* !Rn “They were so simple, those little English tournaments, so utterly artless. Homemade, if you like. Red clay courts, damp and heavy, clubhouses of old brick, and inside all the woodwork nearly worn out. Floors, tables, bashed-up little bars. In the change-rooms, wooden lockers, wet floors, and nice old smells, musty as the devil. They were funny things, those tournaments, but they were open-hearted, and they allowed ordinary people to play them.*
Our first tournament was at Sutton, Surrey—cold, damp, old and English. Veal and ham pie, lettuce and watercress, fragile cucumber sandwiches. Also, Teddy Tinling. A tall man in tennis clothes, who seemed at first glance to be all legs and piercing eyes, approached me and said, “My dear chap, those shorts you’re wearing are appalling! Simply appalling. You have no knees,” he sniffed. “Come along with me. We shall have to rig you out.”—Gordon Forbes, writing about his first trip to play the English spring tournaments in 1954 in A Handful of Summers.
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“I think any surface change has something nice about it, but grass obviously is the most special one because you are only one month on it, so every day you have the chance to play in this surface is a special day. I feel it is something you want to savor as long as you are on the surface.”—Roger Federer, after his match Thursday in Halle.
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Queens is the tournament that reminds me the most of tennis’ old amateur circuit, or at least the old amateur circuit as I like to imagine it. This 250-level event comes just a few hours after a Grand Slam has ended, after two weeks of gladiatorial theatrics in bloody arenas at Roland Garros, where matches are won by sweating and sliding. By comparison, Queens is modest, human-size—homemade, as Forbes might say. It’s also, like those English tournaments of the 1950s, played not in an arena but in front of an old brick clubhouse that, inside, really does have woodwork that seems deliberately worn out. The last thing Queens, which houses a court-tennis court deep inside it, wants to feel is shiny or corporate. The scale is small enough that, like its sister tune-up tournament in Eastbourne, you can see the houses of the surrounding neighborhood from the cheap seats.
After Paris, everything moves a little more quickly and crisply at Queen’s. The players walk among the fans as they travel the short distance from clubhouse to court. The ball skips through the grass—it still does, no matter what people, or Pat Cash, say about how slow the surface is these days. The points get shorter, as do the players’ strokes. The no-nonsense atmosphere must be contagious because they even, including Rafael Nadal, get up to the line a little more quickly to serve. Sandwiched between the high-stakes history-making intensity of the French Open and Wimbledon, Queens feels sort of like a very (very) good club championship. Where else will you see Nadal let out a laugh in the middle of a close third set?
Of course, it’s not exactly like the old days. In Forbes’ day that many of the English events were played on red clay. Even more confusing, they were called “hard courts," to distinguish them from “soft” grass courts. The first open tournament, in 1968, was the British Hard Court Open, played on clay in Bournemouth, England. Now it’s all about grass in Great Britain, which is as it should be. As Federer says, it’s a season to savor, a brief flowering, the way I imagine summer is over there. Grass tennis, because we see it so infrequently, looks like a lark. The players, who have no time to prepare for it, wing it out there. They slip and fall, but it doesn’t matter too much. It’s grass: Boris Becker used to dive on the stuff.
Because of this lack of preparation, I’ve always been surprised that form typically holds at Queens. John McEnroe won it many times, and more recently Andy Roddick, Lleyton Hewitt, Rafael Nadal, and Andy Murray have hoisted the tournament’s absurdly large trophy. So I guess it’s somewhat of a shock that this year everything fell apart. The matches so far have shown again that grass-court tennis, more than clay-court tennis, can come down to just a couple of points. Murray had to sneak out a first-set tiebreaker in the first round against the net-rushing Ivan Navarro. It was a match that, for a second, could have gone either way, but after one excellent passing shot from Murray it veered sharply in his direction. Today he was on the opposite side of that phenomenon. Murray let his game get away from him for just a minute or two in the third-set tiebreaker against Mardy Fish, but they were the wrong minute or two.
Ditto Nadal this week. He appeared to have carried his momentum across the English Channel, the way he did in 2008, right up until he handed a break back in the second set to Denis Istomin with a couple of oddly timed and, for him, almost nonchalant drop shots. All of that clay-season momentum, built over 24 straight victories, vanished just like that. Nadal barely survived Istomin, after stoning an overhead on one match point, and then he took a rare loss to a fellow Spaniard, Feliciano Lopez. Late in the first-set tiebreaker of that match, he anticipated a backhand return, had a good look at it, but put it in the net. On set point, he had an open crosscourt pass, but he went up the line instead and missed in the net again. A match on grass, especially at Queens this year, remains as dodgy and unpredictable as the footing. (Note: For years I’d never seen Nadal miss an overhead, or even hit one for anything other than a winner. Now he's missed three in four matches: One at Roland Garros against Melzer, the one I mentioned above against Istomin, and another, into the net, against Lopez. If there’s any shot that you don’t want to start thinking about, it’s the overhead. Could it become a factor at an important moment at Wimbledon this year?)
