Playing the Moldovans At Tennis

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Authors: Tony Hawks

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PLAYING THE
MOLDOVANS
AT TENNIS

PLAYING THE
MOLDOVANS
AT TENNIS

TONY HAWKS

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ISBN 9781407025582

Version 1.0

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First published in 2000

This edition published in 2007 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing

A Random House Group Company

Copyright © Tony Hawks 2000, 2007

Tony Hawks has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British library

ISBN: 9781407025582

Version 1.0

Inside photographs by Tony Hawks and Tim Goffe

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To Grigore, Dina, Adrian and Elena

Prologue

'You know, your problem is that you're in denial.'

'No I'm not.'

'I rest my case.'

I wish it was always that easy to prove you're right. Sometimes it requires going to enormous lengths.

1
Moldova Beethoven

I'd always played a fair amount of tennis. My father had become fanatical about the game after taking it up at the age of 45. It brought him a great deal of enjoyment over the years, an enjoyment which was only tempered by the fact that other people could play the game much better than him. Millions of people, in fact, and that was just in Sussex. However, like all proud fathers, he decided that what he couldn't achieve himself, he would instruct his children to do on his behalf. And so it was that Ron Burston, a part-time coach at the public courts in Dyke Road Park, Brighton, was entrusted with the task of coaching me and my brother to be the number one and the number two tennis players in the world (with Dad as manager).

Sadly it was beyond the capabilities of all of us, except Dad of course, who clearly had the ability needed to travel the globe, stay in nice hotels, and watch tennis matches from the side of the court. By the time I reached my 35th birthday my father was finally forced to acknowledge that unless the madman who had stabbed Monica Seles was released from prison and ordered to stab every player on the current men's circuit, then the dream was over. He'd simply have to be content with my achievements to date – a runner-up medal in the Sussex Closed Boy's Under 12 event (I'd been robbed – honestly, some of those line calls), and a medal for winning the British Actors' Equity tennis championship. (Most of the entrants hadn't been any good, and hadn't even acted like they were.)

Nevertheless I reckoned I still played a pretty good game, so that's why Arthur's attitude infuriated me so much.

'I don't reckon you're that good at tennis, Hawks,' he said, not lifting his eyes from the footballers on the TV screen, 'Not any more anyway. You've got to be past it.'

Arthur and I were good enough, and old enough friends to indulge in petty squabbling. We'd met as comedians on London's alternative cabaret circuit and had preserved more than a modicum of the competitive spirit which that world had nurtured. It was manifesting itself right here, before the television.

'Look Arthur,' I replied, relieved to see that a Moldovan player had sliced a shooting chance out for a throw-in, 'I reckon I'm still a pretty capable player – mainly because when I was young I got a good grounding in the basics.'

Quite why the conversation had turned to tennis I cannot remember; perhaps it was because the football was less than captivating now that England were 3-0 up, with the Moldovan team looking unable to trouble our goalkeeper or revive their chances of World Cup qualification.

That's bollocks,' declared Arthur, pithily.

I'd had quarrels like this with him before. I would put forward a reasonable argument, only to find it countered with abrupt obscenity. He did it to wind me up, I'm sure.

The thing about tennis,' I continued, a little foolishly, 'is that it doesn't matter how natural a sportsman or sportswoman you are, you still need a certain amount of tuition. You have to have a basic grasp of the techniques required for topspin or slice in order to control the ball.'

That's more bollocks,' argued Arthur. The natural sportsmen in this world can turn their hand to any sport. Take Ian Botham – he played professional football for Scunthorpe. Gary Lineker – brilliant snooker player, Tim Henman – four handicap golfer.' Then he pointed to the TV screen. Take those footballers playing now. A lot of them will be natural sportsmen and I bet that you couldn't beat them at tennis.'

'Of course I could, but that's a stupid bet because I'd never be able to prove it'

'Why not? Just play them.'

'What? All of them? Come off it. I'd never get to play them. For one thing, the English players are virtually royalty. They're constantly surrounded by an entourage of managers and agents. They're hardly going to respond to me ringing up and asking them for a game of tennis.'

'OK then, I bet you that you can't beat the Moldovan players. I shouldn't imagine any of them have got much of an entourage.'

'Arthur, I'm not betting you, but I honestly reckon that I could beat all of them.'

