WHEN ONE BAGEL SHOULD BE ENOUGH

As a matter of course and before waiting to see how generous the servings were going to be in any restaurant we went to, my father ordered two of everything. Double lager with double lime. Double Madras chicken with double basmati rice. Double fish with double chips. Make that treble chips. And, from the local deli on Sunday mornings, a double bagel for each of us loaded with double cream cheese, double smoked salmon and double pickle.

‘You know, Max, one bagel each is more than enough,’ my mother would say.

I can still see his smile. ‘Enough is never enough when it comes to bagels,’ he’d reply, kissing her twice on each cheek.

This was a sentiment with which I heartily concurred until the other day when Amanda Anisimova was beaten 6-0, 6-0 by Iga Świątek in the Wimbledon women’s final - a defeat referred to, for brutally obvious reasons, as a double bagel. Had my father been alive he’d have eaten the scorecard.

I blench from the bagel metaphor, both on behalf of the bagel itself, which deserves better than to have become a synonym for abject failure, but also on behalf of the bagelled competitor, around whose bowed neck the bagel will henceforth forever hang. As for a double bagel, and in a Wimbledon final of all places, the ignominy of suffering that is too painful to contemplate.

You will tell me that Anisimova is ranked 12 in the world, has been playing professional tennis for more than ten years, is the holder of three titles, vanquished the World No. 1 only two days before in this very tournament, and so must be used to the highs and lows of the circuit. Not impossibly, she’s hung the odd bagel around another player’s throat. Reader, reader, have a heart. Her first Wimbledon final! The world watching! And not to win a single game out of the twelve played! How long before she lives this down, in her own eyes never mind the world’s? What if the answer to that is ‘never’?

‘I pass, like night, from land to land, I have strange powers of speech,’ declares the Ancient Mariner, searching for the person to whom to tell his terrible tale. ‘Instead of a cross or an albatross, two bagels about my neck are hung.’

If I say I wished Anisimova’s opponent had found a way of sparing her this shame, I am not accusing her of callousness. Her job was to win and to win as well as she could. But as that second bagel loomed, could she not, for pity’s sake, have taken her foot off the gas a little? Thrown in a couple of double faults? Missed a drop shot? Or would that have been condescension? Out of respect to her opponent was she obliged to carry out a sacrificial massacre?

I understand the logic of that. And I know that you can damage your own game once you permit even a sniff of compassion enter it. Too many years ago to count, when I was a serious boy table tennis player, already armed with sponge in a world of old-fashioned pimple-batted men, I showed pity to an opponent from whom I’d taken the first game 21-3 and was leading 14-2 in the second. He - a man of about sixty - captained the North Manchester Allied Jam and Marmalade Table Tennis Club and played throughout in a hand-me-down cardigan and hush-puppies. I, of course, wore shorts, lightning-fast plimsolls and blushed easily. On the few occasions he won a point, the grandchildren he’d brought along to support him punched the air and cheered.

Because I couldn’t bear to wipe the floor with him in front of his family, I began overhitting the ball and even missing it completely. So good a job did I make of this that he eventually found his own game and began to overhaul me. By the time I was ready to take back control, he had won. ‘Bad luck, lad,’ he said, when it was all over, shaking my hand and winking at his grandchildren. Later on, I overheard him telling them that he’d gifted me an early lead to make a game of it.

‘How could you be sure you weren’t giving away too many points, grandad?’

‘Experience,’ he said, laughing. ‘You can tell when your opponent doesn’t have what it takes.’

I vowed to take him to the cleaners the next time we met but the Grim Reaper bagelled him before I could.

I repeat - I don’t accuse Świątek of rubbing Anisimova’s face in defeat. But I do blame the culture of sport that glories in what even ideologically soft-centred papers like the Guardian love to call a ‘thrashing’. In that paper’s sports pages no one any longer loses. They are routed, trounced, pasted, pummelled, humiliated. Especially humiliated. To go from the sanctimoniousness of its op-ed pages to its gory coverage of cricket, bowls, croquet and the like, is like closing The Pilgrim’s Progress and immediately opening De Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom.

I revered my father. He had a gargantuan appetite. But my mother was right: one bagel is more than enough.