Wimbledon is my favorite tournament to cover outside the U.S., for a variety of reasons, beginning with the most sensible—and selfish—of them all. London, more specifically Wimbledon Village, is the place where I feel most comfortable and which I find, to use a term any Anglophile will understand, the most civilized. It's not worth reading a whole lot into that; it's mostly circumstantial. For me, the living and working conditions at Wimbledon are unique. Others may not be so happy there.
I like to go for a run every other morning, at home or on the road. The spacious three-story townhouse I share in Wimbledon with El Jon Wertheim and one or more other colleagues (this year, it was Greg Couch, whose AOL FanHouse column is a great read) is in a setback off the Church Road. It's a 10-minute walk up the hill from the All England Club, and a five-minute walk from the heart of Wimbledon Village, with its restaurants, pubs, coffee boutiques and grocery stores. And just beyond town is Wimbledon Common, a huge, semi-forested park with, among other things, wide but shaded dirt trails, bridle paths for horseback riding, and a golf course.
So on my typical 5-mile run, I leave the house and within four minutes I'm on the Common, where I try not to get lost as I explore this or that path. I ought to drop breadcrumbs as I pick my route, but the abundant pigeons would get them. So I try to memorize mini-landmarks (OK, left at the forked tree with the strange scar on its bark; right at the discarded and flattened juice box some child left behind). It's a pleasant exercise for someone like me, who enjoys observing details and knowing where he stands—more or less.
I noticed this year that the typical English dog is well behaved (and they love their Labrador retrievers over there as much as we do). The dogs poke along, obediently, nosing around here or there in the brush or a trail-side meadow; they might briefly sniff a passing dog or simply trot by it. If they could talk, they might say to each other, Morning! Looks like we dodged that shower. Have a nice day!
Whereas my own dog Buck would be running hellbent through or over (he doesn't seem to care which) everything in his erratic and unpredictable path, and he'd try to engage every other dog along the trail; tease or irritate it into a spirited wrestling match, preferably near a mud hole, or goad it into playing a game of catch me—if you can.
It's often put the other way round, but I say people are a lot like their dogs.
One morning, I walked through the gate for credentialed personnel and debenture holding swells right behind an American couple, who clearly were meeting up with British friends who stood waiting just a few feet away. The British lady was dressed in a discreet, sleeveless flower-print dress and tasteful, pale yellow peep-toe sandals with a medium heel. A perfect outfit for Wimbledon, with just the right dash of (properly) sexy.
The American woman had wriggled into a tight, dazzlingly white dress with a hem well above her knees and a neckline that plunged as dramatically as a WTA ranking. She teetered on chartreuse spaghetti-strap sandals with high, pencil-thin heels.
"You look gorgeous," the British lady said, embracing her Yankee friend. "Just stunning."
What? She looks like a hooker, I thought—not that it doesn't work for me...or these other two gents.
I reckoned the British lady thought the same thing. But she's British, you see...
Anyway, as I run back out of the Common, I roll into town and stop at the grocery for some peaches or cherries, a can of that San Pellegrino Limonata (highly recommended), and a medium iced coffee (Americano) at Starbucks. If you were at Wimbledon these past two weeks, you could see Lindsay Davenport at the intersection of the High Street and Church Road on any given morning, wrestling her stroller and child up onto the curb while desperately trying to avoid spilling the cup of Starbuck's coffee in her hand, expletives not deleted.
The working conditions at Wimbledon are superb. The Centre Court compound (including the seeded-player locker rooms), International Press Centre, and Millennium building (which houses, among other things, the player's tea room/restaurant, the "buttery" for umpires and line officials, and the All England Club member's bar and dining enclave) are connected by various elevated walkways and open spaces. You can also access the massive Broadcast Centre from them, although you have to run a gauntlet of security guards who make sure your credential gives you access to each successive area. Which mine does.
My favorite spot is the "Players' Garden," the second-story terrace between the press centre and Millennium building. It has a real turf floor just like Centre Court itself, which is odd, given that you're 20 feet above ground level. The garden is dotted with lawn furniture, and there's a sandwich shop (you custom-build your own) and small bar. The Players' Garden is where you go to meet people—or catch coaches, celebrities, former players, officials and most any pooh-bah who makes his way to Wimbledon for the day.
We caught up with Toni Nadal and Bjorn Borg there, right after the final. Nearby, Grace Jones was swanning around, and she finally sat down with Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood. He's a skinny little fella, and I couldn't help overhear him bragging to Jones that he's been "clean and serene." Way to go, Ronnie.... You're too old to die now, which is how it works in rock and roll.