'Bollocks you would, Hawks, you're all talk.'

'Goal!'
we both shouted, as our petty squabble was interrupted by a fourth England goal.

Four nil to England. A satisfactory result, but to my mind not one that merited a celebratory drink in the pub. Arthur felt differently.

'Come on Hawks, come and have a pint, you lightweight!'

He could be quite persuasive at times.

'Alright, but just one, I've got an early start in the morning.'

Although to this day he denies it, I maintain that Arthur knew exactly what he was doing. He was fully aware that I was a sucker for these kind of things and that in May 1997 I had hitch-hiked around the circumference of Ireland with a fridge to win a one hundred pound bet. So, when the fourth pint was being lifted to my lips, he returned to his mischief.

'I don't reckon you'll take on that bet because the bottom line is that you're not good enough.'

'Well, I happen to think I am good enough.'

'Alright then – I give you this challenge. If you can get those eleven Moldovan footballers who just lost to England, and beat them at tennis, then I'll er . . ., stand in Balham High Road and sing the Moldovan national anthem. Stark bollock naked.'

'And you'd
do
that?'

'Yes. Except that I wouldn't have to, because you'd lose to one of them.'

'I wouldn't.'

'Course you would. One of them is bound to be very good.'

'Maybe. But I still wouldn't lose. I'd be able to draw on all my tournament experience from my junior days, and I'd find one weak shot in their armoury and play on it.'

'Yeah, yeah, don't bore me with all the technical crap. If you're so sure of yourself then why don't you agree to strip naked and sing the national anthem as well, if you lose?'

'Look, I know what's going on here, Arthur. You're just trying to trick me into a bet which will involve an enormous amount of effort on my part while you just sit on your arse. It's not fair.'

Nevertheless, half an hour later over a whisky back at Arthur's, I shook on that bet. I knew I'd been duped, but I didn't really mind. In my heart I knew I was ready to take on another silly adventure.

I didn't even know where Moldova was, but then I suppose that was part of the appeal. As I stood on the chair to take down the atlas from the top shelf I became excited. More excited than anyone had ever been before while in the act of looking up Moldova on a map. I had a strong feeling that this was
it.
Quite suddenly the void in my life, which had resulted from not being faced with a complex and yet ultimately pointless challenge, was to be filled.

I took down the weighty tome used to plan holidays and settle arguments, and leafed my way through to Eastern Europe.

'Ah, here it is,' I said. 'It's on the north-eastern border of Romania.'

'I still don't think you'll beat them all,' replied Arthur. 'Not every single one of them.'

'I
will.
I
will
beat them all.'

There's a scene in the film
Annie Hall
in which Woody Allen gets into an argument with a man standing in front of him in a cinema queue, over the interpretation of certain views expressed by Marshall McLuhan, the famous professor of media studies. Just when the dispute is beginning to get a little heated, McLuhan himself appears from nowhere to interrupt and confirm that Woody Allen is in the right. Woody then turns to the camera, shrugs, and laments:

'If only life was
really
like this.'

Unfortunately, in my case proving that I was right and Arthur was wrong was going to be a wholly more convoluted process. I knew nothing about Moldova, its tennis facilities, its political situation, its visa requirements, its currency, its language, its ethnic make-up or whether its people would take kindly to a decadent bourgeois Westerner swanning around waving a tennis racket in front of its footballers. All I knew about Moldova were the names of eleven men which were printed on the inside back page of my newspaper.

Romanenko
Fistican
Spynu
Testimitanu
Culibaba
Stroenco
Rebeja
Curtianu
Shishkin
Miterev
Rogaciov

'Huh, easy,' I thought.

None of them sounded to me like they were any good at tennis.

Next day in the local reference library, I discovered that Moldova was a small landlocked country wedged between Romania and the Ukraine. It had a population density of 129.1 per sq. km, which seemed acceptable enough provided that the 129 people spread themselves evenly around that kilometre, and I didn't have to spend too much time with the 0.1 of a person. More importantly I learnt that Moldova has two main languages – Romanian and Russian, and so I decided to invest in a copy of
Teach Yourself Romanian.
I felt that I would need a grounding in at least one of the native languages since Moldovans, I assumed, were probably a tad behind the Dutch when it came to a command of English. My reason for choosing Romanian ahead of Russian was not a sophisticated one. It was an easy choice to make – the Russians use the Cyrillic alphabet and Romanians use the proper one. I didn't mind the idea of having a pop at a new language, but a new alphabet? Well bojijiock to that! I'm sorry, but one reaches an age where learning an entirely new alphabet is really not on. (That age, incidentally, is six years old.)

