This note in my diary reminds me of one of the occasions when Abe nevertheless invited me back to play doubles with him and his pals. Not on that wintery-looking grass court, of course, but indoors on the carpet.
I don’t recall what happened tennis-wise – I suspect that I partnered the best of the four and that we had a decent game on the back of that.
I remember what happened afterwards more clearly. Abe was keen to see the progress (or lack thereof) in my Clanricarde Gardens flat, which had been a conversation piece over drinks. I think we also agreed all to dine at The Park Inn, my favourite Chinese restaurant, on Wellington Terrace just a few strides from the flat. So all four of us bundled over to my part of Kensington as it were, to see the flat.
It was very much still work in progress. I remember one of the guys questioning whether it would all be done before Christmas if, as I had described, Gavin was unable to retain a member of staff even for half a day so was effectively working alone on the job.
I also remember one of the guys (perhaps the same one) suggesting that the smell of solvents inside the flat was so great that it was making his eyes stream after five minutes and was surely so strong that anyone working in there for several hours would be “high as a kite” for much of the day.
Valid points, I sense.
Eventually it was all done and lovely…much to the relief of all of the then residents.
I don’t much recall the meal either. But at The Park Inn it will have been good.
I was reminded of this incident in June/July 2019 while Lord’s is too busy with the cricket world cup to allow us to play real tennis there, so several of us are playing in exile at Queen’s.
The recovered memory arises because these 2019 visits, like the 1999 one, are occuring just after the ATP tournament has finished at Queen’s, making the place a bit of a maze/building site. This is not a complaint, btw – I think it is very generous of Queen’s to let us real tennis addicts play there at such a disrupted time.
My 1999 visit at the same time of year was an invitation for an after-work game of tennis by my friend/client Abe Koukou, who was a member of The Queen’s Club and who knew that Janie and I play modern (lawn) tennis regularly.
I told Abe, truthfully, that I had never played at Queen’s before and that I was delighted to be invited.
Which was true.
What I omitted to tell Abe, because it seemed irrelevant at the time, was that I did know The Queen’s Club rather well, having done some advisory work for the Club back in the early 1990s. At that time, I was still laid up with my multiply-prolapsed spine and had been unable to play. Indeed had that not been the case, I might have got addicted to real tennis back then. I do remember Howard Angus showing it to me when there was a major tournament on, being fascinated by it and feeling regretful that I was not fit enough to give real tennis a try back then.
Some 27 years after my first look at real tennis at Queen’s…
…but I digress.
Point is, although Abe was hosting my first go at playing tennis at Queen’s in June 1999, I knew the place pretty well.
On our arrival, Abe was discombobulated by the cordons and the fact that his usual route to the changing rooms was blocked off. But I knew multiple ways around the complex.
That’s OK, we can get there this way instead
..said I, going into automatic and taking the route past the squash and real tennis courts.
I thought you’d never played here before?
…said Abe, quizzically.
I explained.
After our tennis match, my first experience of playing on carpet as a surface as well as my first experience of playing at Queen’s, we retired to the bar.
There, by the bar, was Jonathan Edwardes, then the Club Secretary (a role now called the Chief Executive Officer).
Hello Ian, how lovely to see you here. So sorry I wasn’t able to accept Michael’s invitation onto that sailing barge of his. I’d have so enjoyed that…
At this juncture, Abe’s eyes widened a little, so I introduced Abe to Jonathan.
It then dawned on me that I had inadvertently, but comprehensively, deployed a version of gamesmanship, known as guestmanship.
The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship, or the Art of Winning Games without Actually Cheating by Stephen Potter
I have long been a fan of Stephen Potter’s books and especially like the Gamesmanship one.
In the Guestmanship section, Potter explains that the host at a sports club is at an advantage…
He is playing on his home ground. He knows the ropes…there are plenty of opportunities for making his guest feel out of it…
…so the seasoned gamesman finds ways to reverse the advantage, by mugging up on the host’s club. The prepared gamesman ensures that the host:
would wonder whether he was a host in any valid sense…indeed he would begin to wonder whether he really was a member of his own club.
Potter then gives some examples of what the gamesman might do to deploy guestmanship masterfully…
…but I must say that none of Potter’s examples seem to me quite as masterful as my guestmanship at Queen’s that day in 1999. Indeed, I believe that my application of the art of guestmanship one-upped Stephen Potter’s original example. Having one-upped the one-upmanship chap, even inadvertently, is quite a thing.
So did my guestmanship result in Abe succumbing to my dark arts of tennis? Did it heck. Abe thrashed me in the first set (which reminds me, I need to go out to get some bagels). I did a little better in the second set.
And did the combination of my guestmanship and my comparatively limited skills at tennis make this the first and very last time I ever played at Queen’s with Abe? Of course it didn’t. Abe is such a genial, friendly and good-humoured fellow, he simply found the whole incident very funny. My subsequent visits as Abe’s guest were mostly with two other players making up a doubles that would be well matched. In real life, give me good sports (like Abe) over gamesmen any day.
But the book Gamesmanship, though over 70 years old now, is still a hoot; I do commend it.
