LONDON—I had thought, as I walked to the newsstand this morning in the warmest air we’ve had here in 10 days, that I might get a Sunday morning break, that the news and the headlines and the gossip and all of the other printed nonsense would slow down and pay their respects to the holy day. The birds were singing, the neighbors were jogging, and there were no tennis balls or press rooms in my immediate future. What was there to get worked up about today?
Naturally, I was wrong. How could I forget? News and headlines and gossip and nonsense: That’s what Sunday mornings are really all about. The papers were not only stacked higher on the shop floor, there were many more of them spread across it—another forest felled. So here we go, keeping tabs, first Sunday edition.
The News of the World makes its KT debut today; I’m not sure where it’s been hiding on the shop floor, or if it only comes out on Sunday or what, but here it is, living up to its fellow tabloids with this headline about Laura Robson and the soft-hearted toff spectators of Wimbledon:
POOR EXCUSE FOR LOSERS
The paper takes issue, I suppose properly, with the fans who gave Robson, 17, and fellow Brit Elena Baltacha standing ovations even after they blew first-set leads and lost.
“It would have been far too brutal to simply say that Robson, whatever her growing pains, is short of the requisite fitness for a top athlete and that Baltacha was short of the requisite mental strength. Too brutal. But too true.”
The News also contributes to this week’s list of vintage headlines with this pithy description of Maria Sharapova and her loudest supporter, her fiancé, Sasha Vujacic:
SLAM HUNK
The Independent is back, blanketing the lawns with its requisite 10 pages of coverage.
Most interesting to the daily Wimbledon watcher are these nuggets:
—The paper decides who had the better celeb support, the Williamses with Diana Ross, or Rafael Nadal with Grace Jones (Nadal is apparently big with the 80s post-New Wave; Boy George tweeted his admiration for a shirtless Rafa on the first day). The Independent goes with Ross, because she secured a seat in the Royal Box, while Jones could only "get into a corporate box.”
—There was speculation that the increasingly hirsute Andy Murray was going to go the Bjorn Borg route and not shave his lucky beard before tournament’s end. But Murray assured reporters that it will be gone for his Monday match with Richard Gasquet.
—The paper's third nugget? It employs a writer named Steve Tongue.
No, the Sunday Times is not the same as the Times, I always have to remind myself, the way it is in New York. Nor is it the same as the Mail on Sunday, which was missing from my shop floor this morning. The Sunday Times is a forest of its own, and almost as difficult to navigate—I will find you, Culture section, you can run but you can't hide forever!
The paper does manage to tell us something that I hadn’t heard, but which TV viewers may have. Marion Bartoli ordered her mother and mad-scientist father off the court during her last match. “I don’t remember what I said [to them],” Bartoli said later, after she’d won, “but I think it was really clear.”
—Also of interest: Barry Flatman writes about a new IBM technology that tells us how many yards each player covers during a match, and how fast their individual sprints are. It’s being tested on Court 18 this year, but will likely soon be able to let us know who the fastest players are, and who . . . isn’t as fast.
—Alas, no Times means no Simon Barnes, but we do get another favorite British tennis writer of mine, Nick Pitt (now I finally know where to find him). He looks ahead to Murray-Gasquet and paints them as opposite sides of the same coin.
Both were raised by tennis parents, both were given racquets as toddlers, both have Hall of Fame talent that they haven’t put to full use. “Where they differ,” Pitt writes, “is in temperament and style. Gasquet is a man of the sun and the Mediterranean, with an attacking, flamboyant style, wielding his racquet with the freedom and mastery with which Picasso used pencil and paintbrush. Murray, in contrast, is a magnificently miserable warrior from the rainy north.”
Pitt goes on to say that their contrast is best exemplified in their backhands. Gasquet’s is a “flowing stroke with a huge windup and a tremendous flick of the wrist . . . the whole mechanism is a miracle of timing.” Murray’s backhand is “utilitarian, back with both arms, through with both arms." But, if anything, "it’s more effective.”
—From the sublime to . . . Pat Cash. His column appears on the page after Pitt’s, and perhaps the first sentence is all you need to read. In search of a past champion to compare to the hotheaded Andy Murray, the 46-year-old Aussie with the shag haircut takes a trip to the local library and combs the tennis history books. He returns with a surprising choice: “Turn back the clock a few decades and you’ll find a young guy called Pat Cash, brimful of feistiness, a single-minded attitude, and perhaps a little reluctance to listen to advice. Sound familiar?”
Yes. Yes it does. As does the advice he gives to Murray: Get a better second serve. It’s the shot that wins Wimbledon. A familiar point, yes, but a fair and important one as well, even in this era, when the chip and charge return has become virtually extinct. Murray’s second serve is his biggest weakness.
OK, enough about second serves and stylistic contrasts and other dreary technicalities. The Sunday Sport certainly has no need for them, and it was nearly sold out around the corner. The tab opens its own Murray coverage in a punchier, if less high-flown, way:
HOT MURRAY UP FOR A GAS EXPLOSION
Still, the Sport seems to favor another player, “Rampant Rafael Nadal,” who they believe, like a hungry lion rubbing the sleep out of his eyes and lazily looking for prey, is “in the mood for his third title.”
But the paper does seem to push his case for dominance a little too hard at times. In the middle of its article on Nadal’s last win, the editors insert the word “UNSTOPPABLE” in bold capital letters. What did Mr. Unstoppable say to inspire such a confident prediction for his future?
“I didn’t have rhythm,” Nadal said of his match with Gilles Muller, “and in the tiebreaker it’s like a lottery, but I’m very happy with how I served.”
The man is indeed on a rampage.
Perhaps, now that we’ve come to the deep end of the tab pool, and news is getting more difficult to dig up, it’s best to let the various headlines do the talking for themselves, with a little translaton on the side. These are presented in ascending order of absurdity:
POLE-AXE FOR GAEL (i.e., Monfils loses to Kubot of Poland)
GIRL POWER GONE MAD (i.e., Serena mumbles a complaint about court placement)
MURRAY WILL SLAM IT HOME (i.e., Murray says he has a positive outlook)
SHARAPOVA MAKING ALL THE RIGHT NOISES (self-explanatory, when accompanied by a photo of a fist-pumping Vujacic)
GASQUET BLOWS! Andy turns up the heat on rival (Article begins: "Andy Murray has cranked up the pressure on Grand Slam choker Richard Gasquet")
And finally, the Mail, in a dual-headline combination that sums up the tabloids in all of their bombastic, pessimistic, schizophrenic glory:
MURRAY: I WANT TO REWRITE HISTORY!
That’s the back page, for the world to see. This is the inside page, which has a slightly more muted tone:
“Murray knows that the daunting spectre of Nadal still looms large.”
Oh, well, I liked the whole rewriting history thing better. Stupid daunting spectre of Nadal, will it ever stop looming?