Good TV

Green is what I always remember most about Wimbledon. Not just any green; deep Centre Court green. It fills up the TV set and glows like no other sporting surface. This is the first Grand Slam I haven’t attended, the first I’ve written from the living room and the office in New York rather than the press room on site, since Wimbledon in 2010. I expected to miss the fortnight’s frumpy-civilized hustle, and I’m sure I will. But today, on Day 1, I also discovered that watching from home isn’t what it used to be. Now you can surround yourself with Wimbledon green, and even feel some of the hustle of the crowds, without leaving the house. No Pimm’s, no strawberries, no cream, but that’s OK; I never have time for them anyway.

This is the first year I’ve watched on ESPN2 on TV, and ESPN3 on the Internet. Having the online option is like going from being starved to having having your run of the candy store—with seven or eight matches to choose from, it can even be a bit too much. When you’re on the grounds, it’s a given that you can’t keep up with everything. At home, with each match a click away, I felt like I had see to get around to catch as many as possible. And I still didn't even hear about a couple of epic five-setters until they were over. Here’s a timeline of my virtual tour of the All England Club on opening day.

6:30 A.M.
This is one decided disadvantage of watching from Brooklyn. You must begin early in the morning. But there’s a silver lining. You can hear your morning newspaper hitting the front door, which means you can snatch it before it’s stolen.

I haven’t seen the ESPN Grand Slam crew for a while now; I don’t think I’ve heard Chris Evert do any commentary since her return. Brad Gilbert, for one, still sounds companionable. I’ve actually missed hearing him cry “return to sender!” after a winning return, and telling us that the Gulbis-Berdych match was “unbelievably dominated” by the serve.

7:30 A.M.
Pretty quickly, though, I find myself turning down the TV and going with the wider mix of voices that narrate the matches on ESPN3. The last thing I hear from the studio booth is Hannah Storm saying, “Let’s not forget poor Willie Renshaw.” Renshaw, as some of you may know, is the other man, besides Pete Sampras, to win seven Wimbledon titles, a century ago. This may have been the last sentence I would have expected to come out of Storm’s mouth.

Online, there are British and American announcers, some famous—John McEnroe, Lindsay Davenport—some barely recognizable. One forgotten favorite is Greg Rusedski, who makes this observation during the Nalbandian-Tipsarevic match, just after Nalbandian has lost serve. “It’s a great time to try to break back right after you’re been broken,” Rusedski says.

According to him, if Nalbandian can get on a roll, “He’s only going to grow in stature.” Can you still get taller at age 30?

9:30—10:30
Tennis on the show courts has begun, and there are matches everywhere, maybe even in the trees above. It must be said that the TV version of ESPN does a good job of jumping from court to court, though most true tennis junkies can dispense with the in-studio interviews, even ones with the biggest stars. Online I seek out a few of the courts not shown on TV. Flipping from match to match, watching from your virtual perch at the back of each court, picking out faces in the audience along with the camera, Tweeting about what you see, you can feel like an invisible, omniscient, and perhaps overly judgmental voyeur. Everything looks easy from an ocean away.

For instance, Ryan Harrison is battling Yen-Hsun Lu. Harrison thinks a ball of his that has been called out caught some of the line. He tries to show the chair umpire that there's chalk on it, but gets no response. Harrison takes the ball back from him, chucks it to the back of the court, and yells, “You guys are a joke.” A Johnny Mac-like tantrum appears to be on the way, but Harrison sets himself to simmer and comes back to win in four. He gets Djokovic next.

A few minutes later, I swing to Court 2, where Harrison’s hotheaded U.K. doppleganger, 18-year-old Oliver Golding, has a set point at 6-5 in a tiebreaker against Igor Andreev. Golding, last year's U.S. Open junior champ, shanks his second serve beyond the doubles alley. Three points later, he loses the set, screams in anger, and walks straight off the court for a bathroom break. As I said, it all looks easy from a thousand miles away. Learning is hard.

10:30—11:30
There's excellence on display as well. Novak Djokovic is mostly clinical in his straight-set win over world No. 38 Juan Carlos Ferrero. Maria Sharapova is even better in her first set against Anastasia Rodionova, though Maria doesn’t reach that peak of forehand-firing confidence again in the second.

Best is the way that Elena Vesnina closes out her upset of Venus Williams. Serving at 5-3 in the second set, she goes down 15-30—a classic chokeable moment. Instead, she serves and volleys, and sticks a backhand volley winner into the corner. Two unreturned serves later and the 25-year-old Ukrainian has one of her biggest career wins.

Afterward, we're treated to the type of emotional scene that can only be manufactured on TV: Venus’s long, circling, sometimes limping walk back to the locker room. On the grounds, all you would see, for a split-second, would be Venus walking past you. It’s the camera, following her every step and even getting in her way, that intrudes long enough to transform this routine post-match ritual into a “moment”—"Venus’s (Possible) Last Walk Through Wimbledon." As intrusive as the camera is, though, and as prosaic as the scene may have looked live, seeing Venus in that state really is an emotional moment.

12:00—1:00
If Venus’s loss was the emotional high, or low, point of the day, Ernests Gulbis’ win over Tomas Berdych was the peak of excitement and surprise. With a newer, weirder forehand, Gulbis, the head case we’d all given up on, played the match of his career. He hit 30 aces and 62 winners against 33 errors in his three-tiebreaker win. More impressive was the way he handled his nerves in the end. If you hadn’t known who was the higher seed, you might have thought it was Gulbis from the confident way he shrugged off three blown match points and came back to close it out on the fourth.

If you were watching on TV, you also got to see him walk into the BBC interview room immediately afterward, still sweating, and say to the interviewer, “I’m glad I didn’t choke in the end, as usual.” Told a few second later that he should be happy that he’s going to play the winner of two qualifiers next, Gulbis—a man who has been down so long he doesn’t know what it feels like to be up—shrugged and smiled and said, “That’s OK, I’ve already lost to both of them.”

With his explosive shots and slacker charisma, we always knew Ernie could be a player.

Or at least good TV.