When I visited Wimbledon in 1984 it was a dream come true. I had been following what is now known as a golden era in tennis for a few years, and particularly enjoyed the drama and passion of John McEnroe. My anticipation was in hyper-drive when the game I had procured a ticket for, the men’s final, turned out to be another in a line of clashes between McEnroe and Jimmy Connors. I couldn’t wait.

In a long list of things that went wrong for me in the day or two prior to the final, the one that irked me the most was that somehow I had lost my ticket. These were pre-digital days, and one couldn’t just show the officials an email copy on one’s mobile phone. But still, I didn’t expect any great drama; just an annoying hold-up. My angst was soothed by the fact that I was accompanying Charles H. Price II, the US Ambassador to the UK, and I anticipated an ambassadorial intervention if there were problems, even though I was not a US subject.

Charley and I met a couple of years earlier when he was Ambassador to Belgium and I was a lowly bureaucrat at the United Nations. My first game of tennis in a decade was embarrassing but Charley was shouting drinks at the clubhouse that afternoon, and we spoke at length about the First World War. We would bump into each other from time to time after that – we were both moved to London by our governments – and he always believed I was keen on tennis, even though I never returned to the tennis club. Thus the ticket to Wimbledon enclosed in a US embassy envelope.

As it turned out we went straight through the assembled, and jovial, forces of security, and took up our seats a quarter hour before the match was due to begin. Also in our party was a Hungarian diplomat of some note, and his gorgeous girlfriend of the time – a Pole, I believe.

Just as the match was to begin, after the warm-ups and the introductions, the Polish girlfriend developed an unfortunate cough. It seemed obvious to me that she had something stuck in her throat. However, given the profound tension of that exact moment – the most anticipated game of the year between tennis’s two biggest stars – she tried to suppress it. That never works for long, of course, and just as McEnroe was lining up the ball to smash the opening serve of the match she launched into the loudest and most earnest expulsion of the depths of one’s being that I have ever experienced. Mucous, wrestled off the extremities of her unfortunate lungs, began flying across the heads of the well-to-do in the few rows in front of us and on to the court.

I immediately turned in my seat to administer hearty thumps on the back of the choker, but was beaten to it by the Hungarian. I was completely oblivious to it at the time, but on the tennis court McEnroe had missed the ball completely, and had turned to face our party. He knew Charley, but displayed what can only be described as a fierce glare at the Magyar-Polish activity that was now dominating the arena and worldwide television coverage. By the time I looked around, however, I saw McEnroe, serial blasphemer and tantrum expert, soften his look. As the involuntary guttural utterances continued, and the condition became dangerous, McEnroe seemed concerned.

I became more panicked with the seriousness of the Polish situation and I looked around for help in time to see McEnroe, in what seemed to be one bound, jump up over the boundary fence, up over the rows of astonished fans, and in to our row. He immediately picked the now-purple Pole up, turned her around, and administered the Heimlich manoeuvre – great abdominal thrusts under her rib cage. She was facing me, so my view of this couldn’t have been better, and, as many a front rower at a comedy festival will know, one invariably gets drawn in to the act. For me this meant my forehead became the target for the offending choke-causer: a small hard candied sweet. It hit me hard but clung to my head for a few seconds before dropping to the ground. The Pole went limp, and McEnroe let her collapse into her seat. He looked at my host with a twinkle in his eye and said “Charley, will you let me get on now and beat this bastard?”

I was transferred to the Canberra office a few weeks later and never saw Charley again. Or McEnroe, in person. I’ve always been suspicious of hard candies. And I never took a Polish girlfriend.