Wimbledon, Mon Amour
Death and resurrection on the grass.

By Jeffrey Hart, NR senior editor
July 7-8, 2001

ete Sampras, undoubtedly somewhere in the top ten on tennis Olympus, had not accomplished much since being annihilated by Marat Safin in the finals of the U.S. Open last summer. But Center Court at Wimbledon has long been his favorite venue, Wimbledon grass his favorite surface, and now he was trying for an astonishing eighth Wimbledon title.

He didn't get to the finals, and Center Court did not refresh his powers. The nineteen-year-old Swiss, Roger Federer, did everything that had brought Sampras to the summit, and that day did them better than Sampras: serve, volley, groundstrokes, mobility, consistency. And Federer is no one-day wonder. Previously he had beaten not only the fine young Frenchman Sebastien Grosjean, who had defeated Agassi in Paris, but also the fiery young Australian baseliner Lleyton Hewitt, the leading fist-pumper in men's tennis today.

Hungry generations tread us down. Sampras says he still has years of tennis left, and that he will be back at Wimbledon next year, which is very likely. But he is almost thirty now, the witching hour for tennis at this level. To use a Spenglerian term, this may well be Sampras's Untergangen. The passing of a great athlete's skills has a sense of mortality about it, a symbolic death that reminds us of the real mortality we all share. Even the gods die, in this great tragic ritual. Maybe that is why we care about them so much, why sports at this level has a mythic quality, and why sports memories are told and retold, like the adventures of Achilles and Hector.

Sampras was seeded number one at Wimbledon, and so was Martina Hingis on the women's side, even though she too had accomplished little this year. Hingis disappeared suddenly in the first round, barely having unpacked her rackets. This was mysterious.

To be sure, there is a sense that the women's game has passed Hingis by. The top women players now play a power game: Capriatti, the Williams sisters, Davenport, all those blonde eighteen-year-olds from places like Belgium and the Czech Republic. Hingis is a cerebral player with a fine sense of the dynamics of position on the court. But she lacks overall power, and her second serve is no more than a fat short ball. The big hitters step in and plaster it. Hingis needs greater arm strength (work with the weights) and must practice the wrist-snap to be able to spin that second serve into the court with some juice on it.

But there is a distinct impression that Hungis's mind is in disarray. In women's tennis often a parent (in Hingis's case her mother) is also her coach, and that Hingis both depends on her mother and resists her strictures. When her mother isn't in the stands, she can't play, and Mrs. Molitor was absent at Wimbledon. And there has always been something creepy about Hingis being named Martina at birth, after then champion Martina Navratilova. In addition, Hingis's emotional life is otherwise complicated. Last year she was said to be the "girlfriend" of Lleyton Hewitt, who has now switched over to rising young Kim Klijsters of Belgium. Hingis meanwhile is dating the young Florida prosecutor who convicted the lout who had been stalking her.

If the men's and women's number one players enacted a kind of death this year, there were resurrection stories being enacted by Goran Ivanisevich and Jennifer Capriati.

The last time I saw Ivanisevich play, in the U.S. Open, he could hardly be said to play at all. His control of the ball was nil. His huge serve was gone. At about 6'4" and gangly-awkward, his movements about the court were grotesque and to little avail. He could not have beaten Snow White. Not unexpectedly, he plummeted almost out of the rankings altogether, and this year had to be admitted to Wimbledon on a "wild card" basis. After all, he had once been ranked number two in the world. But, as I write, he is about to play England's Tim Henman in the semi-finals, his serve, at 140 mph, having carried him through a string of one-sided victories, including a four-set win over the powerful but ineffable Marat Safin.

Ivaniesevich is a crowd-pleasing clown. He may be a little nuts, but since he comes from Croatia that may be a redundancy. He claims to have multiple personalities inside him, Good Goran, Bad Goran, and, as I understand it, his Guardian Angel. Oh well.

Jennifer Capriati came to Wimbledon this year as another and more sympathetic resurrection story. At fourteen she had been a child prodigy here, and at fifteen she had eliminated Martina Navratilova in the quarterfinals. Then she unraveled, the strains of big-time tennis evidently too much and her father-coach Stephano probably not an asset. But after a couple of years she decided to "start over," worked with Harold Solomon as her coach, trained herself into adult physical fitness and, shazzam, after six years arrived at Wimbledon with the Australian and French titles in her pocket. She had a shot at four Grand Slam victories this year.

