Playing the Moldovans at Tennis

As a satirical concept, Tony Hawks‘s travel-humor book Playing the Moldovans at Tennis is brilliant. The premise, as Hawks describes it in the opening chapter, arises from an argument, while watching an England-Moldava soccer match, about the author’s tennis-playing skills. Hawks asserts that he can beat any of the Moldovan soccer players on the tennis court, but his friend Arthur insists that — as naturally talented athletes — one (or more) of the Moldovan players would be bound to win. The two men make a bet (with the loser forced to strip naked in the middle of London’s Balham High Road and sing the Moldovan national anthem) — and that bet becomes the basis of Hawks’s book.

As with Hawks’s first book, Round Ireland With a Fridge, there is obviously a lot of comic potential here — and that’s primarily why I picked up a copy of Playing the Moldovans when I was in Bangkok not long ago. In terms of pure satire, both of Hawks’s books (I have not read Round Ireland) would seem to lampoon a certain genre of travel tale, wherein the author’s supposed “quest” to find something/someone is really just an excuse to write a book or article (I’m thinking here about Nick Tosches’s somewhat phony opium quest in The Last Opium Den, or Edward Marriott’s pre-sold trek to find Papuan natives in The Lost Tribe).

As it turns out, Hawks is pretty good at being funny, yet strangely oblivious to the true satirical potential of his book. After making the bet (and securing an invite to the former Soviet Republic with the help of Moldavan Beatles-impersonators in Liverpool)…

…Hawks flies to Moldova, finds a home-stay family and an interpreter, and sets off on the task of tracking down (and playing tennis with) the Moldovan national soccer team. What ensues is an interesting — sometimes funny, sometimes sad — look at bureaucracy, recreation (or lack thereof), and daily life in this forgotten corner of Eastern Europe. The streetlights in the capital city, Hawks finds, don’t actually work; the manhole covers have all been stolen, and the citizens walk around in emotionless resignation in the face of organized crime and corruption. The Moldovans Hawks encounters appear to understand the logistics of his absurd bet, but none of them seem to find any humor in it. In the process of trying to track down his soccer-playing tennis partners, Hawks tests out the local public transportation, makes a failed attempt to visit Moldova’s only tourist attraction, and (in what is perhaps the most charming aspect of the book) gets to know his host family.

Instead of using his silly tennis quest as a metaphor for the inherent absurdities of cross-cultural travel, however — instead of even using it as a vessel to understand Moldova — he mostly just cracks one-liners as he attempts to win his bet. When he travels to the breakaway province of Transnistria, for example, he makes endless jokes at the expense of the loutish soccer-club boss, quickly concluding that Transnistria is the “Arsehole of the Universe”. This is no doubt a fair enough description, coming from a humorist, but it’s the extent of what we learn about a region that (as a semi-autonomous Soviet throwback) is certainly one of the most intriguing regions in Europe. Travel writers (including Tosches and Marriott) have long constructed entire travel books out of the search for romantic anachronism; yet, while Hawks could get a lot of satirical mileage out of Transnistria’s decidedly non-romantic anachronisms, he mostly just expresses concern that his video camera will get stolen.

I might not have to harp so much on these kind of missed opportunities had Hawks held his focus and stuck it out in Moldova. But, in the attempt to expedite his bet, he flies off to Northern Ireland and Israel to catch up with his final three Moldovan footballers. What could have been a fully formed book about Moldova thus gets pushed aside as Hawks hones in on winning his bet. We get a few nice one-liners about Belfast and Jerusalem in the process, but we never get back to Moldova. The book ends predictably, with the loser singing naked in London (and all the obvious jokes that accompany such an endeavor).

Playing the Moldovans at Tennis is a fast-reading, often-funny book, but I was left wishing that the satire dug a little deeper, and that Hawks had had more patience for the Moldovan part of his Moldovan sojourn.

———-

My favorite quote from Playing the Moldovans at Tennis:

“It has always seemed a great shame to me that the moderate cannot arouse the same passions that the fanatic can, but the fact remains that organized marches accompanied by chants of ‘We’ll talk and talk until we find a compromise!’ or ‘Let’s try and see this from both points of view, shall we?’ tend not to set the heart pumping and the blood coursing through the veins. The suicide bomber is always going to grab the headline ahead of the chap handing in a signed petition. The hunger striker is always going to provide better copy for the newspapers than the bloke who just lays off cheese for a month.”