Wimbledon begins on Monday. (Technically, “The Championships, Wimbledon”, but, ahem.)
And there’s been some minor hoopla (on the men’s side, that is; we’re ignoring the catfight going on in the women’s game).
You’ll see some minor headlines floating around that Rafael Nadal, having just won the French Open, has been grievously insulted with the #5 seed. “He just won the French Open for a record 8th time and he’s not a top seed at Wimbledon?” goes the line of conventional wisdom.
The response, generally, is that 1) tennis rankings are weird, and 2) the French Open is played on clay, Nadal’s best surface, and Wimbledon is on grass.
And while this is true, the difference between these surfaces is not nearly as great as it once was.
Frankly, the current grass courts of Wimbledon are probably closer to the clay courts of Roland Garros than to the slick surfaces of the halcyon days of Laver and McEnroe and Becker. You see, Wimbledon changed its grass mixture 12 years ago in a noble attempt at durability and an ignoble attempt to slow things down. That’s right, they took the greatest asset of the surface, its signature attribute, and deliberately eliminated it. It was a concession to the modern game, which features little of the creativity and shot-making of previous decades, and more of the two-handed backhands and frying pan grips and baseline snoozefests–er, rallies. There are likely many hard courts out there that play faster than Wimbledon’s Centre Court these days.
That’s a shame for those of us who long for the glorious days of serve-and-volley tennis, which is fast becoming a lost art.
But, of course, if you’ve got plane tickets to Heathrow and a hankering for some 50-shot rallies and gobs of topspin, well, we’ve got tickets available for men’s and women’s matches from the second round all the way through the finals.