If you stand leaning on the railing of the Players' Garden, you may be looking down upon fans jammed into the relatively narrow walkway between the Centre Court and Millennium building. The two are connected, but only by an open, narrow bridge above the walkway. The fans have figured out that if they crowd into the passageway and stand there, they have a fair chance of seeing any personage on his way out from Centre Court to the Millennium building and transportation desk and courtesy car pick-up area. On most big days, a steady stream of tennis celebrities crosses that bridge, and each of them has a chance to wave at the cheering throngs below on either side.
Last Sunday, a maintenance man appeared at intervals after the final, as the crowd below the bridge waited patiently for a glimpse of Rafael Nadal (or was it Xisca? There sure were a lot of boys in the throng). He had a plastic Wimbledon bag full of used tournament tennis balls. He began tossing them from the bridge to the crowd, who fought (insofar as polite Wimbledon-goers are capable of aggression) for the balls, crying and cheering out all the while. It reminded me of my Catholic grammar school, where my third-grade teacher (Sister Aurelia, if I remember correctly) on Friday would have us push our desks to the walls and line up at the back of the classroom. Then she'd throw pieces of taffy or a peppermint and we'd all scramble and fight over them like they were golden ingots. Talk about old school...
Actually, the press work room where I violate the language on a daily basis is directly below the Players' Garden, and the large windows look out on that passageway and across at the Radio Wimbledon office and studio, built into the Centre Court. All in all, Wimbledon has done a great job, from my perspective, in keeping the various parts of its official body nicely connected with the others. It's not that the other majors treat the press as the tournament body's appendix, or make a conscious effort segregate the different components of the community. It just works out that way more so than at Wimbledon. The planning has been superb and sensible.
I don't want to leave you all without a little tennis today, so here's an anecdote relayed to me by my pal Alejandro Delmas, of the Spanish language Diario As. In his meeting with the Spanish press after his semifinal win, Rafael Nadal was asked what he would write about Roger Federer if he were a journalist.
"First," Rafa replied, "no way I would be a journalist."
He went on to say, "You guys have tried to kill Roger—often. But he's always come back and proved you wrong. So one thing I would not do is make the mistake of saying Roger is dead."
A group of us caught also up with Rafa's uncle and coach, Toni Nadal, up in that Players' Garden shortly after the final. He was peppered with the usual assortment of questions, including the inevitable one: Has Rafa surpassed Federer, as the rankings insist?
"Maybe right now Rafa is the better player," Toni conceded.
Will Rafa eclipse Federer's record of 16 major titles. Toni pondered this, then gestured toward his pocket and said, "If I have to put money on it, I say maybe no."
Sixteen is a very big number, and I see two big obstacles standing in Rafa's way. The first is the state of his knees. They caused him to miss a chance to defend his Wimbledon title and, eventually, surrender his No. 1 ranking. That's no small deal. It's a valid subject for speculation, although I wouldn't start using that as an excuse when Nadal loses a match. If he plays, he's fit, or fit enough for injury to be, at best, a minor theme. But who in his right mind would miss a chance to defend a Wimbledon title, as Nadal did last year, because he had a little soreness in an arm, back or leg? That beats a note from the doctor in my book, any day.
The other roadblock is more subtle but no less formidable, and that's Nadal's lack of a natural affinity and affection for hard courts. Sure his asphalt game has improved, and he's successfully incorporated elements into his repertoire that have made him a much better hard court player. And there's no doubt that he's poised to focus his summer on making a run for the U.S. Open title that would complete his career Grand Slam. But does he really feel it on hard courts, the way he feels it on clay, and grass?
Nadal loves clay. We always knew that. But he loves grass as much as he loves red dirt, and that's a bit of a surprise. I don't think many of us took it seriously when Nadal first revealed that he really burned to win Wimbledon. We shrugged: Who doesn't? It sounded like he was just saying the right thing, blowing a little smoke to be polite. And we'd been conditioned by a succession of clay-court champions to believe that you couldn't possible love both surfaces. Roland Garros winners like Thomas Muster, Sergi Bruguera, and even Gustavo Kuerten made no secret of their antipathy to grass; in some of their cases it bordered on contempt. Grass is for cows, and all that. They basically lowered the bar of our expectations. But Nadal, even in his youth, never harbored such feelings.
We know now how much Nadal loves grass and Wimbledon. You don't get to the Wimbledon final in four of five years, as Nadal has done, pretending to a Holstein. So Nadal's main problem now, if he hopes to catch up with Federer, is one that's not likely to change even if he should win the U.S. Open in September. He's less likely to be happy on hard courts; less inclined, perhaps, to cultivate and maintain the same frame of mind he has on clay and grass. With two of the four majors on hard courts (the Australian Open, where Nadal has collected one title, is the other), he's going to need a tremendous fund of determination and discipline, because it's always easier to play where you feel truly comfortable, even happy.
As Rafa might say, "The true is that grass is the perfect soor-face for me, the same like clay."
Who are we to argue?