The static air, the tube lighting, the faint background hum of a thousand electrical outlets. By Thursday evening, there was no stopping me, I had to get out of the press room. I walked out and past the uniformed door monitors in navy-blue police caps that are too big for their heads—“Can I see your badge, sir? Thank you, sir”—just as the sun was beginning to disappear behind the media center. Its top half still sent a sharp ray into the eye. The big events of the afternoon were over, and all that was left were a few doubles teams fighting the encroaching darkness on the outer courts. Another day that had started with bright promise had stumbled to a tired end under the weight of too many tennis matches. Wimbledon felt woozy.
I sat down on a bench near what you might call the crossroads of the All England Club, a triangle bounded by Centre Court, the players’ area, and the media center. This is where the beautiful people pass you as they bound upstairs and out of sight, off to do whatever it is they do—sit and talk, as far as I can tell.
Next to me were three women in their early 20s, with accents that an American can only describe as “highly British.” They were working in some capacity at the tournament and were out for a smoke break. All three gazed up at the top of the TV centers, using their arms to shade their eyes from the sun. A blonde guy in jeans, somewhere in his 40s, was talking and gesturing into a camera.
“He is hot, you’re right.”
“I told you he was famous.”
“Hm, maybe I can knock into him on his way down.”
“‘Excuse me, sirrr, I’m so sorry I spilled my coffee all over you.’” They giggled.
I shaded my eyes and looked more closely at the handsome bleach-blonde TV star. Pat Cash. Figures.
For a reporter who grew up playing and watching the sport, this crossroads, which begins at your desk and ends at the press benches in the Center Court, is as close as you get to the core of the tennis universe. I’ve run this gauntlet many times trying to get to the seats before the end of a changeover. It involves a lot of bobbing and weaving between players, agents, officials, cigarette-smoking press types, and the various hangers-on that constitute the sealed society Peter Bodo once referred to as “tennisworld” before he created his own.
Who could be found traversing this rarefied location Thursday evening? There were no more must-see matches left, so this was rambling time for anyone still able to ramble. Fans, by the dozen, by the hundred—young, old, male, female, parent, child—passed each other in both directions in a constantly reforming mass. Every second someone went around a corner out of sight; every second someone new came into the view:
A bald black man, in an all-white warm-up suit and white sneakers.
A tan teenage girl with shoulder-length straight brown hair, braces, orange shorts, and a blue sweater with the sleeves rolled up past her elbows. She had the vicious ankle tan lines of a tennis player. She and a friend were throwing their heads forward and back as they laughed at some unheard joke.
A black collar, up.
Brown sandals with rolled navy trousers
A pink and white rugby shirt
Two ball girls, in their dark blue uniforms, the brims of their caps pulled over their eyes, leaning sleepily against a wall.
Andy Murray’s coach, Miles McLagan, his arms over the railing on the second floor of beautiful people land, keeping an eye on a match involving Andy Murray’s next opponent, Victor Troicki.
There were couple holding hands and parents being led by their kids. There was an Asian reporter on another bench in gray slacks with her head down and her legs curled around each other. There were linesmen in their yachting outfits. There was a woman in a bright red dress and an older couple in matching striped polo shirts studying the draw sheet together.
I looked for someone I could identify as a representative Wimbledon spectator. Hip young British types floated in and out—red-cheeked girls in sweaters, their straight brown hair pinned to the side; young guys in shorts past their knees, white shoes and no socks, with short spiky dyed hair—but they constituted maybe one in every 100 people. The sheer volume and variety of humans destroyed all attempts at categorization.
There was a dull buzz of talk all around, but only a stray sentence or two made it over to where I was sitting.
“Oh, please.”
“There’s more courts down there, should we try some of those?”
“She texted me to say she was here."
“Yeah, let’s do that.”
“We couldn’t get into that court.”
“I think there’s some doubles left over here, ooh let’s go.”
Two women in their 50s took the place of the girls on the next bench. Robert Kendrick walked by. “Oh, he played Murray,” one of the women said. They stared. “Wow, he’s really nice.”
A blonde preppy character in a blue suit, red tie, and aviator shades appeared to the left. The two women saw him coming. “Who’s this with the big teeth,” one of them said in a voice of bottomless scorn. His teeth were big, and he was flashing them as much as possible.
On the whole, the fans at Wimbledon are a little scruffier than those at the U.S. Open, and, reputation to the contrary, more varied—there are suits, there are ties, there are jeans, there are baseball hats, there are even bandannas. On the other hand, the employees are infinitely spiffier. The press section is guarded zealously, not, as it is in Louis Armstrong Stadium, by retirees from the Bronx in sweat-stained, oversized, untucked T-shirts, but by a female usher in brown-and-red military regalia, complete with cap, tights, and shiny black dress shoes. She stands with arms folded behind her back in front of the entrance.
“Did you make that your uniform yourself?” she was asked by a tipsy-sounding American fan the other day.
“Excuse me?”
“Is that a Wimble-ton uniform, or do you just wear that?” He and his friend chuckled.
“It’s military, sir.” She told them to go to the back of the line. She said please. They couldn’t think of anything to say and walked away.
A few minutes later a short, pudgy, prosperous-looking and overly tan British man in a bright striped shirt and an expensively cool haircut walked up and leaned against the railing where the usher was standing.
“Sir, the line starts over here, can you please move over here?” She gestured to the opposite railing from where he was loitering.
“I know where it starts,” he belched back sarcastically, without moving an inch. The usher sighed and shook her head.
Why do people come to tennis tournaments? Judging from the lost-looking, ever-shifting mass in front of me, you can spend a lot of time not knowing where the hell you’re going at one of these things. But you do see tennis balls hit eventually, and you don’t have to be a technical expert to be blown away by the perfection of the strokes that are on display a few feet in front of you. In that way, the tour really is a traveling circus, an exotic troupe of foreign freaks with science-fiction names who roll into town once a year and do stunning tricks for your benefit. It would also be silly to ignore that there’s a genteel sexiness to the display—athletic young people in white leap around on picturesque green grass as the sun sets over the trees in the distance. There are worse scenes to take in than that.
But I would say the tennis itself is mostly incidental. Walking to the All England Club each morning this week, I was passed by dozens of packed buses taking people to work. I kept thinking, “You’re going to work?” Of course this is the normal run of people’s lives, and my life, but that’s exactly what made it seem so dull. They were involved in their own lives, while the people walking down the hill with me were going to Wimbledon—an event.
In New York, the U.S. Open is an event. A ticket is a Manhattan status symbol. Wimbledon is bigger, at least from my vantage point, because it is an event for the nation. Snob appeal is undeniably a part of the excitement, but attending also means taking your own small and personal path and joining it to the world’s for an afternoon. You don’t have to know a forehand from a lob or Roger Federer from Roger Staubach to get a buzz out of that. Many of the people walking in front of my bench weren’t sure where they were going—“I think there are more courts over this way, come on”—but they were moving fast. They were enjoying the chase. This was their day away from the office and inside the gates, and they had to make the most of it. No matter how small the universe, it’s a fizzing, energizing pleasure to find yourself at the center of one for a day.
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It's Saturday, the sun is back, and I feel like I haven't seen enough tennis this week. I'm hitting the grounds. Talk to you about it later.