Well folks, it's official. This is the most disastrous Wimbledon I've ever covered, so you can only imagine how poor Novak Djokovic feels. He is the furthest of the players left behind by the rain - so far behind that on a day when he might have been preparing for a quarterfinal match, he is stuck at a set apiece with Nicolas Kiefer in a third-round encounter.
Upon reading this, Rafael Nadal could be forgiven for issuing a big, fat Pfffftttt. . . Because even though The Djoker is the furthest behind, Nadal leads - or is it trails? - the pack by having started his own third-round match against Robin Soderling long before Djokovic and Kiefer started their quest to not play a tennis match. Nadal and Soderling warmed up last Saturday afternoon, and didn't get a single point concluded. When - make that if - the men, who are deadlocked at 4-4 in the fifth set, walk out tomorrow, it will be eighth time they've taken the court. In a span of five days.
I feel really badly for Nadal right now, but also for Wimbledon, because if this week doesn't kill Nadal's interest in becoming a grass-court champion, nothing will. And on top of that, Soderling appeared to be taunting and playing little mind games with Rafa. He tugged at the back of his shirt, in a gesture that seemed to mimic Jet Boy's frequent wedgie adjustments. He stepped back from the baseline when receiving serve to make Nadal, a notorious time-taker, play at his pace, not his own.
Nadal does not often express his discontent with anything but his own, occasional error or missed opportunity. But each time he's taken the court during this five-day adventure in frustration, he's looked more disgruntled than the last time. It helps explain how, after losing two 6-4 sets, Soderling won a tiebreaker set and a 6-4 inning to send the match into the fifth set. When they resumed play today (or was it yesterday? Maybe it was last Wednesday? Or June 27th, 1963? - that's kind of how it is now), he had an early break, but Soderling soon wiped out the advantage with some Swedish Big Boy tennis.
Now, it's a crap shoot: a two-game match. Or is it? Remember, Wimbledon doesn't like fifth-set tiebreakers. I just hope this match ends before the U.S. Open begins.
Some of you may be wondering where the tournament now stands in terms of reaching the scripted Sunday finals. I'd say the chances of that are slim-to-none. Wimbledon will not ask any competitor to play more than one full match per day; that means no double-dip tomorrow for the tournament. Even if Nadal wins eight points running when they do start, he's done for the day. Which means the only way he (or Djokovic) can play a final on Sunday is if he plays a match every day, starting tomorrow. Can you say Instant Masters Series?
Here are the answers to a few other What's Global Warming Got To Do WithIt? FAQs. The tournament is geared up for a Monday final. In fact, they are presently gearing up for a Tuesday final. And it appears that the rule, presumed to be written in stone, that matches that have been suspended (for whatever reason) will always be resumed on the same court has suddenly been washed away. Today, Venus Williams and Maria Sharapova got four points into their match (Djokovic must be salivating!) on Court 3 before it began raining again, but tomorrow they will appear as the second match on Centre Court (following Andy Roddick-Paul Henri Mathieu).
So much for tradition. Wimbledon is 178 matches behind; 64 in the Championships (the rest in juniors). It's anarchy, I tell you! Wimbledon now lives by the the Law of the Jungle!
It looked for a bit like the Wiliams-Sharapova match might be continued (finished is way too much to ask for) this afternoon, so I trudged out before the match was called to get a seat in the small but excellent press box at Court 3. I sat down in murderer's row, with El Jon, Bruce Jenkins, and Liz Clarke. Poor Liz. Her official stenographer's notebook was rumpled and wavy from the humidity, with ink running on its pages. Sarah Clarke (no relation to Liz) ,the chief Wimbledon press officer, stood by, as did a man who serves as a press-gate steward, Alan Chalmers. You may know his name because he owns and runs The Tennis Bookshop, which is the best tennis bookstore on the planet.
Soft sunlight filtered through the transparent gray clouds, a patch of blue lingered like a reminder of other, better days, above the steeple of St. Mary's church. The green seats had a clean, freshly glazed look, and the stands were already filled with people who had every right to be surly and demanding, but were not. All was quiet. all was anticipation. I could smell the grass of the court.
We all waited for Venus and Maria, joking around about the rain, talking about old friends and colleagues. For those of you who remember Rex Bellamy, once the dean of British journalists and now happily retired and getting on, the news is that he has remarried (Bellamy lost his wife some years ago). Alan reports that he regularly sees Rex at the grocery in the village where they both live, and he's so in love that he and his wife walk along, each one carrying one handle of their wire grocery basket.
Sweet, huh?
Alan also told me that he can no longer find any copies of my book, The Courts of Babylon, at least not at a reasonable price, so any of you who have a copy lying around, you could make a few bucks if you want to get entrpreneurial (hail, it isn't all about Ebay). Alan recently sold an extremely rare copy of the first tennis book and, according to Alan, the first book ever written about an athletic sport (as opposed to a field sport, like hunting or fishing). The book has an appropriately grand title: Trattato del Giuoco Della Palla, by Antonio Sciano da Salo (Salo being a village near lake Garda).
Scaino was a consulting "philosopher" at the court of Alfonso II, the Duke of Ferrara. Apparently, the duke enjoyed tennis, but one of the spirited matches that were frequently played at the court was marred by a controversy over a point (could it have been started by the Grand Duke Gionvanni de Mac en Roe?). So, as my colleague Gianni Clerici tells it, Scaino determined to prove his usefulness to the court (something that, now and then, even philosophers are called upon to do) by writing a book about tennis (and presumably its rules). Scaino later went to serve the Pope in Rome, although Clerici was strangely adamant about the fact that Scaino has been frequently misrepresented as a priest, when he was in reality an Aristotelian philsopher. So now you know.
But as we sat there awaiting Venus, the best line was delivered by Jenkins, who labors for the San Francisco Chronicle: "Meanwhile," he observed, talking about the weather, "Roger Federer must be in Nassau right now."
Federer, in case you didn't know, is through to the quarterfinals already, but at the rate they're going he may not remember how to score the game any longer by the time he gets to play again. Thank god for chair umpires!