AlexG's Full Review: Tony Hawks - Playing the Moldovans at Tennis
From the best-selling author of Round Ireland with a Fridge, here comes another instant classic and creative masterpiece of gargantuan proportions which is sure to be the leading contender for this year's Nobel Prize in literature. I'm talking about Playing the Moldovans at Tennis--the book with the most bizarre concept I have ever heard of.
Apparently, for Tony Hawks, hitchhiking around Ireland with a refrigerator wasn't challenging enough, so this time he came up with a bet that...well, no one in his or her right mind would probably come up with. It all started in Balham, England. Tony and his friend Arthur were watching the England-Moldova football game (that's soccer for select 300 million), and somehow (probably because England was winning 4:0) their conversation steers away from soccer in the direction of how good Tony is at tennis. Culminating the evening, Tony bets his friend that he can beat every player of the Moldova national football team...at tennis. The loser of the bet is to strip naked on Balham High Road in London and sing the Moldovan national anthem.
Just in case it has been a while since your last visit to Moldova, I'll remind you that getting there is not as easy as, say getting from London to Amsterdam. You can't just buy a plane ticket and be on your way. You need to get an invitation from someone living in Moldova. What if you don't know anyone there? Jerry Seinfeld would say, "Oh, well, that's a shame." It's amazing that Moldova, so desperately in need of foreign currency, by virtue of idiotic laws makes everything possible to prevent foreigners from entering the country. And so Tony, who had never met a Moldovan in his life, travels to Liverpool first, where at the Beatles Convention, he meets members of the Moldovan band, "The Flying Postmen," and obtains an invitation to conduct his important business in their country.
Unlike his previous adventure (Round Ireland with a Fridge), this one has an extra layer of difficulty. Irish speak English. Moldovans don't. And Tony doesn't speak a word of Romanian or Russian. To at least partially eliminate certain communication problems, Tony invests in the book, "Teach Yourself Romanian," which proves to be as useful as the ears to a dead donkey (old Russian analogy).
"Two sentences caught my eye. First, ..., meaning, 'Have you got time to repair the lift as well?' and, ..., which means, 'Which neighbor do these dogs belong to?'
I knew that only a fool would consider any foray into Moldovan territory without a degree of competence in asking both of these questions, so I set about learning them with all speed. By the end of my first hour I had mastered them both and felt comfortable in the knowledge that if I was bothered by any dogs as I stood outside a footballer's flat, it probably wouldn't take me long to ascertain which of his neighbors they belonged to, or to arrange for the neighbor in question to repair any faulty lifts forthwith."
And so Tony travels to Moldova--one of the little known Eastern European countries, which became independent in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union--the place where traveling is never straightforward. He spends several weeks living in the Moldovan family while trying to find and then play and then beat all Moldovan national football team players at tennis, who obviously have no idea about Tony's bet and couldn't care less about the whole thing. It's the "find" part of Tony's business in Moldova which becomes a major problem during his first two weeks in the country. Thanks to local bureaucracy, getting the players on the court involved contacting their respective clubs' managers first, who weren't the friendliest guys in the world, to say the least. And so in the first two weeks Tony plays a total of...well, as many players as he did before leaving England. Zero.
What makes things more complicating is that some of the players (2 of 11) on the Moldovan team do not play for Moldovan clubs. One plays in St. Petersburg, Russia and one plays in Israel. And then there is Northern Ireland, where none of the players play, yet Tony ends up playing some of them there. Go figure.
Playing the Moldovans at Tennis is a book which at times is so funny that I would advise to be careful while reading in public places. Once again Tony Hawks proves against all odds that, "there is no reason in the world why you can't do something a bit stupid and prove all your doubters wrong. Or at least that was the idea..."
This book is not available in the U.S. yet. You have to order from amazon.co.uk
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