In his “This Week” sidebar on the Contents page of the June 26 number of The Times Literary Supplement, editor Sir Peter Stothard introduces a review by his predecessor on the paper of a biography of a long-ago English Wimbledon champ:
As TV viewers succumb to “mania” for our latest prospect (or are constantly told that they are succumbing), Ferdinand Mount looks back at our last male winner, Fred Perry, seventy years ago. Perry jeered at umpires, put a “gorgeous model” courtside to distract his opponents, and puffed at his pipe between sets. But at least he won.
My own recollection of an English sportsman thrown off his pitch by peripheral eye candy skirting, as it were, his arena, is less worthy of the Athenæum, perhaps, though no less canonic among us groundlings:
The proverbial high dudgeon among the YouTube commenters is of realms of gold of which not even Keats could dream:
That sucks. that guy was winning big time. It wasn’t right for that other guy’s girlfriend to distract his opponent like that. That guy should have protested. I hope that cheater got fined!
Your protest wouldn’t get anywhere until you explain away the crooked cue stick, the jangling jewelry, the chalking noise, and the snuff sneeze. They were both cheating.
You think the wife/girlfriend was from Argentina?
Steve