Wimbledon

Greater London, England, UK – Monday, June 28th, 2010

You can’t always go home again.

My rearrival in London after two weeks of hopping around the rest of the UK felt just a little bit surreal. It was exactly the city I remembered living and learning in prior to my departure, but now all the familiar faces from a summer philosophy program had moved on elsewhere, and there was no comfortable flat with all my stuff in it I could walk into and find out what misadventures the others were planning on that night. The streets and monuments were exactly as I’d left them, but now I was all alone, living off my backpack in a hot, un-air-conditioned hostel, and without a plan for how to spend the rest of the Saturday evening, let alone the motivation. The activity that attracted most of my attention quickly became finding the wireless sweet spots in the room. Predictably the advertised free wireless signal was not strong enough to reach my room, yet after much trial and error I discovered there were other alternatives from unprotected neighbors to leach off from so that way I could spend more time refreshing the stats page on my website. Ah, the excitement of traveling abroad.

Quite literally, enter Eva and Sandy, two late twenty-somethings from Paris booked in the same dormitory room as I. After a brief acknowledgement of each other’s presence followed by listening to fifteen minutes of French banter between them I couldn’t possibly understand, I finally decide to ask if they might happen to know any English. Eva does, Sandy not so much. More formal greetings are made, and then it is realized that I somehow managed to get internet connectivity which they could not access. I walk them through the steps of how to find the good stuff, and many thanks are made. Several minutes later, I am asked if I had any plans for the evening. Absolutely none, I reply. Well then, would I like to accompany them to go sightseeing and get dinner and drinks? Absolutely yes, it’s a date.

Nothing elaborate was planned; mostly it was just looking around shops in Soho, which I had already seen when I bought my vinyl pressing of In the Court of the Crimson King several weeks prior, but had neglected to see Carnaby Street which was one of my last famous sights. The French are not often regarded as one of the friendlier peoples in Europe, as I have often heard them described by other travelers as haughty and rude, rarely showing an interest in other people unless they too share in the singular divine pleasure of being French. For whatever the reason I never once found these generalizations to be true, although the vast majority of French people I’ve meet have been outside of France so that may have skewed my sampling data (Disneyland Paris obviously being one of the last places in France one will actually find the French). I liked to think that this was in part due to the familiarity I had with French cinema, music and philosophy, and as such much of the conversations sounded something like this.

Me: I love Jacques Tati films, especially Playtime. Do you ever watch Jacques Tati?

Eva: No, I have never heard of him. Do you ever watch Dexter or Entourage? I love those shows!

Me: No, I’ve never seen them in my life. What about Magma? They’re a French avant-garde operatic jazz fusion band that sings in their own invented sci-fi language…

More probable, they liked me simply for the fact that I wasn’t English.

After that we got dinner at one of those old hole-in-the-wall pubs that are advertised as predating either of our nation’s revolutions, and I had fun leading the bartender on to believing that I was from France as well (the dress consisting of t-shirt and khaki shorts probably gave it away). Traditional English food is some of the densest and heaviest I’ve found in the world so I was a bit surprised to see Eva and Sandy dig into it. We then went across the street to another pub where I ordered a cider and we passed an hour or so of them trying to teach me French expressions, which given the country we were in seemed to have it backwards but I wasn’t complaining. By the end of the evening when we had ambled back to the hostel I had to conclude that it was quite easily one of the most entertaining evenings I’ve had since I started my solo UK trip, if only because it was so spontaneous and I actually got to socialize with other human beings rather than just me spending the day discreetly trying to take pictures of the locking mechanisms on a children’s coaster in a crusty seaside park.

The next Sunday was another free day. Had I had the ambition (or money) I probably would have made a day trip down to see Paulton’s Park but instead elected to get more use out of my Merlin Annual Pass and did a second trip to Thorpe Park instead, where I had been trying to plan a meeting with one or two people from the NoLimits-Exchange but it didn’t work out for either so I ended up spending much of the time marathoning Stealth as the only coaster with a reasonably short queue. I needed to make sure I was sufficiently fatigued from riding that I would have no trouble falling asleep early that night, which proved to be a difficult task given the hot humid weather and poor ventilation in the room that night.

Flash forward a few hours, it is five in the morning, I quickly and silently gather my belongings and check out, the sun already in the sky but the streets still relatively silent. The tube ride started out with only a few early morning commuters hopping on and off, but as we ventured further outside the city on the District Line I recognized a growing collection of travelers who were there for the same reasons I was. Alighting at the Southfield station we collectively made a steady pace following the signs, whereupon our arrival I discovered over 2000 people had already made it there before me. This is Wimbledon.

