You Cannot Be Serious!: The 101 Most Frustrating Things in Sport. Matthew Norman

not political correctness gone mad.

      So it says something important about Hewitt’s personality that even in Australia he was loathed and regarded as an embarrassment by the media and a fair chunk of the population long before he disgraced himself in New York.

      Still, to his lasting credit, let no one claim that the fury of the US Open crowd, which booed him off court, and the condemnation of the wider world didn’t teach him a lesson. Not only did he come to see how repugnant the accusation of racially-motivated collusion between a player and an official might appear, he made dramatic strides in mastering the wider lexicon of non-offence. At the following year’s French Open in Paris, he addressed that same Mr Egli as a ‘spastic’. His apology the following day to the Spastics Society of Australia, which curiously took umbrage, showed yet again that, while he had very little else to offer, there was never any doubting Lleyton Hewitt’s heart.

      72

      Ken Bailey

      Even during the glory days of football hooliganism, the reliably miserable experience of following England’s progress offered no more depressing sight than this unnervingly strange old boy. For decades Ken Bailey’s presence in his John Bull uniform – red militia tailcoat, blue top hat with Union Jack front centre – was a fixture at just about every international sporting event, broadcasting a stale aroma of Empire and long-anachronistic presumptions about English superiority across the planet. Wherever and whatever a national team played, the TV cameras would pick him out in the crowd. Eventually he bacame such a familiar character that Subbuteo honoured him not only by putting his image on the exterior of a five-a-side box, but including a Bailey figurine in its 1974 Munich World Series set.