Have you ever stood and listened to a tennis match? I tried it for a few minutes yesterday. You can’t do it with just anyone; you need a pair of opponents with special talents to make it entertaining. The distinctive thud and thwack that Marat Safin and Richard Gasquet make with their backhands might suffice for a few games, but yesterday the outer courts at Wimbledon offered a higher order of sonic stars on Court 12. That’s where 16-year-old Michelle Larcher de Brito faced 29-year-old Francesca Schiavone in the final match of the day. Tournament officials apparently couldn’t bear the thought of putting these two women within earshot. Either that or they wanted to have some fun at the neighbors’ expense.
De Brito’s squeal you know about. The teenager lets loose with a long, single, high-pitched note that explodes out of her at contact and gradually tails off as the ball gets farther away. It isn’t just the hit itself that she seems to want to accompany, but the entire trajectory of the shot as it travels from her racquet to her opponent’s racquet. It kind of goes like this: “Ahhhhhh-eeeeeeeeee-eeeee-eeeee!” That may be illegal, but Schiavone is hardly the person to make a stink about it. The Italian produces her own unmistakable soundtrack, a laborious, guttural, two-note grunt that goes, “Ah-unh!” There’s no doubt about it: Francesca is working out there.
The stands, naturally, were full. De Brito has a way of attracting throngs of spectators, many of whom you suspect would be the first to say that what she does is bloody offensive and should be banned forever. There was also a small ocean of people wobbling together just outside the gates, waiting to get in. Rather than join them, I stood against a bench within shouting—er, grunting—distance.
There was a lot to hear. It sounded like what it was, winner-take-all competition. De Brito’s youthful, there-is-this-match-and-this-match-only-and-I-will-die-if-I-lose desperation alternated with Schiavone’s professional pleasure in the physical test. Then there was the crowd. I had just come from Centre Court, where Marin Cilic and Sam Querrey had blitzed winners past each other from the baseline with rapid disdain. The audience blinked and clapped politely. Could it really be as easy as they were making it look? On Court 12, the spectators were caught up in the points. The winners here came with a sound that let everyone know how well-earned they really were. How did I know they were winners, if I couldn’t see them? Because the crowd didn’t just blink and clap politely: They stood, they gasped, they whooped, they tittered. Like the players, they made a lot of noise.
(Boilerplate disclaimer: The above should not be construed as a plea in favor of ever more massive grunting in tennis. It is an observation of a single match. Thank you for understanding.)
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It’s not that Querrey-Cilic had nothing to offer, exactly. First and foremost, there was the surreal sight of these two second-tier players inside Centre Court. They’d been given the run of the mansion and had a great time exploring every corner. As to why they were there, it seems that ESPN had requested that they be placed on a “prominent TV court.” The network got more than its wish, and was pleased with the result.
As for the match itself, it was five sets of tall man baseline tennis. Once an oddity, it’s verging on becoming the norm. Querrey fought long and well, but he was hurt by the fact that he served last in the final set. Cilic was sloppy enough to make me believe, through most of the fifth set, that he would lose. As my colleague Chris Clarey put it, the Croat is “good at everything, but not great at anything.” One of his skills seems to be the ability to close a long match with energy. When he was in trouble in the fifth, Cilic gathered strength from the moment and become more single-mindedly aggressive. In the final two games, he was better than good.
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What happens in London on the Day After the Day of Carnage? I think you can guess. The city’s pundits swoop in for their yearly survey of the wreckage that is euphemistically known as British tennis. They target the LTA, naturally, which is responsible for directing the sport in this country. But these armchair quarterbacks can’t settle on a diagnosis for the disease, beyond telling us that the tennis authorities in the U.K. have done every single thing wrong. There are complaints about the lack of minority outreach, as well as the top-down approach of paying famous coaches “princely sums” to come to London and instruct a bunch of no-names for three-quarters of the year.
While no conclusions are drawn, of course, the Mirror’s Oliver Holt does make humorous headway at the expense of one of those famous well-paid coaches, Paul Annacone.
Calling his explanations “excuses,” Holt says that Annacone “came up with some corkers . . . wreathed in psychobabble and gobbledegook, but the essence of denial still managed to shine through.” Talking about Brit Dan Evans’ defeat at the hands of Nikolay Davydenko in the first round, Annacone says, “That match was 6-2, 6-2, 6-3, but it easily could have been 6-1, 6-1, 6-1 if he wasn’t careful.” Talk about keeping your expectations low!
—But Holt is upstaged by the headline writers at the Mail, who have the final and most sensible word on the subject. The paper puts this solemnly damning sentence across the top of its back page:
“Britain’s Got No Talent”
Otherwise, the tabs have fun . . .
—Hyping today’s Murray-Gulbis match, or, as the Sun puts it, the “Murray Cheat Storm—Angry Andy Ready to Rumble After Cheap Gulbis Cheat Gibe.” This line is accompanied by a shot of Murray in a cricket helmet with face mask.
Gulbis’ crime? Actually, it is real, and a little weird. He accused Murray this week of having taken an unnecessary injury timeout during their match in Queens a couple of years ago. Murray denies it, saying that he had to pull out the next round with the same injury. Gulbis does seem to suffer from a faulty memory. He says the timeout adversely affected him because he was too young to handle it, when in fact he served out the first set immediately afterward, before Murray won in three.
—The Sun also kisses a happy goodbye to the “annoying” Larcher de Brito with the headline, “Screamers Dream Dies.”
—You know it wouldn’t take long. Gisela Dulko has been crowned the “new queen” of tennis by the Express, having “deposed” Maria Sharapova yesterday. The Mail follows suit, commanding us to, “Hail Gisela, the New Queen of Wimbledon’s Catwalk Court.” Even the normally sober Independent asks, “Dulko Charms, but Can She Wear Crown?”
—From the be-careful-what-you-wish-for-department. I recently came across this description of Wimbledon in 1972 by British tennis writer Rex Bellamy.
"Two strokes, the service and volley, are often tediously dominant. All is split-second timing. When a men’s event is pared down to the later rounds, the dreamland of clay memories becomes ever more appealing."
Bellamy laments that Wimbledon, the sport’s finest shop window, offers a dull and mediocre product. He also correctly predicts that the surface will have to be fixed at some point for Wimbledon to matter again.
—Finally, love that photo at the top, right? It's 15-year-old ball girl Chloe Chambers rallying with Tommy Haas yesterday. Who says the U.K. doesn’t have tennis players?
The sun is out, the pleasant man on the loudpeaker is talking to us, and the players are loosening themselves up all over the grounds with that little nervous, twisting hop they do at the baseline. I’m heading out to join them. Or at least watch them. Talk to you later.