“Wimbledon is here, time to do cartwheels around the room!” a British tennis fan tweeted early Monday, as the first balls were being struck at the All England Club.
As I read those words in New York at 7am, I found myself agreeing with them in theory. For the next two weeks, I’ll get to wake up to a television screen filled with Wimbledon’s soothing shades of green and white; that’s reason enough to celebrate.
In practice, though, I wondered if cartwheels were really such a good idea. For one thing, I hadn’t had my coffee yet. For another, I probably didn’t have time to look away from the TV set.
For a top player with hopes of winning the title, Day 1 at a Grand Slam must feel like the beginning of a marathon. It can feel the same way as a spectator. Trying to keep track of the 64 matches – played on 20 courts over the course of 10 hours – on opening day at Wimbledon is like trying to keep your eye on every runner who leaves the starting gate in a 26-mile race. You wanted tennis, but did you want this much tennis?
Until recently, of course, it was impossible to see it all if you were watching from home. In the States, we had to take what NBC or ESPN dished out; often, this was a menu of US stars and show-court blowouts. All of that has changed with the rise of satellite TV and the online stream. Now we control our spectating destiny; now every living room can be a personal press room. In the early days at Wimbledon, reporters will spend much of their day flicking from one channel to the next on their monitors. They know that if they try to catch some live tennis on Centre Court – or even just to pick up a cucumber sandwich to fend off starvation – they’ll miss what’s happening in 19 other places.
Still, Wimbledon only comes once a year, and for some of us the desire to see it all is too much to resist. On Monday morning, I started by checking in on last year’s Centre Court sensation, Nick Kyrgios. The Aussie was already up 4-0, so, with no time to waste on uncompetitive sets, I moved on to his fellow up-and-comer Dominic Thiem on Court 8.
This was more interesting; Thiem had lost the first set to Dudi Sela 6-2. But they were heading for a changeover, so I was heading elsewhere. Next up was Victoria Azarenka vs. Estonian wild card Anett Kontaviet. On the first point I saw, Kontaveit rolled a backhand winner crosscourt. Was this an upset in the making on Court 12? Not exactly – Azarenka broke serve soon after, and I was breaking for the remote again.
A click later, I was at Court 17 for Karolina Pliskova v Irina Falconi. Pliskova is a rising star and a possible grass-court standout, but she was up a set and a break. So I checked in on yet another promising Aussie youth, Thanasi Kokkinakis, who was about to begin a tie-break with Leonardo Mayer on Court 16. Here, finally, was a chance to linger – tennis fans can put off doing anything to watch a tie-break.
It was a long and dramatic one, too, which Mayer would eventually win 9-7. A little too long, it turned out, for my purposes. By the time I got back to Pliskova’s match, she had lost the second set to Falconi. An hour in to my 2015 Wimbledon, I had seen a lot of tennis, but had somehow managed to miss the first newsworthy event of the day, how the 11th seed had let a seemingly insurmountable lead slip.
There are long stretches like this at Slams, where events seem to be speeding right past you. But there are also moments when time stops. The first of those came two hours into this year’s event, when the word went out that Serena Williams was down an early break, and Novak Djokovic was in a close first set. The stars had taken their places on the show courts, and had relegated the rest of the field to bit players in the day’s drama.
Serena and Djokovic lived up to their billings. Serena was all over the place on No.1 Court to start, as she had been in many of her matches at the French Open. But after a few screams, a few aces, and a few fist-pumps – as well as a code violation for profanity – she survived the challenge from Russia’s Margarita Gasparyan. On Centre Court, Djokovic had to shake off what appeared to be a clay-court hangover, but he raised his game at the business end of each set. Along the way, he even took a moment to chat with a bird that landed on the grass in front of him. At least that’s what I read; by then I was long gone, trying in vain to catch up with everything else that was happening on the grounds.
Venus Williams, Maria Sharapova, Stan Wawrinka: These three superstars all won, apparently, but I caught only a fleeting all-white glimpse of each. How did Tommy Haas win a match at age 37? How did No. 147 Jelena Ostapenko of Latvia drub No. 9 Carla Suarez Navarro in under an hour? Don’t ask me. Even John Isner’s match was over before I knew it had begun.
Like many fans, by the time the shadows had begun to lengthen across the grass, my TV screen had taken up residence on No.2 Court, where 34-year-old Lleyton Hewitt and 33-year-old Jarkko Nieminen had dug in their heels on the grass one last time. Each announced that this would be his last Wimbledon, but neither wanted to leave.
While many matches come and go quickly in the early days of a major, there are others that seem always to be quietly going on in the background. Hewitt-Nieminen was a background match that, by the time it reached a fifth set, had moved to the front of the stage.
With his yellow-shirted Aussie fanatics chanting “Warrior!” behind him, Hewitt fought through his 10th five-set match at Wimbledon, only to lose the decider 11-9. Better, perhaps, to go out that way than to come back and face Djokovic on Wednesday. When it was over, Hewitt, champion here in 2002, turned his traditional “Vicht!” sign sideways and saluted the crowd as he walked away.
And that’s why we work hard to see it all on busy Grand Slam days like this. You never know when you’ll see a moment that you’ll never forget.
