Match Point

Apparently, when you’re famous, you’re prone to doing things your parents always told you never to do.

            Like get drunk in a club (paging Lindsay Lohan). Going to jail (Lindsay Lohan). Or getting arrested (Lindsay Lohan). Or trash-talking your bosses (Lindsay Lohan). Or generally making bad movies (Lindsay Lohan). 

            And then you have people who just like taking off their clothes in public for no reason at all.

            “Oh my God, he’s doing it again!” Amanda said a few weeks ago. We were watching the men’s quarter-finals at the US Open. Novak Djokovic was playing somebody called Feliciano something and suddenly, he was taking off his shirt.

            “Why does he keep doing that?” Amanda demanded, her face wrinkled into a frown.

            “He’s so scrawny, too!” added Saffy whose taste in men’s bodies tends to run along the lines of the Rock and Vin Diesel.

            “Aiyoh, where got scrawny?” Sharyn moaned. “So han-sum!”

            “A malnourished chicken!” Saffy insisted.

            “I want to know which wet market you go to!” Sharyn muttered as she reached for more popcorn.

            “Seriously,” Amanda said, “it’s like in every single match, he’s taking something off. You’d never seen Roger do that!”

            “Underfed rabbit!” Saffy said warming up to her metaphors.

            “You seriously think Djokovic is hot?” Amanda asked Sharyn.

            “Wah liau, eh!”

            “At least Nadal has some proper muscles on him,” Saffy said. “But you don’t see him ripping his clothes off!”

            Amanda wrinkled her nose. As much as she disliked Djokovic, she reserved a special disdain for Nadal. “That’s because he only takes his clothes off if there’s a buck to be made,” she told Saffy. “Have you seen his latest ad for Tommy Hilfiger?”

            “Seen it? I’m starting a new page in my scrapbook just for him. And I have barely gotten over his Armani ads!”

            I swiveled my head from the TV screen. “You have a scrapbook for Nadal? How old are you?”

            Saffy shrugged. “It’s not just Nadal. I’ve got everyone in there. David Beckham takes up like half the book. He’s always topless.”

            “You don’t find him a bit scrawny?” Amanda said.

            “Oh my God, he’s totally a malnourished ferret, but I’m making an exception for that face. Honestly, he just becomes more and more beautiful the older he gets!”

            The thing that annoys me about the whole thing is that these famous people are actually getting paid to take their clothes off. Like a lot of money. I know because I asked Siri and she told me that Nadal’s two-year contract with Tommy Hilfiger is worth about $3-4m. American dollars.

            “What, just for wearing a pair of tight underwear?” Saffy asked. You could actually see her fabulous bosom start to tremble with outrage.

            Sharyn’s eyes turned misty. “Wah, four million, hah? You pay me four million to wear linger-rie, I also cook for you, ah!”

            You could tell by the expressions on Saffy and Amanda’s faces that the three of us had simultaneous images of Sharyn in a two-piece bikini.

            “It’s absolutely disgraceful that these people are paid so much,” Saffy went on. “I mean, it’s not even their day job. They’re not Chippendales! They’re tennis players. Very rich tennis players. They don’t need all those extra millions!”

            “Yah, lor. Not like you and me,” Sharyn told Saffy.

            “You would think that Tommy Hilfiger would ask someone like Chris Pratt to model,” Amanda said, a comment that met with universal approval from the girls.

            “Oh, now, there is one delicious piece of seared Kobe beef,” Saffy said, her chest puffing up with carnivorous lust. “Why is that man not naked more often? One lousy scene in ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ and that’s it. The only reason I watched that stupid Jurrasic Park movie was to see him take off his clothes and wrestle with T-Rex, and he kept his clothes on the whole time!”

            This morning, I read an online interview with Helen Mirren in which she declared she would not longer be taking her clothes off in movies.

            “Helen Mirren?” Amanda said. “Since when has she been naked on-screen?”

            “Lots of times apparently,” I told her. “She says she was naked in ‘Caligula’. But she says that it’s just so common now and she used ‘Game of Thrones’ as an example.”

            “Yes, that’s very true,” Amanda said. “There’s just no mystery anymore. It’s all just out there. Like that Djokovic. I bet at the Australian Open, he’ll strip down to his ratty old underwear. What else can he do? He’s lost the novelty.”

            Saffy says if you paid her three million bucks, she’d be more than happy to show you some novelty.