LONDON—Whatever happens with the weather today, the air felt good while I was walking down my quiet, S-shaped village street to get the papers this morning. The customary clouds, the streets with last night’s rain still on them, the easy-swirling breeze: It may officially be summer, but this is the type of authentic spring weather we get so rarely in New York. It’s a little chilly, but you can deal with it because you know warmer, rather than colder, weather is on the way. Of course, authentic spring weather also means rain. Buckets of rain.
Now I’ve got the papers and the coffee, and I’m back where I seem to belong, in front of a computer screen, tapping. Let’s see what the tabs made of Day 2 at Wimbledon.
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Has women’s grunting finally gotten out of control? Wimbledon, after measuring Victoria Azarenka at 95 decibels yesterday, seems to think so, though we’ve had this discussion many times before. Remember Michelle Larcher de Brito? She seems to have shreiked herself out of the sport.
But newspapers need questions, so the question is back. This morning the Daily Telegraph quotes All England chief Ian Ritchie saying, “I think there is an education problem with younger players” when it comes to their noisiness—i.e., no one ever tells them to stop.
“We have discussed it with the tours,” Ritchie continues, “and we believe it is helpful to reduce the amount of grunting. We are one tournament in a global circuit. But we have made our views clear and we would like to see less of it.”
“One tournament in a global circuit”: Talk about a sign of the changing times. Wimbledon once had the clout to unilaterally declare the end of 90 years of amateur tennis. Now they can’t do anything about girls shrieking. Sometimes a dictatorship has its appeal.
—Elsewhere in the Telegraph, there’s a piece on Michael Stich’s ties to Tobias Kamke, Andy Murray’s next opponent. Stich was planning a strategy huddle with his fellow German last night—or, as the Telegraph puts it, “FORMER CHAMPION STICH PLOTS MURRAY’S DOWNFALL.” OK, sure, if that's how you want to say it.
—Wimbledon ordered Slazenger to produce 54,500 balls for the event this year. That certainly sounds like a lot; what else does Slazenger make now?
—The paper takes a shot at a new Wimbledon-themed creation from the grocery chain Tesco’s, a Strawberrys and Cream sandwich. The Telegraph’s reviewer gives it a thumbs down—“hardly the cream of snacks.”
—While that may sound mild by the standards of British headline writing, the paper doesn’t a miss another opportunity to go overboard. This is how they describe a day when three of the country’s players went out:
ANOTHER YEAR, SAME OLD BRITISH FAILURE
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The Star’s major report of the day—aside from its front page exclusive on “Harry and Pippa’s Naughty Dates”—is about the song that Andy Roddick can’t get out of his head right now, “Combine Harvester,” by the Wurzels, a novelty hit from 1976.
Here it is, though listen at your own risk. It is, as Roddick says, alarmingly difficult to get out of your head.
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The Express, which has been in a slump this week, comes out swinging today. They see Andy Murray’s placement on Court 1 this way:
“MURRAY CAST OUT OF CENTRE: Andy’s Murray’s bid to win Wimbledon was last night thrown into jeopardy by tournament officials anxious to make a cheap point to the public. Murray will now face the same rain delay lottery that denied Tim Henman a place in the 2001 final after being cast out to Court 1 against Goran Ivanisevic”
—The paper also reveals that Murray attended his first play recently, and he liked it. “People have said to me that most plays are a bit dull,” Murray said. “But this was really funny. I would go to a play again.”
He even claimed that he could relate to the actors, in a way: "There are so many lines they have to remember. You have to do the lines over and over until you remember them. In some ways it's a bit similar to golf—lots of repetition." A drama critic is born?
Perhaps not. Murray was asked if he was working his way up to Shakespeare: “No,” he answered decisively. “My girlfriend did a bit of drama at school. But I don’t understand it.”
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The Times provides a few interesting stats:
0: Times Serena Williams has lost a first-round match at a major
1,109: Number of queuers yesterday. I saw some of that line. It is daunting.
11,500: pounds awarded to first-round losers. That’s $18,500. That’s not bad.
—Elsewhere, the Simon Barnes watch continues. Today he writes about Federer. I’m not sure how I feel about this, his most ambitious line of the article: “Some players force you to watch from behind the sofa; Federer gives you tennis for the cat on the sofa to purr to.”
Is that great, or awful? Good idea, clunky execution, I’d say.
Barnes does close well: “Federer [could] be a serious item at the sharp end of the tournament, looking ever so slightly smug as he walks back to the baseline after a particularly devastating series of shots, with a thought bubble floating over his head that reads: 'Well, I suppose I am a little on the brilliant side.'”
Good idea, good execution.
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The Times runs a column by Neil Harman criticizing the LTA, for faulty developmental priorities. The Mail has a column by Charles Sale criticizing the LTA, for ending ineffective marketing initiatives only to replace them with similarly ineffective ones.
I’m glad there is this much front-office coverage of tennis in the U.K.; it feels like the NFL back in the States. These types of articles could easily be written in the mainstream American press about the trials and tribulations of the USTA. But they aren’t, for a simple reason: Nobody cares. Which makes me wonder how many people actually care about the LTA’s troubles here. I know tennis, relatively speaking, is a bigger deal here than it is in the U.S., but does anyone expect the LTA, after all of these futile decades, to suddenly find the magic bullet and start churning out tennis champions in a country where it rains two-thirds of the year? Murray, the U.K.’s best, left for Spain as a kid to get his polishing. From my perspective, as someone who reads these articles periodically over the course of the year, it’s impossible to keep straight all of the things that the LTA does wrong.
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The Guardian’s witness to Isner-Mahut II is their columnist Barney Ronay, and he comes up with a pretty fair description of the two players walking onto Court 3: “The craning Isner, in his shrugging baggies, and the scurrying Mahut, a ferrety, were-wolfish figure, took to the court to a muted ripple of applause.”
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The last two days I’ve ended with a plea for sanity. Today I’ll go in the other direction, with the Sun’s message to Wimbledon after they dared to chuck him all the way over to Court 1, the uncovered show court:
"YOU DRIPS! Wimbo wallies fail to protect Andy from rain fear"
—The Sun closes with a story on Murray’s now-legendary first trip to the theater. They trot out a list of tennis-themed shows that he could star in:
The Merchant of Tennis (weak)
Lobin Hood (please)
The Line King (snore)
Ham-let (bingo!)
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Heading down the hill now. Talk to you later.