Tennis now about catering to the whims of superstars

The Wellington Sevens are history.

All the professional rock stars at the Australian Open tennis had to do over the past two weeks was hit the ball.

Everything else was laid on for them, as it was for the Williams sisters in Auckland.

The ballkids for instance, seldom get any thanks. They slave away, sprinting in the heat, bringing sweaty towels, lifting drinks out of freezers and disposing of racket wrappers.

The players demand three or four balls from the ballkids before every point and after a cursory scan to ensure they have fur, are round and yellow, one or two are batted back to the kids.

One day a ballkid will holler: ‘‘Hey buster, what was wrong with the first two I chucked your way’’.

Rafael Nadal, with his dripping nostril, had two towels, one on either side of the court. Players peter.lampp@fairfaxmedia.co.nz

towel themselves after each point out of habit rather than necessity.

But, enter the resurgent German Mischa Zverev. He didn’t bother with towels and after the opening game of a set, didn’t bother guzzling a drink as everyone else does, marching straight past to take up his station.

And he belted Andy Murray with his old-fashioned serve-andvolley game which pulled my heart strings. It didn’t work against Roger Federer, mainly because the serve-and-serve volley has been made redundant on that slow blue junk they play on now.

There was a doubles match involving former American heroes, Todd Martin and Michael Chang.

They just got on with it, barely one bounce of the ball before they served.

Many of today’s players bounce the ball off their racket countless times before then bouncing the ball on the court.

I counted Novak Djokovic bouncing it between six and 13 times.

The Williams sisters, with career earnings of $161 million, obviously didn’t need to come to New Zealand beforehand and hopefully Serena won’t be back.

In Melbourne, Venus didn’t seem bothered by her sore arm which she blamed for pulling out of Auckland after her secondround match

There are reports now it cost $33,000 to host them and their entourages in luxury digs in Auckland and Tennis Auckland has had to stump up, not to mention appearance money and other frills.

Not for sale

While motoring through Woodville on Sunday, I was startled to see a real estate sign which suggested the 118-year-old Woodville Bowling Club had been sold.

That seemed strange because it is on Tararua District Council land.

It turns out the club was hosting a tournament and the tourney sponsor Property Brokers had brought along one of its signs for the gate with ‘‘sold’’ boldly emblazoned on it, causing passersby to have a double take.

So the Woodville club rocks on. In its heyday it had up to 40 members and these days has 14 men and eight women.

Another plane chase

Taupo-based helicopter pilot John Funnell, who has done his share of work in Manawatu, has chronicled his adventurous life in his new book, Rescue Pilot.

In it, he recounts his part in an incident in 1981, during the turbulent Springbok rugby tour.

An elderly former World War II fighter pilot, Pat Macquarrie, stole a Cessna 172 on the tarmac of Taupo Airport and took off.

Funnell was asked to tail the aircraft which was heading to Hamilton where the Springboks were about to play Waikato. Another Cessna also gave chase.

Funnell wrote that Mcquarrie had apparently let slip he had terminal cancer and might try to take the Springboks out with him. En route, he would not respond to radio calls or gestures to return to Taupo.

Because he was either lost, or on hearing the match had been abandoned via his transistor radio when the protesters invaded the pitch, he landed on Morrinsville racecourse. Funnell set down close to him and he and the policeman with him hauled Mcquarrie out of the Cessna and handcuffed him.

He later did jail time. He didn’t have any flour bombs on board, so he might have been set to kamikaze into the Hamilton grandstand, but he had dropped flour bombs on the Nz-south Africa softball test in 1978.

The police took Mcquarrie’s threat into account when cancelling the Hamilton match.

‘‘Apparently he was supposed to be flying the plane that flourbombed Eden Park a couple of weeks later, but because he was locked up, Marx Jones took over instead,’’ Funnell wrote.

There Manawatu prop Gary Knight was felled by a 450gm flour bomb.

Sevens turned off

The Wellington Sevens are history.

And they have only themselves to blame. They alienated rugby fans by turning it into a beerswilling, fancy-dress rock concert which turned off those keen on the sevens.

And when the partying got out of hand, the organisers toughened up and that turned off the carousers.