Bolters

< The Knack: "We're gonna slow things down now"

I got out of bed unfeasibly early this morning to watch the Australian Open men's tennis final, which pitched world No.3, and example of how good Andy Murray would be if he wasn't British, Serbian Novak Djokovic, against the unseeded and unheralded Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, the French world No.38 who dispatched Murray in the first round. As well as being a fairly entertaining match between two of the least glamorous names you'll find in any sport, it also taught me another new word, which applies to Tsonga and his shock run to the final:

A 'bolter' is a term applied to unseeded tennis players who reach the latter stages of the Australian Open tennis tournament.

This tournament has a history of unfancied players getting through to the latter stages; in recent years Marcos Baghdatis, Rainer Scheuttler, Thomas Johansson and other people you've never heard of have forced their way through to the final, with Johansson actually winning the trophy. It's an Australian tennis-related phrase, but technically would apply to any lowly player making a breakthrough to the latter stages of a knockout tournament. The greatest bolter of all has to be Goran Ivanisevic, who won Wimbledon in 2001 despite being about 40, having one change of kit and seeming to be on the brink of insanity. The moment he won is up there with It's A Wonderful Life in terms of embarrassing, unexpected tear jerking. Other honourable mentions include Millwall reaching the FA Cup Final a few years ago (I lived in Cardiff at the time and can still remember walking past rows of 4x4s that had ferried the Man Utd fans down, while Millwall fans arrived on what appeared to be freight trains) and cheeky churchgoer Shaun Murphy winning the World Snooker Championship (although surprisingly, he has proved to be quite good).

It's great that unknown players cause upsets often enough to have their own nickname; on this occasion Tsonga became another bolter that fell short, losing in four sets. One article I read claims that the Aussie Open bolters fall into 2 categories - those that go on to greater success, and those that never produce a run like it again. The writer makes an odd analogy to The Knack, the U.S. band who managed to come up with My Sharona, but never troubled the charts again. I wonder if when they play gigs now, whether they have to just play My Sharona 12 times in a row, and if they attempt to "play a new one" they get bottled out of the venue. Anyway, when the tennis was over, we went to buy walking shoes (it's always wild at Knowledge Towers) and My Sharona came on the radio. What does that mean? Should I become a professional tennis player, or start an AOR combo? Hard to know which would be more disastrous.