But there were ominous signs in her quarterfinal victory over Serena Williams. Capriati led Williams 5-4 in the first set, and was serving for the match. Then she hit three double faults and continued to lose the set. For one stretch she had completely lost confidence in her serve and was tossing it low and pushing it in at about 50 miles per hour. Then, Williams playing raggedly, she won the second set, while Williams complained to a trainer that she had an upset stomach. Soon, Capriati was complaining of a strained buttock, no kidding. Capriati, playing sloppy tennis, was able to pull out the match. John McEnroe, commenting for NBC-TV said that this was the latest NBC soap opera.

In the semis, she faced l9-year-old Juustine Henin of Belgium, 5'5," about 100 pounds, but also with a powerful long-swing backhand. Capriati's game fell apart. It will be Venus Williams versus Henin in the final. And, oh yes, Richard Williams, the father-coach of the two young women, arrived trailing clouds of scandal in Newsweek, his wife Orecene having supposedly left him, and gave it as his curbstone opinion that Venus, now the finalist, might not be playing tennis much longer. He's making his own movie of his life and seems to have popped his cork.

Tim Henman, an otherwise admirable fellow, illustrates the maxim that he who loves the world will lose it. Henman desperately needs to win, with the entire population of England more or less demanding it. He has a beautiful game, but his fear of losing is actually painful to watch. The tabloids call him a choke artist. Several times in his quarterfinal match with the formidable Federer he actually seemed white with fear. But he pulled out the match and the Brits in the stands went bananas. No doubt pints were lifted in pubs all over England.

Tim Henman should recall that he has practiced every shot thousands of times, that when he practices his served about 95 out of 100 go where he wants them to go, and no matter how tight the situation in a match may be. Those are not bad odds. Just hit the thing, and if it doesn't go in, well, prepare to shake hands.

He should also reflect on those words on over the players' entrance to Center Court. They are from Kipling's famous poem "If": "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/ And treat those two imposters just the same…" then you have things in perspective and your manners will be appropriate.

In other words, the fist pumping, bellowing, complaining and even racket smashing that we see so much now are beyond the pale. The great Fred Perry and the Doherty brothers from the turn of the century, whose statues preside over the Main Gate here, would rather move to Patagonia than behave that way.

That the sign at the entrance to Center Court quotes Kipling is deeply appropriate, because the poem "If" describes a Gentleman. Thirty-two lines in length, its first stanza reads:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowances for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise…

Then — the poem ends 24 lines later — "Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,/ And, which is more, you'll be a Man, my son."

By a Man here, Kipling of course meant a Gentleman. Kipling, though a great poet is much dissed nowadays by fools (though praised by Orwell, Trilling, Eliot and Derbyshire) because he admired the empire (so did Conrad). In fact, the empire left most of its possessions much better than it found them. His presence in the temple of tennis is variously appropriate.

In July 1937, here at Wimbledon, the young Don Budge defeated the great Baron Gottfried Von Cramm in a five-set Davis Cup match that tennis historians consider probably the greatest tennis match ever played. If Budge had not come from behind in the fifth set to win, the Davis Cup would have gone to Berlin. Hitler had called the Baron just before the match to wish him luck.

Earlier that summer, Budge had won the Wimbledon tournament, and Von Cramm had given him an exquisite lesson in the manners of sportsmanship.

At the time, long ago, many players, believing an opponent had received a bad call, would throw the next point, hitting the ball aside. Budge himself had done this in a match that very day. Von Cramm took Budge aside, sat down with him on a bench, and said that it would be better sportsmanship, and less personally conspicuous, to let the bad call stand. "After all, the linesman is doing his best." Budge thought that over and decided Von Camm was right.

Much later, Budge wrote, "From that first day I met him on the porch at Wimbledon he became one of the greatest influences on my life. Gottfried Von Cramm's ideals bordered on the beautiful. I mean that."

To the extent that it still can do so, Wimbledon insists upon the ideal depicted in Kipling's "If." All players, all, wear, exclusively, white. This represents tennis tradition. And the subordination of the raging ego to the game. The stands at Wimbledon are totally silent during a point. And there is no play on the first Sunday, midway through the tournament — no matter what gate receipts are forgone. And of course there is the grass, the glorious grass, which adds a subtlety other surfaces lack, even to the feathery drop shot of fading angle shot or sliced serve.

All Wimbledon tournaments are great. Because Wimbledon is Wimbledon.