To start today's thread off, I've been giving thought to what it is about tennis that made me love the game, and how it all started. Living in England, it's natural enough that I grew up familiar with the BBC's coverage of Wimbledon each summer. I'm not sure whether it's quite so normal for a child of five or six to be riveted to the TV for so many hours over the fortnight, but I generally was, and as I got older, I was pretty good at persuading my mother that I really, really needed to be at home to see certain matches in the event that schoolwoork might interfere. I was usually a keen student, but there were only two weeks of tennis to follow back then. Naturally, many of those must-see matches involved a certain longhaired Swede - about whose hair, in his 1979 book 'Inside Tennis', Pete once said that "In this day of the sculpted blow-dry haircut, Borg's locks are just plain long and unkempt." I have to admit that when I read the book a year or so back, the description had me in stitches - because it's so true.
But what was it that drew me into watching tennis itself? It wasn't Borg, though I grew up riveted watching him. I'm not really a fan of other sports, athletics being the slight exception. For myself, I've concluded that tennis somehow works best for my personality. It's a game that throws the spotlight on individuals alone, in an intense competition that pits one lone jouster against another in an arena where none of their actions can be hidden. Racquets replace swords, but the metaphoric cut and thrust and eventual fight to the death must satisfy some atavistic urge in me, only made more involving because of what knowledge I have of the racqueteers as people.
For, to me, watching the actual characters is an essential element. It's not as though we don't have time to watch players when they are on court - they generally spend more time preparing to play than actually playing. I have always been a voracious reader, and love burying myself in good fiction, getting to know and analyse the characters I find there - and in a sense, I think tennis meets some of the same needs. This works on more than one level. Firstly I grew up in the era when players like Ilie Nastase, Jimmy Connors and, eventually, John McEnroe were on the scene. Love 'em or not as people, they were colourful - and I loved the colour. Still do, whoever brings it. A love-to-hate character in the game is generally OK with me - I like to feel involved in the outcome of a match, after all. Somehow, I miss the days when Lleyton Hewitt inspired annoyance rather than a faint degree of sympathy.
On another level, of course, character is all about using the mind for winning matches - or what stops some players from winning matches. I think my first education in this area probably came from watching my compatriot Virginia Wade, who was 31 when she finally won Wimbledon in 1977, after I'd seen her appear to crumble mentally in various tough matches in earlier years. It can be immensely satisfying, and inspiring, to watch someone do something that I didn't think was possible for them to do. There are those who still mourn the result of the Wimbledon semifinal last year between Justine Henin and Marion Bartoli, I know. But for me, sitting there on Centre Court, listening to the buzz of the crowd as Bartoli fought her way to the Wimbledon final, and the chatter about her performance afterwards, it was a one-off feelgood experience - and I'm not sorry that it happened and I was there to see it.
One thing I must say about character, though - generally tennis players do a fair job of protecting their private lives, compared to, say, Hollywood stars or politicians - or even other kinds of sportspeople. Much that is said to the press by the players is pretty tame. Some of what I think I know about these people's characters, even watching them week after week on the endless carousel of the tennis circuit, which sometimes feels like watching a long-running soap opera, is almost certainly wrong. I like that area of mystery and privacy - probably because it leaves me some room for interpretation, thus, it engages the imagination, chiefly leaving me with what happens on court as a basis for what I think I see.
Perhaps I'm making it sound as though I don't care about the technical aspects of the game, yet that wouldn't be right. It's just that I see tennis as a mental game first. It can't be performed without the strokes - but those strokes mean nothing until paired with a mind that can use them to win, and I love watching other people's minds in action.
