In my old brownstone-filled neighborhood in Brooklyn, you can see into people’s ground-floor apartments as you walk down the street. From that vantage point on a hot day, every living room looks temptingly black and cool. But none looked as tempting as the one I glanced into about 10 years ago, while straggling back from a jog in the park on a humid July afternoon. Just inside the open window, there was a big television set—big for those pre-flat-screen days, anyway—that was tuned to Wimbledon. Centre Court’s green grass glowed in the dark, and the pop of the balls and polite murmuring of the British crowd seemed to come from some other, more civilized world. I’ve never been so close to knocking on a stranger’s door and inviting myself in. If there’s a sporting venue more perfectly suited to television, I haven’t seen it. The show courts at Wimbledon fit the playing surface inside the screen, while keeping up the illusion that the grass might go on forever outside of it.
The last two years I've spent the first week of the tournament on the other side of that screen, walking around the grounds. This time I’ve been back on the outside, but I’ve felt almost as surrounded by the event here, across the ocean. The ESPN crew is already at it when I wake up, I can get four different matches on my computer at work, and the players stop by to chat on the Tennis Channel in the evening. These days Wimbledon seems to be made, and played, for TV. I’m not complaining. If nothing else, this week of tennis has helped me get the sound of the vuvuzela out of my head.
After all of that scattered watching, listening, and reading, here’s what stuck in my mind from the opening days.
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Speaking of having the stars stop by to chat, I’m still amazed by how often tennis players are asked to talk about themselves. They do press conferences in multiple languages, and then make the rounds of various TV networks from different countries. It makes me think of what Andy Roddick said at one of those borderline-useless pre-Davis Cup press conferences. He was asked what surprised him the most about being a pro. Roddick, with a half-serious, half-joking sneer, said, “I never thought I’d have to answer so many [darn] questions."
My two favorite Q & A sessions from this week involved Roger Federer on ESPN, after he’d met the Queen, and Justine Henin on the Tennis Channel after her second-round win. Federer, hunched low in his seat and wearing a striped Wimbledon member’s tie, looked like a happy schoolboy. As he was describing what the Queen had for lunch and laughing his goofy laugh, I thought about what a different type of person and star he is from a guy like Tiger Woods. The weekend before, Woods had been ice cold in his post-U.S. Open TV interview, to the point where it got a little awkward. Granted, he had just let a major slip through his fingers, and Federer never would have shown up on ESPN if he’d already lost at Wimbledon. Nevertheless, there’s something appealingly disarming and un-Olympian about Federer’s demeanor in these situations. In the days of Borg and McEnroe, it was said that the No. 1 player had to be a society to himself, closed off and above his fellow players. It was one reason why the very social McEnroe didn’t thrive there at first. That stayed true during the Sampras era, but from all accounts Federer doesn’t operate that way. He doesn’t need to distance himself from his fellow denizens of pro tennis, and you could see that in his interactions with Mary Carillo and Pat McEnroe.
