Tennis clone - your double is out there!

Dolly the Sheep, a DNA-perfect clone, hit the headlines a few years’ back. A female sheep, a perfectly normal-looking sheep. But Dolly had no conventional mother or father. A few swabs of mammary gland DNA had been taken from a ‘mother’, introduced into an egg from another “mother”, and these cells had been grown on in petri dishes and test tubes, then introduced into the womb of yet another “mother”. Remarkable. Out came a cloned sheep, a perfect copy of the “mother” who had provided the DNA.

One of my first serious tournaments was played down in the Algarve. It wasn’t an ATP event, but most of the players in the draw had World Ranking points. In the draw was a Portuguese player, aged 23 or so. Let’s call him Eduardo Santos. It was 1983. I had to rub my eyes twice. He had the same Fila clothes, the same wooden, small head Donnay racket, the straggly blond hair under a headband, the same dead eyes, expressionless look, and slightly hang dog mood. It was clone Borg.

Idol

I was fortunate enough to see Borg in the flesh a few years earlier when I was 19. It was the 1980 Wimbledon final against McEnroe, the one where Borg won. I was enthralled from my seat just behind the players’ chairs. Wimbledon Centre Court, certainly in those days, was so special. It seemed like a back garden tennis court with a few seats arranged around. I could have touched both players. After the Seles knifing incident in Roland Garros in 1993 the players are now not so touchable.

The players seemed to be a little small. The court seemed particularly small. The warming up already passed by in slow motion. McEnroe with his shoveling, easy shoulder turn strokes, Borg with his excessive looping swing and his flick of the wrists to lift the ball with slow spin high over the net. I didn’t play tennis like either of them. I wouldn’t have copied them either. McEnroe, a bit of a bad boy, was very much the anti-player – technically over-simple, obviously, oddly, left-handed. Borg’s cat-like movement, loopy hitting, and simple service motion was also, somehow, undesirable. I didn’t want to play like that.

I had to watch Santos’ match of course. He won in two longish sets, but managed to maintain his “Borg act” resolutely until the end. Despite the comings and goings of the score, he maintained his icy demeanour which set the real Borg apart so much from his contemporaries.

The only indication you did notice, the only difference, was comfort on the ball. Santos struggled getting around the court and creating those carefully trained loops. He had copied a very good model, had well learned to reproduce Borg’s mental discipline, but he couldn’t move like Borg. You couldn’t copy that.

Superkid

In 1987 I was playing a Warsteiner Grand Prix tournament in Bavaria, also a lower tier professional event, with all the main draw with World Ranking points. Two courts away from me clone Boris Becker was playing. I could hardly concentrate on my match. In fact I lost quickly anyway, and joined a large group of spectators watching their hero who had, as a complete unknown, won Wimbledon aged 17 in 1985. This clone had managed to copy him very quickly!

There was the big knee-bend on the serve, the floppy slightly gingery hair, the fresh freckled face, the bauhausisch Puma racket and the strapping thighs. Like Santos for Borg, this one was just like Becker. He sailed through his match, pushed his way after through the crowd as if he were the superstar himself. The astonished spectators almost started taking autographs.

Copy him

Just two weeks ago I attended an ITF Under 18 event in Luxembourg. In the semi finals was a German girl who looked nothing like Sharapova, except perhaps she was tall and blond. But this girl was well on her way to copying Sharapova, not yet perfected. She had that slow, slow, quick, quick, slow walking step, and the uncompromising shots – serves, forehands and backhands hit flat, powerfully, but not respecting mechanics and typical ball flights much. There were plenty of mistakes for her opponent to feed on. But clone Sharapova won, pausing at the back after every point, giving an elegant pose to the spectators, a quick stare far away, a tidying of the long straight hair, and a beating on the chest. I had to giggle.

The only thing she clearly had not copied was the Sharapova shriek. Maybe somebody, a parent or a coach, or a club official, had objected. But I can imagine she had tried.