A Quote From ... Archive

A Quote From Humphrey Bogart

Anyone for tennis? as a catchphrase typifies the kind of drawing-room comedies in which someone stepped in through the French windows, lightly swinging a racket; surprisingly (given his later tough-guy image) it was once much associated with Humphrey Bogart, although it may have originated with George Bernard Shaw. (Misalliance, 1914, has the question, 'Anybody on for a game of tennis?'.

Some recent tennis quotes, however, reflect a greater sense of urgency. 'You cannot be serious!' protested an aggrieved John McEnroe to a Wimbledon umpire in the early 1980s, but his fellow-American Jimmy Connors drew a rueful comparison between British and American attitudes to displays of emotion on court: 'New Yorkers love it when you spill your guts out there [at Flushing Meadow]. Spill your guts at Wimbledon and they make you stop and clean it up.' Other quotes, more happily, celebrate success; in 2000 the new champion Venus Williams, the first African American to win Wimbledon since Althea Gibson, said of her predecessor, 'I'm so proud to have followed her achievements and to have done it in her lifetime.'

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