Gordon Forbes Plays his Best Hand

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

– Ray Bradbury

 

DIANE DE BEER

 

I’ll take the Sunny Side by Gordon Forbes (Bookstorm):

 

I’m a tennis fanatic so I loved his first memoir A Handful of Summers, but that was some time ago and as I started this one and set off with a bunch of ageing guys having lunch and the discussions emanating from that, I wasn’t sure I was up for it.

Sorry guys, but many of us, not part of that demographic don’t feel the need to be privy to your conversations. They’ve been too dominant for most of our lives and we need and have found more diversity elsewhere.

But then he turned his pen to the place that interests me – again – and I was hooked. As one of his lunch companions wisely points out, this is his expertise. After all, how many of us have played tennis on his level. He still mixes and watches the best and has much to say about everyone.

Also, Forbes knows how to spin a yarn and doesn’t seem to have a mean bone in his body, hence the title. So while he tittle tattles a touch, there’s no malice and for those of us interested in the great game, he has more than enough knowledge to impart. Of course, he is nostalgic about the old ways and condemns the impact that a world with social media has had on the game, but he does speak his mind on all kinds of things relating to tennis and for those of us who were already glued to our screens from the Hopman Cup and the Brisbane Open with the Australian Open almost in full flow, this is heaven.

Who doesn’t want to know what somebody with Forbes’s expertise thinks about the game today? In his time, it was a gentleman’s sport and they weren’t purely driven by the money. Just watching Federer raise record crowds simply by being in Australia, tells you in which way the game has evolved. Even the Australian pairing at the Hopman Cup couldn’t do the same with their own people. They wanted to see The Fed, that’s it.

But Forbes is also someone who has a led a life which gives him a specific perspective. He has fun with his chums around a table in a Joburg club, one of those that started without allowing women but had to change with the times.

It is though his tennis participation – still-  in a world that those of us who follow can never learn enough especially from an insider and that Gordon Forbes is. He and his partner Abe Segal, who he writes about with great dexterity, still hold the record for the longest set in men’s doubles at Wimbledon – 32/30! Makes sense that they have discussions about matches ending in the dark at the hallowed Wimbledon courts.

With a partner like Segal, the stories abound and every occasionally, he drops titbits like the win he and his first wife Val had in Gstaad in the mixed doubles when it meant they were presented their silver cups by Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. That’s the kind of life he has led, and he spins a great yarn about these meanderings.

It’s the kind of book you read with a gentle smile about times gone by, but it also focusses you on a life worth living and how people go about sharing what they regard as stories worth telling.

While I might have been dubious at the start especially in these times when writers have more important stories to tell, it is a good thing to escape the fury of today’s world sometimes, catch your breath and listen to a voice that might not be your obvious selection from the start.

You might just learn something and for me the tennis insight was invaluable.