Queuing for Wimbledon tickets is nearly as landmark an event for the average visitor as is the tennis itself. Unlike most other modern sporting events of this scale that require expensive memberships and preplanning months in advance, the Championships at Wimbledon still reserve about 6000 general grounds passes for those willing to queue early enough before each day of the tournament. Most economists would tell you that the laws of supply and demand would have it that the ticket prices should therefore be much higher (£50 is already quite enough), but thankfully the organizers at Wimbledon recognize that the time honored traditions of queuing are precisely what make the championships such a special event. As soon as I arrived on the grassy fields there were stewards to direct me into the next spot in the row, hand me a numbered queue ticket so that the line would remain properly ordered and a glossy, full color “Guidebook for Queuing”. Settle down on a patch of turf, lay back and watch the clouds roll by and the sun climb higher as it dries the morning dew: there’s nearly five hours until we’ll be afforded admittance for the first matches at noon. Under almost any other circumstance this would have been a mad proposition. But this is Wimbledon.

Around 10:00pm we’re finally starting to move into the grounds, where I take notice that the overnight campers for the next day’s centre court tickets have already started to gather. Once I have my actual grounds pass my plan of action is to proceed without delay to court 12, which was where I could see some of the best matches outside of the main courts provided I was there early enough to get a seat. To get there I must squeeze through the aisles between several practice courts, most of them empty but I notice the last one has some players and a small gathering of people along the sidelines. The first player I don’t recognize at all, but as I was strolling pass I recognized who his opposition was: that’s Roger Federer, often considered the greatest tennis player of all time, playing less than ten yards away from me. I watch for a minute or two and then move on. Only at Wimbledon.

Match One: Jelena Jankovic vs. Vera Zvonareva. Jankovic was the big name most in the stands expected to see win, but within the first twenty minutes it quickly became clear that Zvonareva was going to dominate the match, compounded in the second set when Jankovic had her serve broken twice and was also coming up with double faults. At 0-3 in the second set she called her trainer over for several minutes, attempted to play another point or two, immediately returned to her trainer, and then announced that she would have to forfeit the game to Zvonareva. Quite a disappointment for everyone involved, especially Jankovic and even I suspect Zvonareva. Despite being (relatively) unknown, I later learned that Zvonareva would continue all the way from today’s fourth-round match to the Woman’s Finals, where she eventually lost the title to Serena Williams.

Match Two: Jo-Wilfried Tsonga vs. Julien Benneteau. It’s a battle of the Frenchies (I can’t get away from them this week, apparently) this one proved much more spirited and competitive than the last, even if Tsonga took an early lead to win the first two sets, losing the third in a small second wind for Benneteau, only to take home the fourth set 6-1. This being my third live professional tennis event I’ve been to in recent history (quite a step up from Indianapolis and Cincinnati last year, although Cincinnati did have most of the greats playing some amazing matches) I’m still surprised by how different the experience is compared to watching it on television. For one thing there’s obviously no commentary, and the pervasive silence amongst the attentive crowd made the focus on the players so intense that sometimes I would completely lose focus altogether. On a smaller side court the I was down at the players’ level where you get to closely observe the techniques of the player on your side of the court, rather than following the path of the ball back and forth which becomes simply impossible to keep track of. And finally there’s simply the excitement of seeing it unfiltered through a glass screen and several hundred miles of broadcasting distance; these are real professionals sharing the same immediate spatial-temporal arena with you. It’s quite a remarkable thing.

Match Three: Robin Soderling vs. David Ferrer. Both Swedish and Spanish players gave it their all, and here it was clear that their abilities were equally, if not always evenly matched. Soderling was the favorite and his speed matched with level-headed playing tended to do him more favors than Ferrer’s aggressive, emotional battles. It was clear that Ferrer wanted this match badly and never once gave up, but his occasional temper tantrums (spurred on by the crowd’s favoritism for Soderling) generally resulted in his worst playing. However, after several points to cool down he would surprise everyone by grabbing the upper hand from Soderling and winning the second and fourth sets. Soderling found that even his 140mph serves weren’t always enough to get by Ferrer who chased down everything sent his way even if it occasionally was sent back on an errant path. In the fifth set Ferrer once came within two points of winning the entire match but Soderling managed to push back and ultimately won, a series of events that predictably got us spectators quite animated.

Now this is Wimbledon!

By the time the game was over the sun was already casting long shadows over the courts, and as I had not eaten anything since a small backpack breakfast snack that morning I decided I would be best off skipping the last doubles match scheduled to play and find my way back to the exit. Not before picking up some souvenirs for my mother and sister, for which of course we even had to queue just to get into the gift shop. I found a small Italian café across from the tube station and feasted heartily whilst surveying how much darker my skin looked after an entire day in the sun. I needed to be at London Paddington station by 10pm that evening for the start of my final European adventure before my return home.

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