Teach yourself Romanian
comes complete with the pleasing anomalies of all language books. In a section marked 'Cuvinte cheie' (Key words), the first word listed is 'Acrobat'. Now, I struggle with the notion that 'acrobat' is a key word. Surely those readers who are not seeking employment with Romanian travelling circuses might manage to get by without using that word at all. It's certainly a word I tend to use infrequently. In fact, I think there was a five-year period in my life when I didn't use it once, and they were happy and fulfilled years too, if I remember rightly. However, I was about to go to Eastern Europe and life there was surely going to be different, and who was I to say what was and what wasn't a
key word?

I resolved to learn the word 'acrobat' at once. The text before me revealed that this was not going to be a difficult task.

acrobat, acrobati (m) – acrobat

With this under my belt and with confidence very much in the ascendancy, I moved on to some 'Dialog' (dialogue). Two sentences caught my eye. First:

'Mai avefi timp să reparaţi şi liftul?'

meaning, 'Have you got time to repair the lift as well?' and

'Ai cărui vecin sunt aceşti câini?

'which means 'Which neighbour do these dogs belong to?'

I knew that only a fool would consider any foray into Moldovan territory without a degree of competence in asking both of these questions, so I set about learning them with all speed. By the end of my first hour I had mastered them both and felt comfortable in the knowledge that if I was bothered by any dogs as I stood outside a footballer's flat, it probably wouldn't take me long to ascertain which of his neighbours they belonged to, or to arrange for the neighbour in question to repair any faulty lifts forthwith.

Of course the one key expression that you really want in these books is never there – and that is the equivalent, in the relevant language, for:

'Look, just because I can manage one sentence in your language doesn't give you carte blanche to reply to me at that speed. Slow up or shut up. Got it pal?'

OK, it's a little harsh, but delivered in your totally crap accent it wouldn't be understood anyway.

Buoyed by my recent linguistic advances I was chomping at the bit to book my flight to Moldova and begin my quest. However, there was an immediate obstacle in front of me which needed removing. To travel to Moldova I would need a visa, and according to the
World Travel Guide,
to obtain this I would need to provide the Moldovan Embassy with an invitation from a Moldovan citizen, written on a special Interior Ministry form.

As far as I knew, Moldova hadn't produced a flood of immigrants into the United Kingdom. I certainly didn't know of any. Admittedly, for most British citizens this lack of Moldovans was not a major cause for concern, but for me it was a profound irritation. I needed a Moldovan more urgently than I had ever needed one before, and I simply did not know where to find one – other than in Moldova of course, but I couldn't go there because the bastards wouldn't let me in until one of them had invited me.

One potential solution to this problem involved a plan in which I would hang around outside the Moldovan Embassy with a view to falling into an easy and natural conversation with a departing member of staff. I would then invite this Eastern European civil servant for a drink, and secure the required invitation after the fourteenth vodka – just before we both embarked on gratuitous nudity and mutual expressions of undying love. The only drawback to this brilliant stratagem was that Moldova didn't have an embassy in London, the nearest one being in Brussels. Quite apart from the travel costs and hotel bills, my limited social Flemish would be unlikely to furnish me with the required charm, and my Romanian would founder once the subject veered from tumbling and gymnastics.

All I could do was occasionally mention the subject among friends and work colleagues.

'You don't happen to know anyone from Moldova by any chance, do you?' I ventured at dinner parties, sporting events and at my weekly meetings of Optimists Anonymous. Invariably I got a negative response.

That was until, incredibly, after some months of trying, this tactic finally paid off. I learned from a friend in Liverpool that she was pretty sure there was a guy from Moldova studying at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts. A phone call later and the college bursar had confirmed the good news for me.

'Yes, we have a Moldovan,' he said, untroubled by the oddness of my request, 'His name is Andrei, he's a nice guy.'

'Do you think he might be nice enough to invite me to Moldova if I came to see him?' I asked, rather forwardly.

'I don't see why not,' replied the bursar, still failing to recognise anything unusual in the conversation. 'Why don't you come and see his band?'

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