The Championships, the high point of the tennis calendar, are over. As a tournament, as entertainment, it delivered the way it always does. With hundreds of matches played over the course of two weeks, it can hardly fail to give us something memorable in terms of drama. And while neither of the finals caught fire, we did get to see two players live out the dream of winning this tournament for the first time.
But any event that lasts as long as a Grand Slam—tennis puts on the equivalent of four Olympics each year—and draws half a million people into one small, diamond-shaped plot of land, qualifies as being more than just a tennis tournament, and more than just an athletic contest. It is, as much as anything else, a place to see more of your fellow humans at once than you can anywhere else. There must be dozens of ways of looking at an event as multifarious (sorry, love that word) as that. To wrap up three solid weeks of Wimby coverage, here are a few of the ways I found myself looking at the tournament as I made my way around the All England Club.
As the ultimate tennis vista
On one of the tournament’s opening days I stood next to Court 14 to watch a match. The wall there is low enough that you can park yourself outside, on the pedestrian walkway, and still see everything. I don’t remember anything about the match on 14, even who was playing. But I do remember catching a glimpse, just for a split second, of Philipp Kohlschreiber one court over. I could just see the top half of his body, but he appeared to be floating as he moved. Something about his all-white clothes and the grass courts—still unscathed at that point—made the sport look much more graceful than it does anywhere else. You could spend a day wandering the grounds, never stopping, never focusing on one match, and soak in the sport just through your peripheral vision.
As a showcase for both the possibilities and limits of internationalism
Tennis may be the most worldly of sports, more so even than soccer (Should I call it football? I can’t decide. Footie?), because it’s watched and played with equal avidity in both the U.S. and everywhere else. Tennis obviously doesn’t run as deep in any country as soccer/football does; our sport is spread wide and thin, rarely reaching below the upper crust.
But that international aspect works itself out in a funny way. Paradoxically, it makes people involved in the game, from players to writers, stick with who they know. In the press room, there are rows of British journalists, then Spanish, then French, then Japanese, Chinese, French, American, and on and on. And you do interact with many from various countries. But mostly you huddle with your own. (Or, if you’re like me this year, you go back to your flat to write another post.) The upside is that, faced with the whole, slightly unfamiliar world at once, you appreciate the bonds that you have with the people you know that much more.
As one of the less unpleasant reminders of how quickly time passes
Wimbledon, with its grass, its church on the hill, its Centre Court, its whites, is eternal. Which only goes to point up how rapidly the cast of characters who populate it each summer turns over and passes you by. This year you could see it most clearly with the rise of two teenagers, Grigor Dimitrov and Ryan Harrsion, at the same time that the veterans they most resembled, Roger Federer and Andy Roddick, champ and finalist here on many occasions, faltered earlier than they had hoped. Neither is yet 30, but both are already closer to the ends of their careers than the beginnings. In Dimitrov and Harrison, they can see themselves as they were 10 years ago.
More than that, while the tournament lasts for two weeks, the days when it sprawls all across the side courts are much shorter than that. With half the players in the draw departing on any given day, the chance to wander and mingle in the back court garden comes and goes in a hurry. It’s on those back courts, the ones that have never been remodeled or had bleachers added to them, that you feel more closely connected to tennis’s origins than any other place—it still feels like a lawn game out there. But before you know it, in a matter of hours it seems, that connection is lost for another year.
As an argument against any form of generalization about any group of people anywhere
In the popular imagination, who goes to Wimbledon? Preps, toffs, the hoity-toity, guys with sweaters over their shoulders, your grandmother? Yes, these people are well represented. But this is what I saw as I sat for a few minutes one afternoon in the middle of the grounds, between Centre Court and the press room:
—Worker sweeping up in a purple shirt
—Female ushers in dark-blue police-style hats and short red ties, standing with their hands behind their backs, guarding each door
—Two young women in jean shorts and black jackets
—Nerdy teenager in a green sweatshirt and brown socks pulled up nearly to his knees
—An Italian 20-something in a leather jacket and boat shoes, with sunglasses on his head
—A fashionable young woman, sitting, in a white jacket, with a white handbag, her green shoe dangling off her foot
—Two chair umpires talking, both in their yachting uniforms (fresh off the yacht?)
—Two older women in purple sweaters and white pants
Anyway, all kinds come to Wimbledon. All kinds, that is, except the stereotypical aggressive young male soccer/football/baseball fan—i.e., the steretypical sports fan. I suppose tennis is defined not so much by who likes it or comes to watch it, as it is by one major group that doesn’t.
As a way to believe that life isn’t all bad
The newspapers beat the daily drum of defeat and despair, so much so that you begin to think that’s the only reality you’re allowed to acknowledge. Everything else is just a fairy tale. A look around Wimbledon, at the hordes and hordes of people—farther than the eye can see—who are successful, comfortable, or just plain fortunate enough to be able to enjoy a day at a tennis tournament, is enough to let you know that the world contains many happier realities.
As a way to feel lucky for two weeks
Each morning on my walk to the club, several double-decker buses passed me going the other way. All of them were filled to bursting with people who had the blandly grim collective demeanor of those on their way to work. This is when you feel the special pull of an event like Wimbledon, an event watched from all over. Unlike those grim workers, I was lucky enough to feel, for a couple of weeks, as if I’d been lifted out of every day office life. The buses were heading one way, toward those offices. I was heading the other, toward the magical, buzzing center of the sports world.