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Why the Swiss tennis legend brings out our misguided love of a first name
Can there be a more irritating word in world sport than “roger”, specifically as it is applied to the dreamy stud-muffin of SW19? Do you know, I’m not certain there can. Not even “Lewis”, for motor-racing’s adorable, chin-strapped gas-guzzler. Or “Pep”, for the dishy daddy of Sky Sports’ Super Sunday.
Make no mistake: those endearments are exceptionally annoying, too. But, like a double foot-fault deep into the fifth set, something about the promiscuous use of “Roger” really stinks the place out. There’s the maddening presumption, of course. And the icky overfamiliarity. But most pungent of all the malodours emanating from “Roger” is the whiff of middle-aged man-musk. It’s quite the bouquet.
For yours truly, and also fragrantly, the murky sense-memory most immediately conjured by the indiscriminate employment of the Christian name of the fanciable finger-blower is the Ralgex reek of the gents’ locker room. That safe space where bloody good blokes roll their feelings up with their socks and stuff them inside their sneakers, all the while nurturing feverish schoolboy fantasies of stolen moments with the shapely captain of the Firsts. (Mine was called Jason.)
Most pungent of all the malodours emanating from “Roger” is the whiff of middle-aged man-musk
But perhaps I’m overegging it — wouldn’t be the first time — and my problem with this whole “Roger” thing is simply that his is such an unromantic name for such a dashing figure. I mean, isn’t the bathos just unbearable? “Roger” is an affirmative muttered by security guards and children pretending to be spies, sticky fingers pressed to imaginary earpieces. Or, it’s an ante-diluvian euphemism for sex, possibly still used by death-breathed snug-bar smoothies, reminiscing about ancient conquests from beneath their hair transplants. (Roger’s also the dog in a poem by Ted Hughes: “He’s just a sack of snoring dog./ You can lug him like a log.”) “Roger” really ought not be the name we use to refer to such a stunning exemplar of masculine style and grace, even an old-timey variety of it: rich, white, cisgender...cardigan-wearing.
And yet, we all use it when speaking of the sexy Slammer, though next to none of us has any claim on him beyond the fact we’ve seen him on the telly. It’s the same with “Rafa”, for Roger’s hench nemesis. Until Melbourne, “Novak”, too, gloried in the status of mononym. Now Private Eye insists on “Novax Djokovid” for the swivel-eyed Serb, and really he has only himself to blame. Our Andy? No, he’ll always be Andy Murray. The spiky baseliner doesn’t invite intimacy, even of the imaginary kind. More power to his (doubtless injured) elbow.
But Roger and Rafa, those glistening show-court himbos, they’ll always be on first-name terms with the world. Like Elvis, and Jesus. And— somebody please throttle me with a sweaty headband — Boris.
This is, I think, a relatively recent development. Laver, Rosewall, Năstase, Borg, McEnroe, Connors, Lendl, Edberg, Sampras, Agassi. We can summon their first names, naturally we can, but if I said “Ken”, or “John”, or “Pete”, in isolation, you’d have no clue who I’m on about. Perhaps the other Boris (Boris I), the tennis player, was the rule-proving exception. Perhaps that was because, like Boris Johnson (Boris II), Boris Becker was a martyr to his pecker, made a farce of his private life and his public life, and as a result is regarded as a Total Lad. (Both Bonking Borises— Boris I and Boris II — would have made excellent Rogers.)
Who is responsible for this mess? We could blame the pundits (Tim, Greg, Martina), invariably retired players who, presumably, really are on first-name terms with the current stars of the game. Equally, we could point to a more general relaxation of formalities, as society goes sports-casual and authority figures seek to telegraph their supposed common touches — they wish! — by insisting on Tony or Dave or Sadiq. (It is, you may have noticed, the more sincere and — blush! — authentic politicians who, for all their faults, we continue to call by their full names: no one, possibly not even Mr May, refers to Mrs May as “Theresa”.)
But I think it’s something deeper, and weirder, and particularly male, that prompts all this uncomfortable Rogering. We know the soft-handed Swiss is catnip to glamorous women, as Anna Wintour and countless others will confirm. But I fear he means more, incalculably more, to a certain kind of chap. One who needs someone— preferably another man — to exalt, to rhapsodise, and, yes, to fancy a little bit.
We needn’t limit ourselves to tennis; the Rogerers don’t. Remember the Formula One supremo forever known as “Bernie”? Why generations of boot-cut-jeans wearers (Jeremys?) should want so badly to be besties with an inch-high tax avoider is another of those mysteries that, like a Jimmy Carr joke, one would rather not have explained. Bernie, one suspects, is the type of man who keeps his VIP lanyard round his neck during coitus, lest his partner should doubt his special status. Perhaps it’s worth remembering that, during World War II and for years afterwards, we Brits knew Stalin as “Uncle Joe”.
