The appeal of ugly men

Gstaad

Lenin Moreno is in trouble, despite his very unchristian first name. For any of you unfamiliar with the name, Senor Moreno is the president of Ecuador, a tiny South American country that I like very much because if you’ve met one Ecuadorian man you’ve met them all. There are 16 million Ecuadorians, and eight million of them, the men, all look like identical twins. One of my closest friends on the tennis circuit back in the late 1950s and early 1960s was Eduardo Zuleta, an Ecuadorian who was the colour of copper and could run all day, all night, 48 hours straight, as long as he was chasing a tennis ball. Those were not colour-blind days and I remember how, one day, an Australian lady watching Eduardo playing a match expressed outrage at the fact that he had a very blonde and pretty girlfriend pining away at the courtside. ‘What does she see in him?’ ‘Well,’ I told her, ‘if you care to sneak into the locker-room shower after the match, I’ll point it out, not that you can miss it.’