Lincicome: Trying to explain the Wimbledon experience
Muscle memory and the calendar combine to contemplate Wimbledon, once an annual destination and lately an irrelevance, yet still a consideration among the distinct events of sports, not unlike hot dog eating contests and the Iditarod.
Well, that is being a bit unkind. Wimbledon has not fallen yet into the junk pile of games and we have Serena Williams to thank for that. Otherwise, we need to reach back to the turn of this century to find Pete Sampras, the last American man to win the thing with no indication of any change ahead.
It is hard to recall when having the best male tennis player mattered, but it seemed to. The gap between Connors/McEnroe and Sampras/Agassi was barely a decade, not a quarter of a century.
I recall an indignant Jim Courier scolding the press, “You ask where the next generation is; well, here we are.”
No one is asking now, except for a faint, and mostly foreign, curiosity about where might be the next Federer or the next Nadal or Djokovic, not names that ever caused an American audience (with a sincere shoutout to tennis’ best friend, Bud Collins) to have breakfast at Wimbledon.
As it was with Serena Williams, the national banner is left for Coco Gauff, identified in the Wimbledon fashion as a “lady,” while American “gentlemen” Taylor Fritz and Ben Shelton try to matter.
The lingering question is, why does Wimbledon matter? I suppose it has a “Downton Abbey” kind of appeal, another time and place, where dignity and dressing for dinner went together.
The Masters, I suppose, is the nearest event in the U.S. to Wimbledon, a place with stuffy restrictions all happily agreed to, and where gratitude is expected for just being allowed to glimpse the private playground of the rich and privileged.
I recall Richard Williams, the father of Serena and Venus, having an intuitive if not original complaint. He thought Wimbledon was too smug and too boring.
“They have traditions for everything, and it takes away the enjoyment,” Williams once concluded. “The traditions are annoying, like the way they make you wear white. You have to sit there quietly like you're at a funeral — we need a bit of crowd participation. I really don't like coming here.”
“The people who run tennis don't care if the players are totally uneducated. Tennis players and boxers are the dumbest athletes in the world.”
This is as true as it is immaterial. Williams’ complaint is exactly what makes Wimbledon what it is, a place of propriety and decorum, of ritual and arrogance, a place the late tennis ambassador Ted Tinling once called “a voluntary anachronism.”
Not that change is impossible. There is a retractable roof on Center Court now, and strawberries may be served with yogurt as well as with cream.
With great reluctance and after considerable consideration, Wimbledon has opted finally to use electronic line calling this year, eliminating human judges, those very folks a young McEnroe identified as “the pits of the world.” They can’t be serious.
Not to worry. No one is going crazy down in SW19. The rest of the world can continue to play tennis on surfaces other than nature’s living carpet. That is no concern of Wimbledon’s.
If the best players are not identified by winning Wimbledon (how many years was Ivan Lendl No. 1 without a Wimbledon title?) it does not matter. If other places allow players multicolored uniforms and Wimbledon still insists on white, then white it is, even if the competitors look like they’ve shown up to fix the plaster.
Wimbledon persists because of and not in spite of its maddening constrictions. It is still the greatest tournament in tennis and one of the special events in sports. It is a place that wishes to restrict the grunting of athletes and would insist they not sweat if it could.
It is Wimbledon when nonsense screams for notice, when it actually seems important to know which Czech in a short skirt is which. It is still the time when tennis collides with the rest of the world.
The wonder of Wimbledon is that they are expected to be the same place.