Slice] Lob] Smash] Kill] (It's only a friendly . . .)

I'm unzipping my sports bag, sliding the racket out, picking at the buttons on my polo shirt, about to play a friendly game of tennis. Friendly? Well, not quite as unfriendly as the sport you see on television; we're not going to be fouling, taking drugs to enhance our performance, disputing line-calls. But we are competing. We are, in our particular way, trying to prevail, to be the best. This is not just fun; this is sport.

I take the tube of balls, pop the ring-pull, pour the balls out on the court. Steve, the guy I'm playing against, says: 'By the way, I haven't been playing much lately - I'm useless at the moment.'

'Yeah? Well, don't worry - I went to bed at four. I still feel pretty sick, actually.'

I can feel the negotiations beginning. How seriously are we going to take this? We're searching for a precise level. I think: would it be ridiculous not to play an actual game - to just knock the ball around for a while and go to the pub? I say: 'Let's see that racket.'

'I'm not really used to it yet . . .'

'It's the one Edberg uses, right?'

We stand on opposing baselines, looping the ball over at each other, trying to keep it friendly. After two minutes Steve puts one on my backhand, making me run for it; I can see the ball coming over low, there's no chance, I scramble backwards, lunge at it, nearly going over, and . . . the ball kicks up higher than I thought, giving me more time, and the shot is perfect, a total fluke, clearing the net by an inch, hitting the court 15 feet from Steve's racket. I think: Wow] What a shot, brilliant.

Steve says: 'Oh come on] We're knocking up.' And I'm in a dilemma: do I pretend that I meant to hit the ball like that, or . . . but this is a friendly game. We're not competing. So I say: 'Sorry, it was a total fluke.' I pick a ball out of my pocket and hit it to his backhand, not a cruel shot by any means, but one that makes him stumble as he sticks his racket out. I could kill the return, but I don't, I hold my racket still, letting the ball fall short: it's a sporting move. But Steve shuffles and stretches awkwardly; the ball hits the carbon-fibre on his racket, lands in the net. He's on the ground. I didn't mean to do this. I'm getting scared at the prospect of an actual game: he'll murder me.

People keep telling me that sport is no good any more now that everybody cheats, now that the tradition of the gentleman amateur has finally broken down. But that's nonsense. People have always cheated in sport. It's just that they're not so ashamed of it any more. Sure, when the Corinthians played soccer in 1890 they would never score from the penalty spot, because no gentleman would ever commit a deliberate foul - so it must have been the referee's mistake, right? But do you think that's because they were saints? Do you think they wanted to humiliate their opponents any less than, say, Arsenal do now? No, they wanted to humiliate them more. A gentleman wouldn't foul anybody] How patronising. They didn't just want to win - they wanted to win with a hand tied behind their back. And afterwards, they walked off the pitch quietly - no punching the air, no laps of honour, no bursting into tears like Andre Agassi. Well, we've won, and you suck, and we don't even care] We're off to tend to our country estates now, get a bit of fly fishing in. That's the code of the gentleman.

But people still whinge on about it, don't they? They want their sportsmen to behave like vicious upper-class sods in war-films. You've heard the one old guy in the room, saying: 'If Maradona had an ounce of decency in him, he'd go up to the referee and say, look, it touched my hand.' But Maradona was wild with delight, he really cared. Twenty years ago in cricket, if the ball clipped your bat and you were caught, but the umpire didn't hear it, you 'walked' - you admitted it, you came clean. You gave yourself out. Everybody applauded. And then when you won, you knew you'd dealt a really nasty blow to the opposition. Now that was a way to crush a team's morale. You didn't care any less than Maradona. You were just a little bit more sneaky, more Imperial about the whole thing.

Now look at today's sportsmen. Footballers, for instance, don't just cheat occasionally during the game, when they're hard pressed - they cheat routinely, opportunistically. The ball goes out for a throw-in; the guy who takes the throw is supposed to take it from the place it went out of play. But does he? Not a chance. He makes up as much ground as he can. You sometimes see them run 10 yards. And the referee does absolutely nothing. He lets it happen. Why? Because if he stopped the game every time he saw somebody cheat, the game would get boring. People would stop watching. So the advertisers would take their money away, and the game would die.

Referees are employed by the same people who lure the sponsors. It's like the drug barons on certain holiday islands paying the police to be lenient so the tourists will keep coming back. I once went to a referees' class - a group of would-be referees studying for their proficiency exam. The teacher kept saying: 'Don't be too harsh, don't blow your whistle for every minor offence; the essence of your job is to keep the game going.'

But we're having a friendly game here. I've got one on the forehand, and I punch it to Steve's left, a good shot, nice and low, going away from him, and I move towards the net, but somehow I can't do it, I'm too cowardly, and I catch the next shot on the half-volley, a pathetic half-hit lob. He moves towards it; I cower, terrified, he can whip it right down . . . but he doesn't, he lobs it, giving me a chance. The ball loops over my head and I'm on my way, might just about . . . I get to the ball, edge it with my racket, trip over, skid along the tarmac on my chest, wham]

Later, I ask Steve why he didn't deliver the killer blow, why he'd been so sporting.

'Sporting?' he says. 'I just wanted to watch you suffer for a little bit longer.' Very much the old-fashioned attitude.