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HOW TO BE A BRITISH TENNIS FAN
Not long ago, you could trundle into Wimbledon midway through the day and watch top tennis for the price of a cheap night out. These days, you need to queue for days and mortgage your house for an outside court. What makes a British tennis fan now? Find out below:
Only ever watch Wimbledon – and that’s just for the 15 minutes it takes for every Brit except Murray to get knocked out.
Refer to all the top players by their first names even though they’d give you a powerful backhand into the face if you got near them.
Be one of the only people in Britain who sees a man wearing a tracksuit in a court and isn’t reminded of their dad.
Realise that despite the fact you’ve only watched it on telly you’re now Britain’s number six.
Laugh so hard a bit of wee comes out because a pigeon lands on the court.
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‘We must have had 99 per cent of the game. It was the other 3 per cent that cost us the match.’
Ruud Gullit explaining a defeat
HOW TO BE A PROFESSIONAL GOLFER
Check out our hit list of fairway essentials to look the part in plus fours:
Consider yourself an athlete although you play an estate agent’s hobby for a living.
Dress like a cross between the Dorothy Perkins window display and a rodeo clown’s nightmare looked at through a kaleidoscope.
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During a 20-year career play like the world’s greatest for the three days the Ryder Cup’s on, then go back to being total dog crap the rest of the time.
Realise your main handicap is talking to members of the opposite sex.
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BORN: 18 September 1971, Plano, Texas, USA
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS: Doping to an extraordinarily brazen degree over many years
1) The Texan’s cycling career was split into two stages, pre- and post-testicular cancer. Before his brush with death, Armstrong forged a highly impressive reputation as a big race rider in winning the 1993 World Championship and stages at the Grand Tour events in Europe.
2) Armstrong battled to overcome cancer and won the respect of many people around the world. Unfortunately for him and them, his entrance back into the sport coincided with rampant drug use that he spent years viciously denying in winning seven Tours de France.
3) He once admitted his confession was probably ‘too late’ – yes, not least because your confession came nearly three years after you’d been caught.
4) When asked if he got what he deserved, Armstrong said: ‘I deserve to be punished. Not sure I deserve a death penalty.’ To be fair, Lance, it’d be pretty hard to give you that as your tolerance to drugs is likely to be ridiculously high.
DID YOU KNOW: Armstrong dated singer Sheryl Crow from 2003 to 2006 – during which time she only released one new album, so maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on him.
Suspicions that Lance was cheating were first aroused when he beat this guy in a race
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Those of us unlucky enough to be around at the time of Hoddle and Waddle’s ‘Diamond Lights’ know that sports stars and music do not mix. Here’s a few other ‘notable’ efforts that have left poor fans reaching for their earplugs rather than their iTunes gift voucher.
CAROLINE WOZNIACKI
World number one tennis star Caroline Wozniacki released a heavily auto-tuned single called ‘Oxygen’ in 2012.
The stand-out moment is the lyric ‘Boy, you’re my match point’, which was presumably written by someone who’d just received one of Caroline’s 100mph serves to the head. Watching the video the song appears to be a ‘love’ story – in that zero people bought it.
We shouldn’t be too critical, though, as Caroline did do it for charity – and I’m sure they were very grateful for the 3½ euros she raised.
BUBBA WATSON
Two-time Masters winning golfer Bubba Watson has released several songs, usually alongside fellow players Rickie Fowler, Ben Crane and Hunter Mahan. However, in 2014 he released a solo Christmas single under the name ‘Bubba Claus’, imaginatively titled ‘The Single’.
The song’s not a bad effort – even if Bubba does rhyme ‘Dad’ with ‘Baghdad’ but the video does let it down somewhat. I can’t help thinking we’d all be able to guess what we were getting for Christmas if Santa’s sack had ‘PING’ written on the side and a set of woods poking out the top.
NEW ORDER AND THE 1990 ENGLAND WORLD CUP SQUAD
Often considered the best ever football song, New Order’s ‘World in Motion’ for Italia ’90 reached number one that summer.
Everybody remembers John Barnes’s rap – partly because we were shocked they didn’t choose a more obvious candidate to perform it like Peter Beardsley or Dave Beasant.
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WWF WRESTLERS
In 1992 a group of wrestlers including ‘legends’ like ‘Hacksaw’ Jim Duggan, ‘The Undertaker’, Brett ‘Hitman’ Hart and ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage released a record entitled Wrestlemania: The Album.
With
