Wimbledon 2018: Why can't tennis' next generation step it up?

The return of Novak Djokovic as Wimbledon champion marks the seventh Grand Slam in succession won by a player 30 and older, raising serious questions about tennis' next generation of stars

It was hard to get past all the impressive numbers in the memorable Wimbledon semi-final between the South African Kevin Anderson and the American John Isner. There was their height — 6 feet 8 inches and 6 feet 10 inches, respectively. There was the fact that the two men had clocked up the highest number of aces and service winners in the tournament as their serves blitzed the court, as if a semi-automatic rifle had been attached to the top of a crane. And there was the controversy generated by the match becoming the longest semi-final at Wimbledon after it lasted six-and-a-half hours. 

In fact, the clash of the giants was a kind of Rosetta Stone moment for tennis. The real stone that lies a few miles away at the British Museum helped archaeologists more than 200 years ago understand hieroglyphs because it had inscriptions in three scripts. This match similarly carried many messages, but about the future of tennis. It will be used again and again to argue the case for shorter matches. Billie Jean King, a pioneer of unconventional formats such as World Team Tennis with jarring sudden death tie-breakers at 4-4, wasted no time in calling for three-set matches at Grand Slams. More significant than its length was the age of the competitors: the quartet of competitors in the semi-finals was the oldest ever in the 50 years of professional tennis. Isner was the oldest at 33, followed by Anderson and Nadal (both 32) and Djokovic, 31. 

The semi-finals were an occasion also to worry about the inability of the next generation to perform at its best in Grand Slams. The exception is Dominic Thiem, but even the French Open finalist went out in the first round at Wimbledon, retiring hurt after two sets. The rest of the next generation’s performance at Wimbledon was dismal. The most charismatic, Alexander Zverev, the German world number 3 with choirboy good looks, lost in the third round to Ernests Gulbis, the gifted if erratic Latvian who was coming back from injury. Zverev lost the fifth set 0-6, the second time this year he has crashed out of a major with that embarrassing score in the final set. Given that the 21-year-old has never reached a Grand Slam quarter-final, large questions about his temperament are mounting, but then Roger Federer came into his own only at 22. Eloquent as ever, the German explained he had suffered the effects of a stomach bug and had not eaten for over 24 hours: “It felt like somebody just unplugged me in the middle of the fourth set.” 

Nick Kyrgios, the mercurial Australian of Greek and Malaysian-Indian parentage, is both wildly popular and deeply polarising. Wimbledon fans got both Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I was courtside for his match that followed Zverev’s loss. Pitted against Japan’s Kei Nishikori, who has long played as if he is willing to run a marathon if that is what it takes to win a tennis match, Kyrgios appeared to have done no tactical homework. Kyrgios hit so hard that he was overshooting the baseline by metres. He would later say he “panicked”.  Kyrgios seems destined to occasionally astound us with his talent — his three-set loss at Indian Wells in 2017 to Federer may have been the best match of the year outside of the Grand Slams — as well as his inability to make much of it. The ATP has even provided him psychological counselling to get him over his tendency to throw matches, but the odds are looking longer and longer that this entertainer will ever make the big league. Two hopefuls with infinite promise and some charm are the Greek wunderkind Stefanos Tsitsipas and the American Mackenzie McDonald, both of whom reached the fourth round.

It has almost become a cliché to say that we are living in tennis’ golden age. Indeed, the triumvirate at the top, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Wimbledon champion Djokovic,  are not only among the greatest ever but have a flair for redemption and rejuvenation that makes their careers seem like something out of a novel rather than mere sporting history. Björn Borg and John McEnroe, by contrast, had an intense rivalry but, by today’s semi-immortal standards, theirs was over in a flash, lasting a couple of years versus more than a dozen in the case of Federer and Nadal and a staggering 50 matches in the case of Nadal and Djokovic. What comes after is much less clear, however. 

This is even truer of women’s tennis where it is a more worrying question of “After Serena Williams, what?”. None of the other top women players has shown the consistency to make a mark on the public imagination. This was even truer at this year’s Wimbledon; by the end of the first week, nine of the top 10 seeds were gone. Simona Halep, the Romanian world number one who won her first Grand Slam at the French Open, not only fell apart in the third round but then confessed  to being mentally “tired” after her win at Roland Garros. Indeed, Halep used the word “tired” seven times and sounded less like a new world number one and more like someone contemplating retirement. 

Watching some of Williams’ last practice session of two hours before the final was to imagine her as an Amazon incapable of retiring. Even so, she looked noticeably a few steps slower, understandable as it is only 10 months since she gave birth to a baby girl. Last Saturday, she was duly trounced by the variety and aggression of Angelique Kerber, who moved her around and made her heavy-footed. Perhaps this is a rivalry that could keep Williams in the game for another couple of years.

The reigniting of the Djokovic-Nadal rivalry certainly rekindled the Serb’s love for the game in the semi-final. Watching the Serb this year had hitherto been akin to watching the meltdown of a modern-day Hamlet, albeit one with many monologues and little poetry. Just weeks ago, after losing to an unheralded Italian at the French Open, Djokovic looked mentally unhinged, refusing to appear in the main interview room and declining to answer questions about whether he would play the grass-court season at all. In the early rounds at Wimbledon, he seemed to be “playing from memory”, as Martina Navratilova put it. Then, facing the anything but stiff- upper-lip Centre Court crowd in his match against the Brit Kyle Edmund, Djokovic was unfairly booed for questioning a decision by the umpire. I was courtside and have never seen anything quite like it; the umpire somehow made three incorrect calls on a single point and a jingoistic crowd turned on the victim. In this case, they did Djokovic a favour.

They stoked his competitive fire and, equally importantly for a man who keenly feels he does not get his due relative to Federer and Nadal, appeared to make him impervious to the need for crowd support. This kept him going through the see-sawing semi-final with Nadal, who now suffers a mental block playing the Serb. Those who want tennis’ Grand Slams to institute a tie-breaker at 6-6 will use the disappointing final as an emblem of the need for change, but Djokovic by then was unbeatable. Anderson, subject to fatigue and the same attack of nerves he suffered in last year’s US Open final, which he lost to Nadal by a similar scoreline, certainly was not the opponent to pull off an upset. He did not venture to the net much and had done so only 50 times in the big-serving contest with Isner, a match in which most points were decided by baseline duels. In that sense, the battle of the giants was an emblem of how uncomfortable at the net even today’s big servers are, in part because they do not make the journey often enough but primarily because the heavy power top-spin generated by today’s racquets and strings makes volleying so difficult. That was former Wimbledon champion Stefan Edberg’s assessment when I asked him last year why the style of play he, Boris Becker and McEnroe had perfected had gone out of style. 

The renewal of the Djokovic-Nadal rivalry at the pinnacle of the sport and the inability of Federer to turn back the clock forever (he will be 37 on August 8) suggests that even on grass, the battles will be long and arduous and played almost exclusively from the baseline. With the golden age of tennis surely winding down in a year or two — Grand Slam finals that do not feature two of the big three are already often disappointing; this was the third dull Wimbledon men’s final in succession — perhaps it is time to experiment with formats that shorten matches, after all. But, for now, the redemption of  Djokovic and the rebirth of Kerber gives tennis fans much to celebrate.