Sport on TV: Whores, balls, verbal abuse and a surfeit of nostalgia in soggy SW19

A rain-soaked Wimbledon is also inevitably steeped in nostalgia - what else to do with all those breaks except ransack the archives? But even when play was possible this week there were blasts from the past all over the place, and Jonas Bjorkman brought with him a sound of the old days with his roaring outburst during his loss to Tomas Berdych on Thursday.

In best SuperMac style he told the umpire James Keothavong - older brother of Britain's world No 178 Anne - that he was "absolutely useless", before adding, in Swedish, "You're a fucking maniac. I'm so fucking tired of you." Not that the non-Swede speakers among us knew that at the time. Which prompted the thought that in these days of Hawk-Eye's interventions, we also need courtside interpreters, and in the event of what film-certifiers call "language", translations could be flashed up on screen. Players would have to learn one of the dead languages, like Etruscan or Aramaic, or an artificial one, like Volapuk or Esperanto, to escape punishment by the language police.

Not that Esperanto would be any good, containing as it does no swear words, except perhaps pilkoj, or "balls".

Rafael Nadal has been another history man this week, reminiscent of SuperMac's some-time nemesis, Jimmy Connors. It's not just The Fist Pump - perhaps the finest sight in tennis that doesn't involve a ball - but the way his whole being seems ablaze. The way he runs to his chair at change-overs. The way he glowers round the court after winning a long rally. There was an extraordinary moment during Thursday's win over Mikhail Youzhny when he muttered "Puta", or "whore", over his shoulder at a ball boy who waited a microsecond too long to take his towel from him. If he understood, I'm sure the ball boy didn't mind. Being called a whore by Rafael Nadal is a moment to treasure.

Thursday's rain brought a John McEnroe documentary - as good a way as any to fill the time - and afterwards he told Sue Barker about the origins of the kind of behaviour that brought Bjorkman a $1,500 fine yesterday.

He'd just lost in the 1977 French Open after some questionable calls, and the victor, Phil Dent, told him, "Listen, son, you're in the pros now - you can talk to the umpire, you know." As McEnroe put it, "a light bulb went on in my head."

After a fascinating, wide-ranging chat, Sue Barker wrapped things up. "We're going to change channel now," she said. "And guess what: then we're going to look at the tie-break."

McEnroe's eyes became black pools of nothingness. "Ah, the tie-break," he echoed, staring at the floor with a fixed, wan smile. He looked like a man condemned by the gods to relive the same 22 minutes of his life for all eternity. The past is all very entertaining, but sometimes it just gets in the way. As McEnroe should have said, pilkoj to that.

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