Playing the Moldovans at Tennis

Tony Hawks

The comedian Tony Hawks' last book was "Round Ireland With a Fridge", the story of his journey round Ireland with a fridge and the result of a drunken bet that he couldn't hitch-hike er ... round Ireland with a fridge.

His follow-up bet was that he couldn't play the entire Moldovan football team at tennis and beat them. His pal, and the other half of the wager, had argued that natural sportsmen like international footballers (even for a small country like Moldova) excel at all sports, even ones they have had no formal tuition in. Hawks, apparently quite a good a amateur tennis player, had argued the opposite. The bet was that Hawks couldn't beat all eleven Moldovan internationals at tennis. The loser had to strip naked in the high street while singing the Moldovan national anthem.

I don't know if it's just me but the fridge thing seemed something of a 30 second joke and I was never interested enough to read that book. But the idea of this latest wager grabbed me immediately as a more interesting challenge. And a more interesting premise. Could you or I beat a professional sportsman if we got to choose the sport? The answer at first would seem to be "obviously", since we're choosing the weapons in this duel. But professional athletes tend to be superbly fit and naturally talented. At school the captain of rugby always also turns out to be captain of football and cricket too. Furthermore, the terms of the bet were that Hawks had to beat _all_ eleven footballers. Only one of them needed to turn out to be half decent and Hawks would be stripping in the street.

So he sets off for Cisinau, the capital of Moldova, with nothing more than a tennis racquet, a bag of clothes, and the back page of The Times listing the last eleven players to turn out for Moldova against England in a recent international.

His quest also takes him to Ulster and Israel and the hardest part of the bet turns out not to be beating the footballers at tennis but tracking them down and getting permission from their clubs. Entertainingly, and sometimes humiliatingly for the author, the Moldovans appear bewildered and not the least tickled by the nature of the bet.

Some of that is down to the fact that Moldova is a desperately poor backwater of the old Soviet empire and its people have more pressing concerns than helping an idiot Englishman fulfill the terms of a ludicrous bet. One of the intriguing aspects of the book is watching Hawks torn between genuine feeling for the misery most of Moldova's people have to endure and (suppressed but definitely only just below the surface) irritation that the locals are such a sour, unhelpful and joyless lot.

In the end Hawks does track down all eleven Moldovan internationals and plays a bit of tennis against each of them. And one of the two friends does strip fully naked while singing the Moldovan national anthem in Balham high street in front of 300 jeering onlookers.

It's comic, in parts. Surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, the most laugh out loud part of the book is the naked singing at the end, which is well told and very funny. But it takes 220 pages to get there and those earlier pages are more iffy. There are nuggets of humour, but there are also a few sentences which made me wince. You can almost hear the editor on the phone to the author "gotta put more funny bits in, Tony, any old thing will do". Bill Bryson it is not.