The Wimbledon experience
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Hype at Wimbledon is a curious mix of hard-nosed capitalism and romance. VIJAY PARTHASARATHY
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Photo: AP
Not just hype: Walking around the All-England Club is a bit like visiting a popular filming location.
I had scouted the area around Southfields tube station a couple of days ahead of Wimbledon last year, and mercifully (for I have a poor sense of direction) it turned out the tennis park was an eight-minute walk straight down the road after you crosse
d the traffic signal opposite the main exit. Arriving there on day one of the 2006 Championships, with media pass pretentiously dangling around my neck, I wondered with guarded cynicism how much of this was hype and how much was for real.
Enriching experience?
Take the veritable hysteria surrounding strawberries and cream. Most of us recognise that the overpricing is a result of branding; even if one covers for the fact that a tourist’s approach is as authentic as a native Londoner’s, how does it enrich one’s Wimbledon experience anyway?
Maybe I’m being naïve but that’s just the way it is: I grew up watching tennis alongside my mother, an athlete in her college days and an avowed John McEnroe fan and, in time, the sport came to mean many things. In the beginning it was a chance to get away from my school textbooks. Our first tests were usually a month away, so that was a trivial luxury, always granted. As the years passed I watched Wimbledon for Pete Sampras and Goran Ivanisevic, the two finest serve-and-volley grasscourters of the 1990s. Distance renders us immune to the allure of a £22 Wimbledon T-shirt — though an uncle once gifted me a can of used tennis balls from the US Open, which I didn’t ever use because it was “meant to be treasured”.
Now, as I was discovering, hype at Wimbledon is a curious mix of hard-nosed capitalism and romance. Tents did line the pavement and they did contain real people with overnight stubble, people who were willing to camp to get tickets for the showcourts. It was, and it was not, just a fiction created for the sake of television; the ordinary process of ticket-buying is mythified for the sake of drama.
Speaking of romance, walking around the hilly bumps and contours of the All-England Club is a bit like visiting a popular filming location. Say, you recognise that waterfall from the movie rerun you watched last week and enjoy the tingle of familiarity that races up your spine. Wimbledon always makes me think of green, and of Cliff Richard (an anachronism if there ever was one) singing “Bachelor Boy”, as the rain comes hard at the tarpaulin-covered turf. Even touching the hard plastic seats on the outside courts was infused with symbolism and meaning. It felt surreal, as if my hand had somehow reached inside a TV transmission of an old match from my childhood.
Of course the cameras don’t go poking around every corner, so it’s not really possible to construct a plausible topology even through watching panoramic footage — although, as an aside, putting together an armchair first-person tour of London or Mumbai or New York isn’t such a bad idea; we certainly have the ROM technology and internet savvy for that experiment.
Television is all about breaching divides of space and time, it’s about images and personalities, but celebrities invariably steal most of the attention. I met an eccentric old gentleman, a senior member of the club, who has ushered the press into its box for more than 40 years. He was quite the treasure trove, and spoke to me leisurely for more than 20 minutes about tennis in his time, i.e. in the 1950s and 1960s, when he was growing up. He spoke to me about the changes that were going to be carried out, and contrasted it against the setting in the days gone by. As I said to him, the size of the compound disoriented me for the first couple of days: I would find myself near Henman Hill when I was seeking one of the outside courts. At other times, distracted by the balcony of the players’ lobby, I would regularly miss the right turn into the bottom entrance of the press box.
Pardon the gawking, but it’s not every day that an Indian journalist out on a casual walk in the park gets his fill of an internationally recognised celebrity — make that plural, celebrities. Still, one must have standards. Naturally one did not sidle up to Marat Safin or Andy Roddick or Ana Ivanovic (how tall she is!), forget Maria Sharapova, to solicit a quote (or worse, an “autograph for my mother”), although to watch a player freely associate with fans and pose for photographs made the lower lip quiver like jelly.
