Buster's Pants Are No Rival to an Icon

It was doubles day at Wimbledon, traditionally an extravaganza of crowd-pleasing volleys and memory- invoking rallies, though the outfit Sir Cliff Richard chose to mark the occasion - a suit-and-tie combination in an alarming shade of purple - was a pairing most who saw it would be happy never to encounter again.

As it happens, he wasn't the only doubles enthusiast in disconcerting attire. On court 18 Buster Mottram, failed British hope of the 80s and a man whose serve invariably swung to the right, was playing in the Over-45 men's doubles wearing a pair of shorts as transparent as his politics. It may not have been the sight of a large acreage of blue underpants visible beneath the white that was keeping the spectators away, but even so the stands around the court were almost empty.

It is indicative of the All England Club's odd way of presenting a grand slam that while important matches were stacking up on a rain-blitzed day like the clouds overhead, the show courts were given over to tennis ephemera. Thus while seeds and contenders stayed in the locker room studying the weather bulletins, Mottram's assault on the veterans' doubles with his partner Colin Dowdeswell went on regardless. And largely spectatorless. This despite the presence on court of opponents as venerable as Mark Edmondson and Rod Frawley of Australia, a nimble partnership in their day. Floods of disappointed union jack-clad fans, making their way from watching the day's big defeat on Rusedski's Ridge, kept spotting the empty stands and asking one another who was playing.

"Oh," said one, reading the names off the scoreboard. "That's why no one's watching. It's old people."

A little harsh, perhaps, as Mottram is still potent enough to put in an occasional first serve almost as speedy as Venus Williams' second. If only in his prime he had encountered players such as the present-day Edmondson, whose waistline swell precluded him from bending for ground shots throughout the match, then Mottram might have been a genuine contender. Shame he has been obliged to wait until no one was watching to see off a couple of Aussies 6-3, 6-3.

The one pair everyone did want to see were in action on court two. Several obituaries were written to her career last week after she lost in the first round of the singles, but Anna Kournikova is still involved at Wimbledon on two fronts: the women's and mixed doubles.

Yesterday she was playing a last-16 women's match. In the absence of her usual accomplice Martina Hingis, with a foot injury, Kournikova has teamed up with a new partner, the American Chanda Rubin. Snubbing the rival attraction of Buster's bloomers, a large number of overexcited young men had packed the terrace at the top of the court's south stand to see her perform.

As always, she battled bravely against stereotype when she stripped off her track-skirt at the start of play to reveal a fishtailed blouse which seemed to have shrunk in the wash, thus revealing much of her midriff. The appearance of this latest fashion accessory brought the babble of fatuous cat-calls to a crescendo. She studiously ignored everything that was shouted, preoccupied as she was by a snuffling head cold.

But even if it required the regular application of nasal spray, Kournikova found herself in an unusual position here: a winning one. At times she and her team-mate were in such control of the match it was as if she had stepped down to the lower-ranked Challenger circuit, as the BBC's Garry Richardson had suggested to her in defeat last week. This was the comment that had made the young Russian player explode. After that interview, in an attempt to restore an image which, frankly, is her primary asset, her agent had called in a select number of journalists to allow her to put her case.

"I really don't believe that it would help me to go to a smaller tournament and beat someone who is 300 in the world," she told them. Yesterday instead, as if to prove her point, she was beating Janet Lee, from Taiwan, and Wynne Prakusya, from Indonesia, the No11 seeds in the doubles, who had arrived here on something of a roll.

It was clearly therapeutic for Kournikova to be back on court, proving to the world that she is, as she regularly claims to be, a tennis player. From the start, when they broke Prakusya's first service game, Rubin's powerful passing shots and Kournikova's precise serve overwhelmed their opponents. What's more, the pair of them grinned and chatted their way through the match, full of mutual encouragement and camaraderie.

Even when Prakusya wrong-footed them by spinning a return off the top of the net to land between them, Kournikova just grinned and exchanged high-fives with her partner.

For a moment it was almost as if she was enjoying herself. Which is, allegedly, the whole purpose of doubles.