About the Book
The streets of Paris are full of celebrities and media, and out at the stadium the crowds are already huge as players pound the practice courts in preparation for the greatest tournament of the modern era…From all corners they’ve come, the stars of the modern game. What a line-up!
The most unusual tennis tournament in history is about to start. Einstein’s seeded fourth. Chaplin, Freud and van Gogh are also in the top rankings. World number one is Tony Chekhov. In all, 128 of the world’s most creative players—everyone from Louis Armstrong to George Orwell, Gertrude Stein to Coco Chanel—are going to fight it out until the exhilarating final on centre court. First published in 2002, John Clarke’s The Tournament is a brilliant, bizarre comic novel. This new Text Classics edition features an introduction by Michael Heyward.
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
INTRODUCTION
The Crazy Games of John Clarke by Michael Heyward
Dedication
The Tournament
Preliminaries
Day 1
Round 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Round 2
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17
Day 18
Day 19
Day 20
Round 3
Day 21
Day 22
Day 23
Round 4
Day 24
Day 25
Day 26
Day 27
Round 5
Day 28
Day 29
Day 30
Quarter-finals
Day 31
Day 32
Day 33
Semi-finals
Day 34
Day 35
Finals
Day 36
Results
About John Clarke
About Michael Heyward
Also by John Clarke
Text Classics List
Copyright
The Crazy Games of John Clarke by Michael Heyward
THE TOURNAMENT is one of the oddest and funniest books ever published in Australia. It’s like Afferbeck Lauder’s Let Stalk Strine, or the poems of Ern Malley: we could never have predicted its existence, but it allows us to see and hear ourselves differently. John’s early drafts made it plain that he was doing much more than imagine the great minds of the century playing each other at tennis. That would have been peculiar enough, but it would also have been merely amusing, a charming gesture.
The book John was writing was more alarming by far. He had invented an entire tournament involving hundreds of twentieth-century writers, artists, thinkers, painters, musicians and agitators of all kinds, both men and women, with seedings and rounds and form guides and injuries, singles and doubles, including the mixed. Every result was to be recorded. He had dreamed up every last lob, smash and forehand winner. It was fantastic, irreproachable, deranged. A mind like that is not answerable to anyone. Of course, Text was going to publish this book.
John Clarke had been in training to write The Tournament his whole life. He was curious about everything. He loved ideas. He was extraordinarily sensitive to language and to effects of style. He was a brilliant mimic and parodist. He had the nerveless approach of the encyclopaedist. And he adored the idiom of sports commentary. Its cadences and phrasemaking can be heard in all his work. As a young man one of his party tricks was to imitate the legendary New Zealand race caller Peter Kelly. The best effects were apparently obtained by yelling into an empty beer jug. His alter ego, Fred Dagg, who had an opinion about everything, was famous for calling a flea race and was an expert on many sports, including ‘the ancient and revered art of tennis’. Fred explained that it is ‘time-consuming to a point where you can actually think you’re busy, it’s tiring, it involves special clothing and equipment and in general terms it’s a 100 per cent bona fide waste of time’.
A decade or so later Clarke invented farnarkeling, a mythic sport with its own rules, equipment, playing fields and fans. We didn’t need farnarkeling either, but having been given it we couldn’t get along without it. We had a new word; a new holy grail, the ‘bevelled orb’; and a new national hero, Dave Sorensen. The most astonishing thing about farnarkeling is that its entire world, from the gonad to the warble to the umlaut, was conjured up in a few thousand words of laconic commentary, largely written for the television show The Gillies Report in the mid-1980s. Farnarkeling is now the Linear B of Australian history, the lost alphabet of our sporting supremacy.
Farnarkeling is funny because we recognise the voice but have no idea what is being described. It takes the clichés of commentary and transforms them into something rich and strange by making them unintelligible. What is familiar is the tone, the authority of the commentator who needs a shared language to give shape to the speechless passion of the fan. Every punter knows how much we depend on the commentator to understand but we also know how inadequate the commentator’s words are to the action itself and the complexity of our response to it:
As expected, the focus of the match was the tussle between the dangerously fit Wojek Conrad and the very remarkable Dave Sorenson. Conrad had got away from Sorenson several times early in the second warble and seemed poised to take command, but Sorenson, who had been on antibiotics to clear up a blockage in the Eustachian tubes that had caused him to surprise himself while sneezing, proceeded to take the initiative and turn on a display of arkeling that will linger in the memory. The crowning achievement was probably the Inverse Blither he performed while running backwards by reversing the position of his feet and by leaping both up and sideways as the gonad was intercepted and despatched at apparently different altitudes simultaneously. The wall he hit will be shifted before the second round of matches…
If farnarkeling was the essential precursor, The Tournament works by different rules. Instead of making the clichés of commentary indecipherable it makes them shine by applying them to the realm of aesthetic appreciation. It gives us a glimpse of how the true understanding of anything can never exclude its comic possibilities. ‘Beckett,’ Clarke tells us, ‘was nothing if not patient. He waited. In fact, waiting probably won him the match.’ Marie Stopes ‘has one of the best defensive games in the business’. Percy Grainger ‘didn’t mind being beaten’. Proust’s ‘obsession with keeping the
