Wimbledon invents a time machine

If there ever was a year that required a time machine, it is 2020. For years, it was a futuristic marker, the subject of much tedious waffling at Davos on when, say, Chindia would dominate the world. Now, who would not wish for a time machine to take us back to autumn 2019 so the world could take adequate precautions against a medieval pandemic? Or fast-forward past bankruptcies and deaths to the prospect of a widely available vaccine by July 2021?
 
No sporting event is as suited to escapist time travel as Wimbledon. The All England Club is both 19th century garden party and 21st century marketing machine. Characteristically commercially savvy, the club had taken pandemic insurance a decade-and-a-half ago. But, this is above all an event that puts tennis fans first. Over the past fortnight, the All England Club has been live streaming via Wimbledon.com a retrospective of tennis matches dating back to its centenary in 1977. The club’s genius has been to proceed round-by-round as if a tournament was unpredictably unfolding. The great men’s finals for Sunday’s viewing are still unknown because the ‘order of play’ has not been announced. The suspense is partially preserved.

 
Cricket and football are more popular than tennis, but the sport has attracted kings and prime ministers for as long as “deuce” has been called. A French king died after playing a rigorous version of tennis’ forerunner in the 14th century. Last month, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson trumpeted his recovery from Covid by playing tennis, using a wooden racket, with his younger brother. Karan Thapar’s memoir reveals late prime minister P V Narasimha Rao kept a tennis racket and Slazenger balls in his bedroom. Reading rapturous coverage this week in the Financial Times of the bold spending plans of Rishi Sunak, Britain’s Chancellor of Exchequer, I wager the next Centre Court appearance by someone of Indian origin will be Sunak – as an invitee to the Royal Box. (It has been 60 years since Ramanathan Krishnan made the semifinals.)

 

The history telescoped in Wimbledon’s retrospective thus far skips the great Australians of the 1960s altogether, presumably because the quality of television recordings would feel akin to a scratchy vinyl record in the age of Spotify. Still, the time travel allows one to marvel at how the sport has changed almost beyond recognition because of the transition from wooden rackets to today’s thermonuclear weapons, but also because the All England Club began using a durable Welsh hybrid of grass in the early 2000s that allowed baseliners to prosper because the ball sits up more than before, allowing top-spin.
 

The two together — and synthetic strings that create wicked topspin — killed serve-and-volley tennis. One of the gems on offer is a five-set match between Pat Cash and John McEnroe in 1992. Watching its gentle rhythms followed a few days later by the cannonballs unleashed between Juan Martin Del Potro and Rafael Nadal in 2018 made one grateful McEnroe was spared 21st century tennis. His wrist would have been broken.
 
But, tennis, women’s tennis especially, has also gained a great deal. Contrast the dull, languid style of the 1977 semi-final between Virginia Wade and Chris Evert with Serena Williams’ power against Justine Henin, or Venus Williams’ ferocity against Martina Hingis and it is hard to argue spectators have lost out. The benefits of today’s professional umpiring and televised replay appeals are apparent. The Evert-Wade clash turned in favour of the Briton after an inattentive umpire failed to notice Evert had returned a ball after a double bounce and then left it to the players to adjudicate.

 
A character in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude proclaims of the telescope: “Science has eliminated distance”. Wimbledon’s retrospective achieves something similar, but thus far has underplayed the achievements of Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf and Novak Djokovic. The longevity and greatness of Serena Williams and Roger Federer are magnified. The revelation in this collection of matches is Federer’s clash in 2001 with defending champion Pete Sampras, who had won 53 of his 54 matches at Wimbledon till then.
 
It was arguably the last great serve-and-volley match at Wimbledon, paradoxically because unlike, say, Goran Ivanisevic or John Isner, the two combatants had extraordinary groundstrokes. Federer repeatedly won Wimbledon in the 2000s, but played from the baseline. In 2014, the Swedish great Stefan Edberg urged him to come to the net judiciously to finish points quicker as he got older; a couple of years later, his father advised him to go for broke when opponents targeted his backhand. The Swiss boy genius had all of that, including an aggressive backhand and a tendency to weep after important victories; the nineteen-year-old of 2001 thus bearing more resemblance to the Federer of the past few years. After a second surgery on his right knee recently, Federer this week was on a podcast speaking enthusiastically of the 20-week rehab regimen his sixty-something Swiss trainer has planned for him. One could only marvel, but Federer’s prospects at Wimbledon 2021, just weeks before he turns 40, look diminished. Still, Federer played better than ever in 2017 after a layoff for knee surgery and has an unbeaten streak of victories against Nadal on fast courts since then. Perhaps the world’s most loved tennis player can surprise us, but he will need a magical potion of youth to do it.