How went our ‘Last Smoke’ dinner on Thursday, hosted by the Spec’s Andrew Neil at London’s swish Four Seasons Hotel? If not so grand, there were doubtless other such tobacco requiems all around the country. Nicely apt, somehow, that Nanny Blair’s smoking ban coincides with her own cursing, unlamented departure from the nursery. All ‘final gasp’ mourners should have raised a timely toast for happily, poignantly, sport itself handsomely helped celebrate last rites only a week ago when the convivial chain-smoking Argentine, Angel Cabrera, won the US Open championship, leaving Tiger Woods and all the cold-eyed, humourless gym-junkies of professional golf in fretful conclave with their tight-lipped fitness trainers and ‘performance’ shrinks. Fifty-a-day Cabrera has not entered a health club in his life. Said the jovial 37-year-old one-man band: ‘Everyone else on the tour carry round obsessed personal nutritionists and psychologists. I eat steak, drink red wine, and I smoke. Plenty.’ Somewhere in the back of the field, I know, his Brit buddy Darren Clarke (who spends £25,000 a year on his classy Cuban stokies) was cheering. Here’s to Angel delighting Carnoustie three weekends hence at the Open Championship, 19–22 July.
So no chance of a last puff and pipeful of my St Bruno at Wimbledon this week. No turning back clocks at prim, puritan Wimbers, although doubtless it will turn a blind eye when the most useful of its fat cats light up after lunch in the top-whack inner sanctum of its corporate marquees. Only a decade or so ago just about every serious tennis tournament in Britain was a homage to tobacco, with sponsors Rothmans, Wills, Benson & Hedges or John Player twirling their uniformed pretty girls through the courtside crowds, Odeon usherettes doling out the freebie fags to all and sundry.
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