Mirka Federer's spat with Stan Wawrinka was a blast from the past that shows how sterile tennis is now More than 130 years later, this remains the very image that Wimbledon strives to project. The obsession with aesthetics was there in Osborn's day, and it lives on in the cult of Federer - a player celebrated as much for his balletic style as his 17 major titles. As the cultural analyst Elizabeth Wilson points out, tennis shares more DNA with dance than any other mainstream sport. "It is the tension between art and sport that makes it so special," she writes in her book Love Game. Looking back over the long haul, the 1970s bovver boys are the ones who stand out as anomalies, rather than Osborn or Federer. Gentility has always been the standby setting, and misfits - think Fred Perry, the Labour MP's son from Stockport - have usually been snubbed by the establishment. McEnroe, in fact, was the ultimate anomaly, because he became too big to ban. His autobiography actually bemoans the fact that umpires would not penalise him for his temper tantrums, driving him to push the envelope ever further. The more that professional tennis's money depended on me, the more things seemed to be under my control. Ironically, though, McEnroe's commercial appeal relied on the tension between the beauty of his strokeplay and the ugliness of his behaviour. Aesthetics again, you see. According to Wilson, McEnroe and his rivals were the punks of sport, expressing "alienation and youth rebellion." But that was a looser, more human time. Three decades on, the corporations have taken over. Sponsors and agents act as gatekeepers, protecting McEnroe's successors from personal crises. You can see this in Novak Djokovic, a naturally stormy personality who has become house-trained and all too predictable in his public pronouncements. We can find further ironies here. The first is that the truth of tennis is nothing like the genteel image. Any insider will tell you that this is a sport of bitter struggle and financial hardship on the outside courts, a sport where isolated convictions for doping and match-fixing are only the tip of a sinister iceberg, a sport of unprintable nocturnal adventures that could turn your hair white, especially if you are the parent of a promising junior. The second irony is that Federer really is one of the cleanest-living characters on an otherwise chaotic tour. In his case, there is no Tiger Woods-style dark side waiting to be revealed. Yet Federer and his family are still flesh and blood, and "Mirkagate" - small beer though it really is - has given us an insight into the ferocious competitive spirit that lies behind the angelic exterior. Perhaps it is time that we started looking at tennis - this sport of aesthetes - as it really is, rather than as it aspires to be.