IN some ways it has the same poignancy as seeing an old soldier forced to sell his medals to pay the rent. So there was widespread sympathy last week, reported The Guardian, for Bjorn Borg when he announced that some of his major trophies and his favourite rackets are to come under the auctioneer’s gavel.

Just before Wimbledon starts in June, his trophies and racquets will inspected by a professional auction house. The tennis legend is hoping that a little of the magic of Wimbledon will be sprinkled over the sale and will yield him close to US$1 million. Not bad, eh?

So why is a man who enjoyed such phenomenal success as Borg having to sell off the family silver? “He was taken for a big ride,” Richard Evans, the tennis writer and McEnroe’s biographer, told The Guardian.

Evans recalled seeing Borg with some of his then business associates in Monte Carlo when everyone was drinking his champagne before flying first-class for a week in Japan.

“He was much too trusting. He made bad choices which led to bad luck. Most tennis players of his ilk, with the exception of Roscoe Tanner who is now in jail, have gone on to become very successful millionaires.

“He’s intelligent and amusing and I have to say I’m surprised that he’s having to (auction his trophies). But he’s living in Stockholm and in Sweden, where you get taxed out of existence, so I suppose that may be the reason.”

His personal life, with three marriages, two divorces, two children and two stepchildren, has carried its own expenses. Not to mention the 15 years as a resident in Monte Carlo where the rents would be considerably higher than those around Inya Lake.

More money than sense, some would say about the McCartneys though. According to AFP they were nabbed up in the Canadian tundra cuddling white baby seals on an iceberg.

Fisheries officials said they had considered prosecuting the former Beatle and his wife Heather for interfering with a marine mammal.

The global duo, with a brace of helicopters and a couple of dozen reporters in tow, were protesting the annual killing of 300,000 seals by local hunters.
McCartney called the hunt “cruel”.

Have a guess what? Right on cue, French film star turned animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot came out applauding the McCartneys’ action: “I came to Canada to denounce this horror in 1977. I thank Paul McCartney from the bottom of my heart for his courage,” she said.

There was a little less courage being shown on a Virgin Atlantic flight at around about the time Paul and Heather were ogling the seals.

At 30,000 feet, flying over Greenland (and the baby seals), pandemonium broke out on the Gatwick to Las Vegas route when the plane was hit by storms and plummeted thousands of feet in seconds, reported The Independent.
Claire Daley, one of 451 people on board, hoped the crew would calm her nerves. “I turned round to look at our hostess for reassurance and she screamed: ‘We’re crashing, we’re crashing, we’re crashing’.

“And I just thought: ‘It’s over if an air hostess is telling us we are crashing’. I really thought we were crashing,” she said.

“She screamed every time the plane dropped and when she screamed the whole of the back of the plane screamed. It was terrifying. I was almost hyper-ventilating. I was sobbing – I thought we weren’t going to make it.”

Virgin Atlantic confirmed that flight VS043 had encountered “severe turbulence” and said that reports of the cabin crew’s behaviour were being investigated.
The last word this week, fittingly, goes to William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare certainly has a way of slipping through the fingers. According to UK press reports after three and a half years’ research, and the detailed examination of six paintings, the National Portrait Gallery has concluded that the so-called Chandos portrait shows the true face of Shakespeare – probably.
The gallery’s Dr Tarnya Cooper said that the claim that the Chandos portrait represents Shakespeare has “increased, but it’s not absolutely watertight. We may never find the clincher piece of evidence – though it may yet turn up”.

The Chandos portrait, of a sensitive, almond-eyed fellow with a gold hoop in his left ear and a receding head of hair, has not always been regarded as having quite the look appropriate for England’s greatest writer.

In 1864, one critic, J Hain Friswell, wrote: “One cannot readily imagine our essentially English Shakespeare to have been a dark, heavy man, with a foreign expression, of decidedly Jewish physiognomy, thin curly hair (and) a somewhat lubricious mouth.”

The Chandos portrait of Shakespeare is named after its owners, the Dukes of Chandos. Some believe that Shakespeare’s friend and fellow actor Richard Burbage painted it and gave it to Joseph Taylor, an actor with the King’s Men. Taylor then left the painting to William Davenant, the man who claimed to be Shakespeare’s illegitimate son.

In 1856 it became the property of Britain’s National Portrait Gallery.