UFO Info Week-End

He’s a good pro but people playing for any team have to want to play for their

He’s a good pro, but people playing for any team have to want to play for their team, and he does.”He has played very well over the last three weeks and he now desperately wants to play for his country again. Wilkinson had been in exile, virtually self-imposed, since protesting about the Lawn Tennis Association’s decision to import Greg Rusedski from Canada in 1995.
The 19-year-old Martin Lee, of Sussex, will also travel with the team, Jamie Delgado and Mark Petchey having been dropped from a squad headed by Tim Henman and Rusedski.Andrew Richardson, who defeated Byron Black in the tie against Zimbabwe at Crystal Palace in April, keeps his place, along with Neil Broad, the doubles specialist.”David Lloyd has spoken to me, and everything is fine,” said Wilkinson, whose five-set victory on Tuesday against Sweden’s Jonas Bjorkman, the No 17 seed, impressed the captain as much as everyone else.”I told Chris at Queen’s that he was coming [to Kiev],” Lloyd said, “and now he’s played himself into the reckoning That match yesterday was his best win. Ranked 32nd in the world, the 22-year-old Johansson is still improving after taking a giant leap forward in 1996, and he will be out to prove that he is not just another production-line Swede Becker will be wary Simon O’Hagan. There were at least two happy campers squelching in the grounds here yesterday. Chris Wilkinson, having settled his differences with Britain’s Davis Cup captain, David Lloyd, was named in the squad to play Ukraine in Kiev the weekend after Wimbledon.

The period of the late great Boris Becker dates from early 1996, when he ended five years without a Grand Slam title by winning the Australian Open. But that campaign could so easily have ended in first-round disaster and the reason was the player he is due to meet in the second round, Thomas Johansson. In their only meeting so far, Johansson was two sets to love up on Becker and on the brink of claiming a famous scalp. Becker’s heroics did for him in the end, but the match will surely be uppermost in both men’s minds when they meet again. “Her microskirts resemble crisply ironed tea towels and her microphone manner is impeccable Anna Kournikova would be the perfect Spice Girl but … Headlines urge her to join the Spice Girls, the all- girl pop group.”Spice Girl Anna’s A Knockout” cooed The Sun yesterday.”She has a ponytail and a perma-tan,” opined the more up-market Times.

she is too young.”She can play tennis, too, although much of the early coverage has failed to mention it.”The irony is that no one was interested in the quality of Kournikova’s performance, how she projected her personality was all that mattered,” The Times wrote.Stephen Wade reports forAssociated Press. Williams will reportedly wear purple and green (Wimbledon’s colours) beads here.Much of the attention focuses on the new generation of young women players. Kournikova appears to be the local darling, with male and female reporters writing much the same story.Raised in Moscow and transplanted at 11 to Florida to learn the game at Nick Bollettieri’s tennis academy, she is being compared to Chris Evert and a Barbie doll. Some excerpts from local coverage of the tournament included: a photograph of the 17-year-old blonde Olga Barabanschikova – tugging up her shirt and rolling back her elastic waistband to show off a diamond-studded navel; the Russian- born 16-year-old Anna Kournikova, her lanky, supermodel looks spread across all the papers, with headlines equating her to “Lolita”; tennis’s top woman – the 16-year-old Martina Hingis – photographed in her opening match lunging for a loose ball in a short, clingy tennis dress.
Such is the current obsession that BBC television crews have been told to keep their cameras trained above the waistline and avoid glimpses of underwear.The London Evening Standard – pointing out the change – notes “underwear of the women players has been an inescapably prominent feature of Wimbledon ever since `Gorgeous’ Gussie Moran added lace to hers in 1949.”Post-game interviews have offered up questions about 19-year-old Iva Majoli’s live-in boyfriend and the relationship between teenager Kournikova and the 27-year-old Detroit Red Wings player, Sergei Federov.All of this, and 22-year-old Mary Pierce – long considered one of the most glamorous women in the game – has yet to take the court.Neither has the 17-year-old American Venus Williams, whose beaded braids made headlines when she played in a Wimbledon warm-up tournament recently.

Wimbledon, they point out, is an 18-court tournament, not a one-court event.Dreekmann, incidentally, has played Sampras once previously, the American winning in straight sets on a concrete court in Switzerland last year.. As Wimbledon got off to a wet and gloomy start, the British press has turned even more to its favourite subject – sex. “The reason for the Halle tournament is Hendrik Dreekmann,” Weber says.While wishing Weber and his roof well, the All England Club decline to put a roof on the Centre Court Nor did they design a roof for the new No 1 Court. Weber then decided to apply for mainstream Tour status.Offered a date two weeks before Wimbledon, he elected to convert the courts to grass to help competitors prepare for the world’s most prestigious championships and engaged a former All England Club groundsman Weber also built a stadium court with a retractable roof. Dreekmann made impressive progress, and the coach told Weber that the youngster needed to be able to play and practice on outdoor courts.Weber purchased land from a local farmer, and built outdoor courts with clay or concrete surfaces.