Annabel was most recently seen dangling her tanned, toned, and fashionably famished legs from a suitably high chair on Sky Sports coverage of the U.S. Open, at the end of which she sported so many pairs of shoes I wondered which poor soul had to lug them to and from the airport. Or maybe I'm being naïve and they were delivered by yellow taxi from downtown Product Placement Plaza.

Although she is clearly an astute business woman, in sporting terms Annabel Croft was something of an also-ran. Technically, she had a solid, crunching forehand. But, if I can borrow the word 'chintzy' from Jim Courier, who once used it to describe a shot from McEnroe (after which McEnroe smacked an ace and shouted 'Was that chintzy, you little shit?), Annabel(le)'s slice backhand was along similar lines and definitely not a weapon (I hope it isn't being taught at her tennis academy).


In her matches, Miss Croft looked as if someone, somewhere, had a voodoo doll of her and was sticking pins in it every time she lost a point, and at times you had to scratch your head and wonder why the **** was she out there. A muttering, nervous wreck on court, she had—in the tradition of most posh Brits bar Henman—the over-refined one's gift of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Although a Junior Wimbledon winner, Annabel had one major final appearance in the grown up's game, against Sabatini (I think...I'm not big on stats) and she seemed to wilt with each shot and passing year on the circuit, until her on-court, behavioural punctuations eclipsed the main sporting event.

Stunning in her freshness and beauty, yet something of an exposed nerve-end in her partially formed humanness, you (or at least I) wanted to step onto court and protect her.
But from what?
Her opponent?
The game itself?
The whole unsporting business?
The expectations?
Her own sensitivity?
The critical eyes of others?
I couldn't help wondering what else she might have excelled at, if they hadn't unearthed that nugget of a forehand on the family tennis court. But one good sonnet doesn't make a poet, if you'll pardon my juggling the metaphors (... it seems fairer to one so fair than the one about fool's gold).

I don't recall who she was playing at the time of the photo, but Annabel was expected to win... and was definitely beaten. No. Not beaten. She disintegrated. Yes, a well-practised disintegration that worked its way from the inside-out, and quite often from a winning position, because winning was less of a focus than overcoming the fear of the burden of losing. If only someone had made her believe, at a young enough age, that it truly didn't matter, then you might have seen her truly play beyond all expectations.

As I left Roland Garros the day I took this picture, I started making notes for a short essay, which, like most all of my stuff, Henry Wancke subsequently turned down at Tennis World (oh house style, where now is thy stunted sting?). By the time night fell, I had the very heart of my infatuated—fatuous?—essay worked out, and was dancing through the narrow, sharply rising streets of Pigalle llike a love-sick artist from bygone days (bohemian and impoverished? But of course....darling), weaving his way back to a hovel near Montmartre, and shouting up at any available balcony:
'Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down thy hair...'.
Of course Rapunzel did not.
How could she?
There were no balconies into the real world in her star-fivery ivory tower....but I bet there are now plenty of shoes.

Annabel's strokes are not featured in the animated tennis book!