Playing the Moldovans at Tennis » (Reprint)

Tony Hawks is a London-based writer and comedian who makes regular appearances on British TV and radio. Playing the Moldovans at Tennis is his second book, and if you have not already done so, he strongly urges you to buy his first book Round Ireland With a Fridge, a surreal adventure prompted by a £100 bet. Unlike most authors, Tony has singularly failed to settle down and live in the country with a wife and four children. This, however, is his ambition.

It doesn't take much - "£100 is usually sufficient" - to persuade Tony Hawks to take off on notoriously bizarre and hilarious adventures in response to a bet. And so it is, a pointless argument with a friend concludes in a bet - that Tony can't beat all eleven members of the Moldovan soccer team at tennis. And with the loser of the bet agreeing to strip naked on Balham High Road and sing the Moldovan national anthem, this one was just too good to resist.

The ensuing unpredictable and often hilarious adventure sees him being taken in by Moldovan gypsies and narrowly avoid kidnap in Transnistria. It sees him smuggle his way on to the Moldovan National Team coach in Coleraine and witness (almost) divine intervention in the Holy Land.

In this inspiring and exceptionally funny book, Tony Hawks has done it again, proving against all odds that there is no reason in the world why you can't do something a bit stupid and prove all of your doubters wrong. Or at least that was the idea....

Kirkus Reviews

Another goofy travelogue—and a UK bestseller—by the English writer who, on a dare, once hitchhiked around Ireland with a refrigerator. Don't come to Hawks, as you might with just about any other literary travel-writer, expecting to glean respectful social-studies lessons about exotic Third World places and why they seem that way to jaundiced First Worlders. When Hawks takes us to Moldova—that sandwich-thin, Romanian-speaking slice of the former Soviet Union once known as Bessarabia—it's mostly to complain about the awful food, the horrific drinking habits of the locals, and the absence of reliable telephones, electric lights, and hot water. Still, he's quick to admit his ignorance of the place. He writes, for instance, that he'd been blissfully unaware of a separatist movement of Russian-speaking Moldovans that declared a "Transnistrian Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic" following the collapse of the Gorbachev regime. "All this had gone largely unnoticed by Western observers and particularly by me," he confesses. "I'd been too busy practicing my serve." He'd been doing so to bone up for another goofy dare, namely, to find and play tennis matches against the Moldovan national soccer team, which had given the English team a good scare in an international match some months earlier. His account of his travels to Moldova, Transnistria, Northern Ireland, and Israel to track down those worthy opponents may remind some readers of Bill Bryson (except that Hawks is genuinely funny and doesn't have to reach to get a laugh). The payoff (finding out how the bet turns out) is well worth the occasional dry patches. Not particularly elevated or elevating, but a lot of fun.