The commercial extravaganzas known as the French, U.S., and Australian Opens are played continuously for two weeks. All of them begin with family-friendly festivities on the weekend before play begins, and none of them stop for a breath until the tournament ends a fortnight later. There’s even been, both voluntarily and involuntarily, a gradual creep beyond the two-week schedule in recent years. Roland Garros now takes three Sundays to complete, while the last four U.S. Opens have finished on a Monday.
Wimbledon stands alone in its insistence on a break from tennis, as well as a break from the sales of T-shirts, coffee mugs, seat cushions, and strawberries and cream (on the grounds, anyway; you can probably still fork money over on the tournament's website). Middle Sunday its called, with appropriate reverence. It can be a bummer for a fan, no doubt about it, but if you'll allow me a personal viewpoint for a minute, it has been a life-saver for many staggering journalists, including this one. In past years, after eight or nine straight days of 7 A.M. alarms and 11 P.M. walks back from the All England Club, I’ve woken up on the Middle Sunday at 7 again, gotten out of bed, and sat down at the computer before the fabulous thought hit me: I don’t have to work today. I’d lie down again and enjoy those deep, serious two hours of sleep that you tend to get when you absolutely must have them, and when you know no alarm will wrench you from them.
Middle Sunday is the only day left in the tennis calendar when God, or at least rest, still takes precedence over worldly activity. It’s not surprising that it takes place at Wimbledon. It wasn’t until 1982, in its 105th year, that the tournament allowed tennis to be played on any Sunday. Until that season, the men’s final was played on the second Saturday—the legendary Borg-McEnroe final of 1980 was played on Saturday, July 5th. Wimbledon always worked a leisurely pace, though. In its first year, 1877, the event was stopped for three days so everyone could watch the annual cricket match between the Eton and Harrow schools. (Try, if you can, to imagine the U.S. Open being halted so we would all have time to see a series of high school basketball games in Queens.)
Still, I find it interesting that the last Saturday men's final, in 1981, again between Borg and McEnroe, was also the last one in which each player used a wood racquet. A brave new commercial future for tennis began the following year. Sunday was now a time for worldly activity.
The day off means a stroll past ancient St. Mary’s Church—its steeple at the top of the Village hill organizes the sky around Wimbledon—down to a peaceful All England Club, where the lucky 32 who are still in the tournament hit some balls in between their conversations with coaches and playing partners. After the hustle of the past week over these same grounds, there’s a luxurious sense of time to spare.
In the Village, the action picks up. The tennis world gathers around the bars and cafés and tourist-priced Italian restaurants that line the main drag. For me, in the years I’ve been there, it’s been a day to leave behind the Village, and Wimbledon, and tennis, and take a long, swaying, sometimes stuffy train trip into central London, with some locally appropriate piece of music in my ears—the Kinks, the Clash, the Jam, Linton Kwesi Johnson (listen to them here, here, here, and here). The city itself has always been hard for me to navigate. Nothing seems to lead anywhere else, as it does in New York or Paris; even the Londoners I've met have been boggled by it. More than once on my Middle Sunday wanderings I’ve asked for the general location of a fairly major street and have received a shrug in return.
Not that anything monumental happens on these trips. I tend to seek out the same three stores each year: a crowded vintage sneaker place on Carnaby St., a distinctly uncrowded second-hand bookstore on Charing Cross Road, and a big bookstore on the same street, Foyles. On each trip to the second-hand store, I look at the same ponderously thick biography of Cyril Connolly and wonder if anyone else has opened its pages in the last 12 months. Best, though, is the absurdly dry banter between the idling clerks (or owners, I’m not sure), whose identities never change.
“I remember Sundays in my town,” one of them said in a dreamy tone last year, as if he were about to wax poetic about simpler times in England. “You would look forward to the church bells ringing in the morning, because that’s the only thing that would happen all day.”
Some sneakers, some books, some banter, and I’m back on the train to Wimbledon, back past St. Mary’s and down the narrow lanes of the Village.
This year’s Middle Sunday in New York has also been a relief. But I remember, before tennis was work, having a different feeling about it. Maybe 15 years ago, a friend and I got together at his place that afternoon, planning to watch Wimbledon. I’d forgotten that there was no play that day, and we were disappointed to find out that the tournament took a day off, and all we would get were highlights from the first week. A rest was nice and everything, but we were sports fans and we wanted to see some tennis—that’s what Sundays were for!
The next day, when 16 matches went off around the grounds, made up for it, as long as you had your VCR ready. And it's easier now to keep up, with ESPN's extended coverage and the advent of the DVR. Wimbledon's method may seem frustratingly old fashioned on Middle Sunday, but it makes sense in one way. Monday's storm wouldn't be the same without the calm that comes before it.