Perhaps as compensation for our stoic professionalism, accredited journalists get to attend press conferences where we can speak, sometimes out of turn, to the players, plague them with questions about their daily routine. They, in turn, reveal to us fascinating nuggets such as how renting the same flat year in Putney Heath — as opposed to living in a hotel — year after year relaxes them. (Athletes, as you probably know, are a remarkably superstitious bunch.)
Sometimes a Daily Mail sportswriter, compelled by the constraints of his job, will persist with fashion questions and Maria Sharapova will lose her temper and say it is time people stopped paying such close attention to her sartoria
l sense, and she will turn up her nose regally so we can coo at her icy demeanour.
Personalities contrast at these pressers. There are the players, and there are the celebrity journalists sitting in the front row. I spotted Bud Collins from my perch five rows behind, but my courage failed at the sight of his multicoloured trousers and I never did approach him for tips.
I recognised the respected tennis writer Peter Bodo from the picture on his popular Tennis World blog and struck up a conversation with him on our way to the press conference room. He wanted to know more about Sania Mirza’s training regimen; he was of the opinion she had hit a peak, and while I’m not a big fan of her game I felt the need to defend her.
As for some of the players themselves, world number one Roger Federer is suave and replies to questions posed in five languages and in an equable tone. Incidentally, last year he insisted on wearing that abominable jacket of his through each interview, as if it wasn’t enough to parade it on court. Somehow he seemed to think matching a cream blazer with white shorts and sports shoes made daring fashion sense. Daring it was, but it made no sense. One worries Federer might consider the jacket his new lucky charm, but besides that blip of conceit, Federer hasn’t yet betrayed a flaw.
Press conferences
Most sportswriters say Andre Agassi, who announced his retirement at the 2006 Wimbledon, was one of the most erudite and impassioned analysts of the game. Should he be interested in a broadcast medium career, his popularity would rival that of McEnroe. (I’m not sure if my mother would agree, but she did like Agassi’s way of standing near the baseline on the fastest of courts and picking the ball early.)
At the other end of the age spectrum, Nadal mumbles and charmingly injects “no” as a conversation filler, as in “Roger is a good player, no, I like playing with him”, “I eat pasta for lunch, no”, although every now and then he phrases the word in the context of an obvious consensus.
He is more personable in a room than across the net. That means no glaring, he is detachedly polite — press conferences are a job, after all — and he routinely thanks the media afterward. He is close to the Spanish media, just as Federer is personally acquainted with members of the Swiss press.
Sharapova, for want of a better word, drones. She sits in her chair sometimes upright but mostly slouched with her arms resting on the table. So easily we forget that she has barely put her teenage years behind her; there is still something vulgar about treating her as a pinup. Her manner is terse: maybe she is mindful of Anna Kournikova’s experiences and doesn’t want to take herself too seriously, but her eyes, so intense during matches, seem to droop from boredom. Her smiles rarely reach them.
This is how it feels to watch your first Centre Court match featuring the world’s top-ranked male tennis player. His opponent on the day was Richard Gasquet, who some believe is a virtual replica of Federer in terms of talent for shot-making. That was the day Federer first stepped out on court in his jacket and one thought, “Now what if he lost?”
You can barely focus on a shot at the start, because you’re so aware of your surroundings, and my eyes kept seeking instant replays when obviously there was going to be none, because this is somewhat different from being able to concentrate on age group tennis live on a mud court in Chennai.
It got better though. I began to see the spin better, feel the flow of the Gasquet backhand. I saw the most complete tennis player in history busily constructing his points less than 50 feet away.
By the time the rain started to come down, Federer had taken the first set, scampered off, jacket in hand. I was starting to find my place in the stands. I sat for a while as the others, clutching coffee cups and covering their heads with a newspaper, hurried into the media room.
In my head, Cliff Richard absurdly sang “Bachelor Boy” with the rain coming down hard on the tarpaulin-covered turf.
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