Do not disown him. Tennis needs a working-class hero
Evans should pay a heavy penalty for his stupidity, but this does not have to be the end
On his darkest day, Dan Evans at least had the good sense not to reach into Richard Gasquet’s book of excuses. Notoriously, the Frenchman, eschewing any Gallic chivalry, tried to explain a positive test for cocaine in 2009 by claiming that he had exchanged several prolonged kisses with a Miami nightclub waitress referred to only as ‘Pamela’. Evans, true to his straight-talking Brummie nature, was nothing like so squirming, simply blaming his disgrace upon a “context completely unrelated to tennis”.
It is this extramural activity that has always been the problem for Evans. As he put it three years ago, with bracing candour: “I don’t train hard enough or work hard enough – I’m obviously pretty bad at my job.”
He is an instinctive party animal, whose idea of knuckling down for his doubles match at Wimbledon in 2008 was to stop out in a local bar until 3am the night before. And yet despite the constant compulsion to hit the tiles, Evans marshalled the better parts of his character to break into the world’s top 50. Now, in one senseless moment of stupidity, he has thrown all that good work away.
His contrition yesterday appeared genuine, even if there were inescapable parallels with Maria Sharapova’s disclosure of her own doping violation. There is nothing like an antiseptic function room, clearly, to convey sackcloth and ashes on the confessor’s part. Where Sharapova chose the LA Hotel Downtown, Evans plumped for the Novotel Hammersmith.
Life on the tennis hamster-wheel always seemed an inversion of the real Dan Evans. While he belatedly realised that he ought to put his talent to proper use, he often let slip that he hankered to let his hair down back in Solihull. In a Telegraph interview in 2014, he sounded as if the ascetic lifestyle of a top-rank player, interspersing monotonous training sessions with sparrow-sized portions of sushi, was making him thoroughly unhappy.
But there was also a precious artlessness about him. He was not cut from starchy Home Counties tennis cloth, instead making his way as the son of an electrician and a nurse, pursuing tennis not because of family expectation but pure natural aptitude. He was also refreshingly connected to his roots. Evans was a West Midlands boy to his bones. He lived there, had a partner there and, yes, did his fair share of socialising there.
It feels peculiar to be writing about Evans in the past tense. He is 27, not dead, although in the short term his career prospects might as well be. Quite apart from the doping suspension to be imposed, there is a real danger that British tennis will now seek to excommunicate him altogether.
Disowning him, though, would be a mistake. Tennis in this country needs a working-class hero in the Evans mould, a figure who has made it to the upper echelons despite none of the traditional privileges, who has warded off the temptations of youth to be a serious international contender. There is no performance-enhancing motive at play here, which limits the reacceptance of Sharapova into the fold.
Look at Martina Hingis and one sees that there is the chance of a reprieve. The ‘Swiss Miss’ had a metabolite of cocaine in her system in 2007, served a two-year ban, and was later inducted into the World Tennis Hall of Fame. Evans should pay a heavy penance but this need not be the end.