The View from the Spaghetti Factory

As if the drastic state of British tennis wasn’t bad enough*, the charmingly unflustered protocols of the All England Lawn Tennis Club have come in for some justifiable criticism this week. Like the opening of Parliament or an episode of Miss Marple, Wimbledon has its own slow, deliberate methods, based on an unshakeable certainty that The Way We’ve Always Done Things simply cannot be wrong.

But how wrong they were. Having lost a significant portion of the first week through heavy rain, the club’s only hint of radical thinking was to start the key show-court matches earlier… on Day 6, after several days when clear mornings offered the opportunity to catch up on the growing backlog of matches. Far more damaging, though, is the system for restarting matches after rain breaks. Grass courts require special treatment, so it’s entirely reasonable that the covers go on quickly at the first sign of rain. The problems lie with what happens next.

I was there on the second Monday this year, and several generous patches of dry, sunny weather were completely wasted, because (as I understand it) the AELTC are always waiting for the London Weather Centre to assure them of at least 30 minutes of clear weather. The players are always given fifteen minutes’ notice before the resumption of play and may be given up to five minutes to warm up, which seems perfectly fair, but why aren’t the players given their notice fifteen minutes before the rain ends? Why are there no facilities for them to warm up indoors? If the London Weather Centre can predict the arrival of the next shower to within 30 minutes, why can they not do the same for the end of the current shower?

Oh well, at least they’re installing a retractable roof on Centre Court. In 2009.

*But let’s hear it for Alex Bogdanovic and Melanie South… unseeded British mixed doubles pair, who have already beaten the No.1 seeds and absolutely hammered the No.13 seeds. There is hope!

When Tim Henman spoke frankly about British tennis and how we are far too “accepting of mediocrity”, it was inevitable that the massed clever dicks of the press would swap their knowing nudges and winks. Despite the insinuation, though, Henman is far less a part of the problem than those very journalists who hurry to reduce every uniquely promising sportsperson to a handy, easy-to-denigrate stereotype. There’s always a Bottler, a Loose Cannon, a Lovable Rogue, a Crafty Latino, etc…

Henman, of course, is the One Who Always Loses (Heroically) and as ever, the bitesize media image conveniently ignores the truth. As the best British male player of the last 50 years, he’s eminently qualified to comment. On a subjective level, his creative flair, in the style of Borg or Edberg, has made him an ideal antidote to the more brutal side of modern tennis. And while we might criticise his lapses of concentration and self-confidence, Henman’s work-rate and fitness are beyond reproach.

Speaking of which, fitness seems to be a major problem in Britain’s tennis crisis. At least a couple of the young British women in the first round of this year’s Wimbledon just didn’t look up to the job. David Foster Wallace (a promising junior player in his day) describes the high-pressure daily life at a tennis academy in ‘Infinite Jest’, and I’m guessing the training programmes haven’t changed much since he wrote that book. Not naming names, but if you’re 18 years old, carrying visible surplus around the midriff and looking utterly shattered at the end of the first set, there’s something wrong.

Of course there are other problems. School sports pitches are being sold for development all over the country and it’s difficult to promote a fairly exclusive middle-class sport when the national sport (with working class roots) is all-pervasive. However, I don’t think anyone really expects tennis to compete with football or cricket… making a decent fist of things with the facilities we already have would be a start.