I think it’s something deeper, and weirder, and particularly male, that prompts all this Rogering
Now, football has taken the stomach-turning hero-worship to a new extreme. While I genuflect to no one in my admiration for Man City’s master tactician, don’t you think we might be taking things a smidge too far with the obsessive “Pep this” and “Pep that” and “Pep the other”? When we’re not marvelling about Pep’s use of a false nine, we’re swooning over Pep’s fetching knitwear, fawning on Pep’s rugged salt’n’pepper stubble, Pep’s remarkable multilingual proficiency, Pep’s brooding touchline intensity. In England, there is a cult of the foreign football manager so slavering that it makes the Roger stans look like amateurs.
Where did it start? Not with Pep. First came Arsène. The austere Alsatian, who managed Arsenal for roughly two centuries in football-manager years, set the template for sophisticated (eats in restaurants with tablecloths), cultured (reads books without pictures) foreign managers to come. It was on Arsène — Le Professeur— that we rehearsed the craven grovelling that has achieved its full potential with Pep. He was, it was agreed, pure class, applauded for the artistry of his teams and the science of his approach. No wonder Sir Alex (who had to settle for“Fergie”) turned such an angry shade of rouge in his presence.
After Arsène, le deluge. Most famously Sven, the sexually incontinent Swede, and José, the swaggering silver fox, with his stadium-sized hubris. And now we have a mortification of Eurobosses to crush on: gegenpressing Teuton technocrats; glowering carabinieri imported from Serie A. Handsome, urbane, fluent in a bedazzlement of tongues including both the language of sign (technical-area dialect) and, no doubt, the lingo of lurve, even the more minor members of this gilded gang — the Mini Pep at Arsenal, Southampton’s Klopp clone — are treated with a cringing reverence, by press and public alike. For a time, I believed this was simply because, with their cashmere V-necks and their luxury-watch endorsements, they are unimaginably exotic compared to the lumpen dolts who once patrolled English touchlines. (Fun fact: no homegrown manager has ever won the Premier League.) And maybe that was all it was, for a time.
But the reverence has turned to idolatry, and the super-managers’ thoughts are solicited, and received with worshipful respect, on all the issues of the day: not just the necessity of playing out from the back, but the government’s response to Covid, and how to stop racism, and improve the nation’s mental health, and end the culture wars, and address the climate emergency, and if any one of them was ever moved to tell us what to watch on Netflix we’d probably fall to our knees, weeping with gratitude.
We needn’t get bogged down in the dreary sociology behind this phenomenon — family breakdown; discrediting of political classes; absence of leadership; death of God — but should we not question the wisdom of putting quite so much faith in men whose chief qualification for sainthood seems to be the ability to conduct multiple daily press conferences without ever saying anything memorable — and, in some cases, anything intelligible? That, and the fact they didn’t grow up in Britain?
As with Roger and Rafa, it’s that last bit, the foreign bit, that seems to be curiously significant; indeed, the determining factor. After all, Eddie Howe doesn’t get this kind of treatment. No one cares what Brendan Rodgers thinks about the crisis in the Met. David Moyes can only dream of being asked his opinion on the social-media habits of Gen Z. Graham Potter on Ukraine? Do us a lemon.
As with Roger and Rafa, it’s that last bit, the foreign bit, that seems to be curiously significant
As for Gerrard and Lampard (Stevie G and Lamps, as it were), the managers of Aston Villa and Everton — as Esquire goes to press — maybe lavishly decorated former Premier League poster boys, but no one gives the faintest toss what they think about matters of state.
(An anomaly: Roy Hodgson, who can’t pronounce his “r”s, is routinely referred to as “Roy”,and not just for fun. His counsel is also sought on topics far beyond football. I blame his years managing abroad, as well as his pathetically well-documented interest in literary fiction. Honestly, anyone would think the man was foreign.)
How far will all this go? Could Roger end up as President of Europe? Might we like a silky continental for monarch? Are we ready for King Pep?
Puzzling over this important topic the other day, I decided that, after all, perhaps all this bowing and scraping around Roger, Pep and co is not so shameful. Previously, the British tradition involved promoting violently inarticulate young men with moronic training-ground nicknames to senior role-model positions. Having endured years of Chopper and Psycho, Gazza and Wazza, perhaps we’re better off with our cute little pashes on Pep.
A final observation: When mulleted Spurs heroes Hoddle and Waddle launched their fleck-trousered assault on the pop charts in the spring of 1987, the leggy duo’s record-label bosses decided to go with first names only for their new act, and so “Diamond Lights” (peak position#12) was credited to Glenn & Chris, as they would never have been called while playing football. Sadly, though perhaps not unjustly, a follow-up failed to chart.
Alex Bilmes is the editor-in-chief of Esquire. This piece appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of the magazine