LONDON—Wimbledon follows hard on the French Open, a little too hard for an American shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic and trying in vain to find the right time to go to sleep. It’s a head-spinning change to walk off the wide thoroughfares of Paris and onto the narrow streets of southwest London 10 days later. The motorbikes and fashionable 20-somethings of urban France give way to suburban England’s strollers, babies, and packs of teenage girls huddling and shrieking with laughter.
One thing that you still get in both places, and which has become something of a dying breed back in New York, is the newsstand. There are at least three of them, bristling with dead wood, in a single block of the Wimbledon village. It’s a tribute, I suppose, to the English dedication to the word. More specifically, it's a tribute to its headline writers' dedicaton to the nickname.
John McEnroe was famously known as Superbrat here; the word was used as if it were his real name: “Disgrace of Superbrat!”; “Superbrat out in the cold, and he blames the English weather!” Judging by the headlines I saw as I walked through the village on Saturday, Andy Murray’s behavior at the French Open has earned him a temporary nickname: Mr. Grumpy. But it may be retired soon. Only a British tabloid like The Sun could take Murray’s quote from yesterday—“I enjoy playing, but I put a lot of pressure on myself”—and turn it into this headline: “BYE BYE GRUMPY: Andy Murray last night insisted he won’t be Mr. Grumpy at Wimbledon next week.”
For a U.S. writer, this is a tremendously guilty pleasure: Not only do you still have newspapers here, but you get to see, for better and worse, what the written word can do when it's set loose. It can be sensationalizing, it can be illuminating, it can be absurd, it can be grotesque, it can be groan-inducing, and it’s almost always unfair. But for me Wimbledon wouldn’t be the same without its words.
With that I’m going to kick off the first in a daily series of posts I’ll be doing from the All England Cub, called Keeping Tabs. Each morning, I’ll pick out a few of the day’s many local stories and headlines, from the preposterous to the sublime.
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I’ll begin with the unabashedly preposterous, because this was the first headline I came across this morning, in the Sunday Sport, and it gave me a good laugh to start the day:
“GREEDY RAF HAS EYE ON ONE MORE SWISS ROLL.” This newsflash is accompanied by a photo of a feral-looking Nadal on court baring his teeth and upper gums in triumph, while a small photo of Federer gazes up at him with a look of fright.
“Defending champion Rafael Nadal wants to heap further misery on Roger Federer,” the story begins, “and wreck the Swiss master’s dream of becoming Wimbledon’s greatest ever.”
What vicious language did Nadal use to make himself seem so “greedy” and frightening?
“I will be going [to Wimbledon] with high motivation.”
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Now for the sublime, or at least the very interesting: a dual interview in the Guardian with Andy Murray’s and Novak Djokovic’s early coaches, Pato Alvarez and Niki Pilic. The insights are many:
Alvarez on the young Murray:
“He was a very good boy . . . on the court he was very quiet. I don’t think I once saw him get angry in the three years I worked with him, so it surprises me to see him get angry so often now. . . . Someone needs to get inside his head and fix this because the calmer he can stay on the court, the better he will do.”
“He did not care about free time,” Alvarez continues. “He just wanted to work. If Andy was not on the court, in the gym, or in class, you did not hear from him. It was like he disappeared. . . . In all my time coaching, and that includes 16 years as the national coach of Spain, Andy is the most talented player I have worked with. Technically he had everything when he came to us.”
Pilic on the young Djokovic:
“Very soon I found that the young guy was very special—in the way he talked, the way he took the game seriously, always warming up and preparing in the right way . . . He initially didn’t have a very good serve. We had to work on improving his wrist action for one year to help improve his serve. I changed his grip on the forehand because it was too much of a Western grip.”
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After that foray into the earnest and illuminating, the Daily Star Sunday happily takes us back down into the comical muck. They begin their coverage with a shot of Roger Federer in full scream, under the caption: “GROIN FOR GLORY: Federer puts injury behind him.”
Next, the paper casts a skeptical eye on one famous woman’s chances, based solely on who’s supporting her: “It looks like Serbian sizzler Ana Ivanovic has no chance of Wimbledon glory after being backed by football’s biggest loser, Avram Grant, the Israeli coach who brought Portsmouth and West Ham down in successive seasons.”
The Star Sunday goes onto reveal that a superstitious Rafael Nadal wants to play golf at the same club, with the same three friends, where he played the day before the tournament began last year.
The paper is at its finest when it does some investigative work on Andy Murray’s secrets to success, one of which is “avoiding his mum’s cooking at all costs!”
“Murray insists the way to [prepare properly] is to do everything as normal as possible,” the paper says, “starting in the kitchen, where his mother Judy is banned.”
“Mum’s cooking was so bad when I was a kid,” Murray said. “Everything was out of a can. If something was nice, it was a ready-made meal—otherwise she used to give us veggies out of a tin. The only thing she did that I liked was tinned pears and cold custard.”
Murray has been advised lately, by players and journalists alike, to cut the apron strings. Is this his way of starting?
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There’s lots more, where that came from; there must be a dozen dailies I haven’t looked at yet. So I will leave you on this cloudy Sunday at the All England Club with a cheerful bit of advice from one of the abovementioned tabloids: “Cream up your strawberries, Wimbledon starts tomorrow!”