No person of spirit could fail to delight in the story of the 17-year-old British tennis player who was sent home from Australia for turning up to practice without a racket. Marcus Willis, from -- and the address itself reads like a crime-sheet -- Wokingham in Berkshire, had been driving the coaches at the Lawn Tennis Association to distraction, and with this latest bit of prattery finally pushed his luck too far.

It is a story that seems to say it all. No wonder Britain doesn’t produce any tennis champions! All these middle-class kids who think that life is a continual gap year, in which you swan about and grow a bumfluff beard and think you are the coolest creature on the planet, and as for work – perish la pensée!
It seems obvious, does it not? Tennis is irredeemably tied up with the middle classes and middle-class children do not and cannot grow up to become sporting champions. You need grit for that, you need to know you have to fight for what you want, you don’t need Eton and Oxford, you need the school of hard knocks and the university of life.
A slightly more thoughtful view is that middle-class parents don’t see sport as a serious career. The odds against success are too high, so children are actively discouraged from going into professional sport. Better to spend those vital early years studying law or business. You’ll always have sport for fun, won’t you? Work is serious, sport is fun: that has always been the middle-class way.
But is it true that the middle classes are incapable of producing champions? If we are to ask this, we must first come up with some kind of definition of middle classness. There have been a million books and a billion pieces in newspapers and magazines on the subject. Tony Blair famously declared that we are all middle class now, but this only revealed the fact that he has never attended the darts World Championship at the Circus Tavern in Purfleet, Essex.
Middle classness is a vast and protean concept, and it needn’t necessarily involve extra virgin olive oil and pubs serving sauv blanc. If the notion of working class sounds rather obsolete, there is still a definite difference between middle class and not middle class. Let us use darts as a handy measure of class: if you stick out at a darts tournament, you are probably middle class. If you fit in seamlessly, you are probably not.
So let us turn to the greatest English triumph of recent years, victory in the rugby union World Cup of 2003. One of the stars was Jonny Wilkinson, a man renowned for cold nerve, a taste for moments of drama and crisis, a fly half who tackles like a rat-trap and whose ferocious discipline shames everybody else in sport. He is an unreconstructed member of the middle classes, a champion and a hard bastard.
England’s captain in that campaign was Martin Johnson, famous across sport as the man who never took a backward step, a quiet person around whom men rally, whose monobrowed glare at the coin toss was a weapon in itself. He was the toughest bastard in sport. He used to work in a bank. His mother was a PE teacher. He’s about as working class as Hugh Grant.
There are as many strata in middle-class life as there are in the Grand Canyon, of course. There is a difference between state school middle class and public school middle class, for a start; but the fact remains that neither of them would fit in with the audience for Phil “The Power” Taylor and feel happy singing Is this the way to Amarillo between bouts.
Can the most privileged stratum of the middle classes produce people hard enough to be champions? We need look no farther than the greatest British sportsman to have performed in the 21st century so far: Sir Matthew Pinsent, Eton and Oxford and owner of four gold medals garnered from four successive Olympic Games. Soft? He and his crew in the coxless four in Athens were beaten a dozen strokes from the line, but with the most extraordinary explosion of power, energy and will, they forced their boat ahead. It was as tough a piece of sporting confrontation as I have ever seen.
The most stunning individual feat in British sport this century was Dame Ellen MacArthur’s solo round-the-word yachting record, beaten this week but a staggering achievement nonetheless.
This is not a soft option: skyscraper seas, solitude, up and down the mast, sleep deprivation, days upon days straining to get a last extra half-knot of boatspeed: well, MacArthur is as tough a bastard as I have ever met. She was brought up in no great affluence, but she was a middle-class girl who acquired her taste for sailing from a trip with her aunt when she was 4.
Where do we stop? Paula Radcliffe won the New York Marathon last year in a blazingly confrontational race. This was not Paula the lone gazelle, this was Paula in a three-way dogfight. She won because of her toughness and her desire. Her mother was a head teacher, her father an exec in the brewing industry.
The England cricket team have been led by a succession of tough Michaels: Brearley, Atherton, Vaughan. All are unapologetically middle class. Brearley was mercilessly barracked by the Australian crowds, who saw him as a softie. He refused to agree to a newfangled notion of fielding restrictions in one-day cricket and was hammered for it. In one match, Australia needed a four off the last ball to win. Brearley put every player, wicketkeeper included, on the boundary. He knew what the reaction would be: he honestly didn’t care. He wanted to win.
I think I have demonstrated, then, that a middle-class upbringing is no bar to sporting success. Tim Henman did not fail to win Wimbledon because he is middle class: he failed because, despite a lifetime of dedication to this one aim, he fell short. He wasn’t quite good enough, that’s all, no disgrace there.
If there is a problem in producing tennis champions, it does not lie in the class system. That assumption doesn’t stand up under the weight of evidence. If the problem is cultural, it is to do with the culture of tennis and tennis clubs. The problem is not related to second homes, Chardonnay, goujons of sea bass, material comfort, financial security and saying lavatory instead of toilet. It is in the difficulty of creating a winning culture in a largely social sport.
The nature-nurture debate is never very far away in sport. In so far as you can generalize, high achievers in sport tend to have a mighty will and a high level of family support. That is certainly true of Andy Murray. Whether he succeeds or fails in tennis, it won’t be because of his middle-class background, or in spite of it.
Moral: people don’t fail because they’re middle class. They fail because they’re not good enough.
(Source: The Times)