventually, the cramped and inadequate charm of Forest Hills.

So what, at great expense, did they build instead? First they chose a site on Flushing Meadows. Flushing Meadows? Isn’t that the site of La Guardia Airport? It is, and no one has ever explained who decided to give the contract to somebody who thought that the tarmac of La Guardia Airport was just the place on which to play United States tennis championships. Someone with the authority of success, I’m not sure it wasn’t Martina Navratilova, jokingly advised a young newcomer to plug your ears with cotton wool and go to it. The planes, about one every 25 seconds, take off and, fortunately, always miss the flagpole and the scoreboard of the stadium.

There are, of course, planes coming in all the time and between the income and outgo they cause a fearful racket. If the Flushing tennis centre had been there for years and years the city fathers would have been hounded and bullied long ago to set up a new centre somewhere in the surrounding country and I may say that one of the pleasures of New York city is that you have only to go over to the west side of Manhattan and drive north beyond the George Washington Bridge and you are at once in quite deep, rolling wooded country. But no, to plant a tennis stadium right in the glide path of hundreds and hundreds of planes is sort of exciting, isn’t it?

I’m sure that Mayor Ed Koch, the most inveterate, incurable New Yorker extant, looks benignly at the TV sound and light spectacle of the centre court and the banked crowds and the thundering planes and sighs “I love New York”. The architectural masterpiece of Flushing Meadows is, however, a great rectangular grid like one wall of a skyscraper that houses the bank of lights which go on when the sun is declining.

They could have erected it in the north or the south or the east. They put it up on the west side of the stadium, so that the summer sun would drop slowly behind it and throw a deep, ever-slanting shadow across part of the centre court, so that the player up that end enjoys not only the excitement of not hearing the ball but of not seeing it.

I believe that if this stadium had been built anywhere else on earth it would have been so raucously condemned and ridiculed by the American invaders that I’m pretty sure sooner or later they would have boycotted it.

Ivan Lendl, the present number two seeded men’s player, or number one according to whose computer you’re reading, made himself instantly unpopular with the New York tennis crowds by when he first came here pointing to this bright, giant, waffle structure and saying, “This must be what they mean by American know-how."

Lendl too is not the most popular tennis star in this city. He’s a poet, for one thing. He has a wry, sarcastic sense of humour. He looks thoughtful and forlorn. Curren looks thoughtful and broody. I don’t know how their managers feel about their airing of their sentiments but I’m all for the Currens and the Lendls if only because they are so scarce among the big blond clones, male and female, who dazzle their teeth when they win and sulk when they don’t, but don’t ever dare to point out the elephantine failure of the Flushing Meadows centre, saving their temper only for their opponents or the umpires.

Which brings us, briefly I’m happy to say, to the cocky jumping jack of Jimmy Jimbo Connors, who loves New York and whose crowds love him, so that in his first round he could tell the umpire to get lost, to take up another profession, in a bout of plainly manufactured indignation which, if performed this year at Wimbledon might have threatened his survival into the second round.

Well, Curren also breaks the mould of the bland, beautiful athlete with no improper opinions outside his game by talking in his worried, thoughtful way about his native land. There was a time only a few years ago when South Africa’s best golfer Gary Player received death threats through the mail and when at one or more tournaments he was paced not only by his caddy – a black man by the way – but by a bodyguard. Well Curren, and also Johan Kriek, have become American citizens, we don’t know whether from conviction or expediency. Since they make their living at tennis they are certainly not to be blamed if they foreswear the citizenship of a country that has become an outcast in international sports.

Most other South Africans in the game keep their mouths shut about their native land, but not Curren. He said the other day after his defeat, “I don’t agree with the system and I believe apartheid should be abolished. It’s a shame when people are denied their rights but I’m not for a one-man one-vote system yet either. You look at other countries in Africa – Zimbabwe, Angola, that were granted this and they have a coup and get a dictator.”

Having said that, he made it clear that he’s not off on any crusade. He does not think that athletes should use their status as celebrities for political ends. “We are not,” he said “legitimate spokesmen”.

But we’ve been hearing plenty this week from legitimate spokesmen, from Prime Minister Botha, from Bishop Tutu, from the daughter of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela about that tragic country’s gathering storm, the worst turn in the weather this week being the refusal by dozens of international banks to renew loans to the country’s borrowers.

All this and the decision to impose sanctions, how severe, how limited, will come up before Congress once it assembles again in September. The New York Times on Thursday had 11 separate dispatches in 26 columns from or about South Africa.

However not all Americans see the New York Times, but most see one of the four networked nightly news programmes and the visual onslaught of images of violence and protest is unceasing. It is, I think, a powerful hint that the mere exposure on television of the more lurid face of a great nation’s policies today will be enough on its own to force change.

This week is theoretically the last week of summer, a theory Americans took from the founding country Britain, even though most of this country will be sweltering or balmy for another two months yet. This week is known to shopkeepers as the dead week, to restaurant owners as the empty week, before on Tuesday the whole human hive starts buzzing again after this slack lazy interval, as usually typified by some folksy, rural image of America in its last week of summer play – shots of crab fests, clambakes, midnight picnics on the shore and so on.

There was one caught my eye this weekend that is at once bizarre and startlingly typical of our time. It was of Captain John Testrake, the pilot of the TWA 727 that was hijacked to Beirut. Testrake spent 17 days on the jet liner and his behaviour was impeccable.

This week he was shown grinning in his plane, which showed bullet holes and Arab scrawls. Along with him in the cockpit were two little tow-headed boys, his grandsons, looking things over. “Isn’t it great”, said Captain Testrake, “to see that baby on the ground in Kansas City?”

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