Most comedians only ever have their one novelty hit – Billy Connolly, Jasper Carrott, Nigel Planer all had one-offs, and no matter how hard we all tried, we couldn’t repeat it. Only last week there was a piece in the London Evening Standard about powerful in-car stereos entitled, “Ullo Jon, Gotta New Woofer?” In fact sometimes the articles don’t even have anything to do with cars. Three or four times during the film Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep have scenes on one of the eponymous bridges and each time while the scene was going on there would issue a raucous croaking from a spot at the rear of the cinema. This particular film-showing was at the Warner West End, a brand new multiplex equipped with a state-of-the-art sound system in which high- quality speakers are spread all around the auditorium. The weekenders will probably keep coming, at least until summer ends. They are professionals – there is a green journalist among them, a horticulturist, a gardener. “I arranged an afternoon tea party in the garden and invited everybody in the village, including the vicar.

John Gummer, Secretary of State for the Environment, told them their tents must be taken down in the next six months. (Of course, the people I was supposedly mercilessly satirising were the ones who have adopted the bit most enthusiastically – but that’s something you have to live with.)My major contribution to the outside world has been the title of my 1984 novelty hit single “Ullo John, Gotta New Motor?” There is seldom a magazine or newspaper article even loosely connected with cars or the transport industry in general that doesn’t use some variation of that title. Fernandez demoralised the Argentinian when last they contested a Grand Slam championship, the quarter-finals of the 1993 French Open, recovering from 1-6, 1-5 and saving five match points before winning, 10-8 in the third set.Their meeting here is unexpected, Fernandez making another comeback to beat Sanchez Vicario, 1-6, 6-4, 6-4. “I don’t think we could become full-time professionals unless it is on a worldwide basis so that you would work in the southern hemisphere winter once the European season ended,” he said. The San Francisco 49ers opened with a victory, though it was nothing like as comfortable as the one they cantered to in Super Bowl XXIX, and Dan Marino threw for three touchdowns to lead the Miami Dolphins to a winning start.Back in January, Steve Young, the 49ers quarterback, illuminated a less than glowing Super Bowl when he took away one of Joe Montana’s records by throwing six TDs, but on Sunday he was less interested in abstract matters than the purely physical. Indeed, one of the sadder aspects of the spread of steroids is that any player who improves his power and physique comes under suspicion.The battle against drugs in the game needs to be stepped up and the odds of escaping detection diminished, although whether the call of the chief executive, Maurice Lindsay, for life bans will ever become more than a sound-bite is open to doubt.It is not diminishing the importance of the steroid question to say that it is not the biggest headache facing the game at the moment.A couple of weeks into the centenary season, it is no exaggeration to say that the credibility of the code is under threat.This truncated, transitional season before the advent of Super League in March was always destined to be problematic. But, with Wigan streets ahead of opposition which does not always seem greatly interested in taking them on, its ability to hold on to the attention of a discerning public is even more fragile than was feared.Gates are down, matches outside the 11-team Championship seem to take place in a publicity vacuum and there are few signs anywhere of the improvements that were promised under the pounds 87m chequebook marriage with Rupert Murdoch.The best thing about the centenary season is the way that some clubs, with a nod to tradition, have reverted to playing in proper rugby shirts rather than glorified leisure garments.

For most people that is the only visible evidence that there is anything being celebrated this year or that anything exciting lies ahead.Early days, you might say, trusting that everything is going to slot magically into place next March. But by then a game which has lost credibility with its own public could have left itself with too much ground to make up. Over on the horizon, there is either the US Cavalry ready to ride to the rescue or another war party of Apaches, depending on your point of view.The salvation or the exacerbation of the season is the Halifax Centenary World Cup, due to kick off, although you could be excused for not knowing this, in less than five weeks’ time.This gathering of 10 nations in the World Cup proper and seven more in the tournament for emerging nations could and should be one of the proudest events in the game’s history Forget the sneers about the lack of world- wide penetration. There are almost as few countries where union is played to any standard as there are league – that is not the point.

There will be as many truly competitive games and more exciting rugby played this October in Britain than there was in South Africa this summer and rugby league has an opportunity to show that, on the field, it is a flourishing, vibrant entity.If only anyone believed that the game was capable of organising and presenting itself that way. Promotion and marketing are only just cranking into gear, however, in contrast with the months of hype that preceded union’s jamboree, and ticket sales have been so slow as to constitute a crisis in the making.There is time for that to improve, of course, but it is going to have to improve to a remarkable degree to prevent the staging of the opening match between England and Australia at Wembley on 7 October turning into a damaging mistake. Wembley needs to be half full to make that a success and so far that is just a distant dream.The match is the victim of fall-out from the international battle for league’s soul. Australia is sending a squad devoid of Super League affiliated players, which has left Lindsay decrying its quality on the one hand and wanting people to part with good money to watch it on the other.

You can’t have it both ways.The World Cup is still capable of becoming an outstanding success. Even without players of the calibre of Ricky Stuart, Bradley Clyde and Laurie Daley – all of whom will soon be in court arguing that the Australian Rugby League is acting illegally by excluding them – I would still argue that it represents a higher-quality concentration of rugby talent than the other mob’s counter-attraction in South Africa.The certainty is that making it a success is crucially important, because, in a year that should have been one long uplifting experience, the game is desperately in need of a lift.. Arthur Ashe’s historical triumph as the first black player to win a major tennis tournament overshadowed Tom Okker’s appearance in the inaugural US Open final in 1968 but for the loser, who remains the finest player his country has produced, the occasion prefaced five years in the world’s top five. The Flying Dutchman, as he became known, reached the Wimbledon semi-finals 10 years later before retiring in 1981, aged 37, having also enjoyed great success in doubles with the American, Marty Riessen. He was the Netherlands’ Davis Cup captain for two years in the mid-1980s and now plays the burgeoning seniors tour.
Away from tennis, Okker is a partner in the Jaski art gallery, close to Amsterdam’s celebrated Vincent van Gogh Museum, specialising in the works of modern painters from the Dutch capital as well as Copenhagen and Brussels.“My interest goes back to the mid-1970s, when I would visit galleries around the world while playing tennis, and began my own collection,” he said. “In time it became a kind of obsession.”Once a resident of Switzerland, Okker, now 51, today lives in Hazerswoute, about 30 minutes’ drive from Amsterdam, with his wife, Anna-Marie, and three children. As well as paintings, his home houses many works by the English sculptor, Lynn Chadwick.He is back in New York for the US Open seniors.