Paris:- Saturday, 7. December 1996:-The weather this past week has not been something to write home about, so I won't.

Sweden: 2 - France: 3

Completely unnoticed by me last Sunday night, the French Davis Cup team took over television for hours, allowing millions of viewers to watch a suspenseful and possibly improbable tournament end-match that went down to the wire, to the last second, to the final whistle, to a complete French victory.

Even hundreds of millions around the globe who had not seen the final match on TV, probably knew its outcome before I did. I was not only beaten by the competition, but by the entire world audience as well.

Let me just say I don't follow tennis, and I seldom read the sports pages. I know what sport is. I know it is supposed to be humankind's play; it is a socially necessary brick in the house of the construction of humanity. Man got food, then man got shelter and when man had a slight surplus of both, then man played. So I know sport is important.

I never cared much for 'organized' sport. My favorite game was kick-the-can and the only reason I gave it up - before turning 'pro' - was that the other players grew out of it. I'm glad it hasn't been 'organized' and I hope nobody reading this gets the idea that the world needs a new 'professional' sport and kick-the-can is a likely candidate for this status.

On Monday morning, before seven, with the blind staggers, the clock-radio is blaring 'France-Info' into my semi-comatose brain. 'French Team Wins Davis Cup!!!' Under the shower the grey cells get agitated, start feeling their way, and they tell me - France Won Something. This rare 'news' got my attention into low gear.

Monday's Le Parisien has a succinct one-line all-caps one-word headline: 'INCROYABLE!' and the photo below shows five guys in blue 'sports' suits with gold medals at the ends of green straps, standing behind an immense and very ugly silver salad bowl, which has a pedestal about the size of a 45-gallon oil barrel. The photo looks like it was taken through a fish-bowl lens, one with fine vertical stripes.

The guy in the centre is Yannick Noah. He looks insanely happy. The other four guys also look happy, and second from the right, Guy Forget, looks surprised on top of it.

Yannick Noah is a Hero

This is not my opinion; it is a simple truth. As a non-follower of sports in general and tennis in particular, I nevertheless know that Yannick Noah is a hero.

He was a world-class tennis player who was funny when all his competitors were either bankers, cranky cry-babies, or surfers. Yannick has a huge grin with a gap in his front teeth like Terry-Thomas and he had ropey hair that looked like thick, dark spaghetti.

His time at the top was far too short, and since then he has stayed in the news by being a public good-natured good-guy, by doing things for kids, playing music and by being coach of France's various tennis efforts - at the Olympics, or for the Davis Cup. Yannick, in public, is as good at loosing as at winning, and there are few professional sportsmen who do either with his panache.

On Tuesday, Le Parisien again gave the cover and pages two to five to the victory. Headline: 'The Man Who Made France Win' above a half-page photo of Yannick Noah, shouting victory, arms in the air. It is in fact, the second time Yannick has lead the French team to a Davis Cup - they carried it home from the United States in 1991.

In the rain, the team, whose members are Arnaud Boetsch, Guillaume Raoux and Cédric Pioline, besides Yannick Noah and Guy Forget, take a victory tour of the Champs-Elysées after being received by President Jacques Chirac at the Elysée Palace. The ceremony takes place at 11:00 and Yannick arrives after 12:00 - worn out on account of a late flight from Geneva; dressed in what looks like full motorcycle-courier leathers, with a bright blue scarf as a touch of jolly, which I saw on Tuesday's TV-news.

These last details are found on page 24 of Wednesday's Le Parisien. No doubt they would have been page one and two material if not for other events, reported below.

Black Tuesday

At almost exactly six hours after Yannick's arrival at the Elsyée Palace on Tuesday, a huge bomb exploded in the fourth car o a RER train taking commuters to the suburbs south of Paris.