The Serious Side of John McEnroe

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The Green, Green Grass of Home

Sporting pilgrimages are always fun. You do it for the history, for all the tales you’ve heard about it, for checking if the real place actually compares to the hyperbolic image your mind has. And irrespective of how the comparison turns out, the experience can never let you down. After all, you are visiting the birthplace of heroes.

Thus, the bleak, overcast skies of a cold English winter couldn’t get my spirits down as I found myself at the gates of the hallowed lawns. Walking down the main street of Wimbledon Town provides you with an immediate impression. You see things as mundane as the Wimbledon Theatre, the Wimbledon Fire Station, the Wimbledon Train Depot, all normal, urban structures, and none of them have anything to do with tennis! For a follower of the sport, whose earliest (rather, only) exposure to Wimbledon has been a TV diet of lawn tennis every June-July, it can be slightly overwhelming to see a Wimbledon sign whichever way you turn, with none of them having any relevance to tennis!

Beyond this, let the pictures take over.

As implied earlier, winter is hardly the ideal time to make a trip here. The sky is gloomy, the sidelines on the court are missing, and the grass is left to grow wild, within reasonable limits. As a result, the courts resemble a neighbourhood park ideal for an evening stroll, rather than a gladiatorial amphitheater where sweat and tears are spilled. This court, for example, is adjacent to Court 18, where Isner and Mahut played their duel-to-the-death last year. It’s interesting to see how a match steadily seeps into popular folk-lore at Wimbledon. Court 18 is already a must-stop on the guided tour, and the guide patiently takes a quarter of an hour coming up with tid-bits of trivia spread over the three days the match took to complete. Looking at the peaceful patch of grass today though, it requires quite a bit of imagination to recreate that atmosphere, despite the guide’s best efforts.

This is the view from the top of Henman Hill. From what I could gather, the title continues to persist, and the locals haven’t re-christened it with an alternative alliterative name, for a more contemporary player. Not yet, anyway.
Sitting on Henman Hill, I realised what I liked about Wimbledon. It’s just about the right size. At least, it was smaller than I had always imagined it to be. I guess all the history and traditions end up adding to the physical dimensions of a place too, in our heads. In reality, the stroll through the court complex was quite a short one. Even the courts are pretty compact, and a spectator is always close to the action. Also, the traditional colours of purple and dark green dominate the landscape, going hand-in-hand with the natural green everywhere, and they serve to create an easy sense of familiarity.

The Champions’ Board always makes for good reading, evoking memories of that player you had forgotten all about, drooling over the memories of that match you swear you will never forget. One thing that strikes me is how often there have been repeated champions here, and in quite a few cases, in succession too. Winning seven matches in a row, in the toughest field of players possible, has always seemed a highly difficult challenge to me. But there have always been guys managing that feat with aplomb, with a regularity that must make a mockery of the statistical probability of it happening. Maybe it’s all about winning the first one. A champion’s mindset towards a title must be starkly different to a player who has never done it before, and that skews the odds in his favour more than anything else. Maybe.

Another enduring image of the Championships for me. And I mean the Rolex, not the Radio Wimbledon. I love the fact that advertising does not find a place within Wimbledon. I find it very intriguing that in this day and age, one of the most prominent sporting events in the world does not believe in its commercialisation. Trust the British to come up with a reason involving ‘tradition’ and ‘gentlemen’. But I do find it very appealing. For one, this is the main reason that the distinctive purple and green of Wimbledon really stick in our mind, and not the ubiquitous cacophony of colours seen elsewhere. And the invisibility of corporate sponsors allows the fan to indulge in an illusion of the tournament being played only for the lofty goals of glory, perfection and truth, rather than the crass pursuit of money. It must be said here that the jackpot of one million pounds for the eventual champion does put a slight dampener on this train of thought. Ironically, these are the thoughts that spring to mind on seeing Rolex, the one corporate brand distinctly associated with the Championships. In its masterful positioning as the Official Timekeeper of the Tournament, Rolex hitches its brand to an even bigger brand – Wimbledon, and in the process, makes a few others go green, I suspect.

Centre Court, at last! And in all its off-season glory! Special attractions of the season include a lighting apparatus which supports the grass in its attempts at photosynthesis in the gloomy murk, and an electrified fence around the perimeter of the grass, supposedly to keep out the adventurous local jackal. While I tried to get myself a quiet moment amid the distractions, and figure out the exact spot where Nadal might have crashed to the ground in ecstasy in the deepening gloom of that 2008 evening, I couldn’t help but feel slightly aggrieved that a jackal might have got closer than I ever would to the grass of Centre Court.

Every seat in Centre Court is covered with its own individual seat wrapper, which evoked a vague feeling of exasperation in me just looking at it. I wonder who had the patience to actually carry out the task. Anyway, by this time, our guide was in his element, waxing loquacious about past events in the Court, and I felt a stab of envy for his job. He was engrossed in narrating tales of sporting bravery, triumph and despair to a crowd of people who had been hoping for something exactly like that to make their day, and were now hanging on to his every word.

 

 In the end, I guess it made my day too.