Reflections on Wimbledon
Brigid Brophy
Not since the early years of the industrial revolution has there been a lowlier working life. During the service the net cord judge has to crouch with his head on one side, his ear to the wire and his finger on its pulse; the rallies are usually the occasion for him to flinch and strain backwards in his chair for fear of being thumped by a misdirected passing shot. He is a target also for reproach, since players often hear a net cord where he hears none. John McEnroe seemed for an instant in the course of his singles semi-final to be invoking the umpire's compassion for the net cord judge. 'He's a human being,' he protested. But he went on to explain what he meant by that: 'He can make mistakes.'
To my mind the net cord judge ought not to be a human being. He is ripe for automation. Wimbledon has installed electronic monitors to check whether a service lands in the service court. Those, however, have to perform a complex task by a method (registering when a beam is interrupted) not precisely appropriate, since what counts is where the ball touches down, not the airspace it traverses in getting there. The monitors are known to be fallible, are sometimes overruled and are as likely to provoke disputes as to cure them. By contrast it would, I surmise, be easy to render the wire inside the top of the net sensitive to impact, and the result would be infallible. (Birds and heavy insects are not given to perching on the net, but if one did he would be seen and discounted. As for line calls (of all kinds, not just service faults); on the show courts at least, which are covered by BBC television, a more effective check than the electronic monitors is at hand. All you need is a television set beside the umpire's chair. That would make the replay of a disputed point available to umpire and players, and it would settle the question in all but the rare cases when the camera is unsighted.
The only danger in virtually infallible monitoring is that it might deprive Wimbledon of Mr McEnroe's best (which is distinct from his most point-winning) tennis. Bjorn Borg's best, paradoxically signalled when he abandons his natural station on the baseline and takes to volleying, was extracted, in their semi-final, by the invention and unremitting will-to-win of Jimmy Connors. But such is Mr McEnroe's Irish appetite for injustice that he was, in his opening match, beating Tom Gullikson in a rather plodding way until, in the third set, he was the victim of some patently wrong calls. That set off his first famous outburst, the one where he called the umpire 'the pits of the world'. (I liked Nancy Banks-Smith's suggestion that it was a case of life being just a bowl of cherry pits, but the more plausible gloze, whereby 'pits' was short for 'armpits', gave the thing a certain Old Testament exoticism: 'my beloved is the armpits of the world', as it were.) Only after being docked a penalty point did he begin to play the tennis if not of an angel at least of a baroque putto, an image rounded off by the childish token of effort, a plump protrusion of tongue from mouth, as he serves.
Tennis is intrinsically frustrating, because it's all headlong courses that may have to be suddenly braked. Its nature is epitomised by the two bites the server has at the service and by the system whereby to win a game or a set you have to be not one but two points or games ahead. That system is the intellectual brilliance of tennis as an invention, and what is brilliant about it is that it constantly gives your opponent a chance to frustrate your strategic planning. The players have now acquired voices to express their frustration. Wimbledon has always been a touch militaristic (witness its passion for putting people into uniform, a passion intensified now that it can no longer enforce pure and graffiti-free white on the players), and it is now shewing the characteristic hurt bafflement of an officer class whom 'the men' have taken to answering back. (If it would just adopt the obvious monitors I've named, authority would no longer be posing as infallible in the first place, and would finish with less mud in its eye.) Umpires still used the formula `Smithers to serve,' but when they address the player directly they now call him 'Mr Smithers', a courtesy wrested from them by the original and still best tantrum-thrower, Ilie Nastase. Their trouble is that they then seem to have nothing to say. The inarticulacy of umpires who, asked to explain their decisions, merely repeat the decision has made Mr McEnroe the hero of the antiauthoritarians. I think they've mistaken their man. He is not a champion of justice. He is an advocate. What he pleads is usually, so far as my eye and the replay can tell, true. But the only cause he pleads is his own. In his semi-final with Rod Frawley he stormed at the umpire: 'All I want to see is just one call in my favour.' Alas, the umpire was precluded (not this time by inarticulacy but by loyalty to his own earlier bad judgment) from pointing out that he had, a minute or two before, confirmed a glaringly wrong call against Mr Frawley.
This seeming need to feel unjustly used by authority is a variation on the problem many players visibly experience in finding the appropriate image of themselves for their imaginations to inhabit in a particular match. Mr Borg, the most effective of counter-attacking players, can drop a first game or even set without harm, because he slips into the strategy and psychology of the fight-back. He was ill at ease in the final from the moment Mr McEnroe insisted on dropping the first set to him. Martina Navratilova lost to Hana Mandlikova because she would not surrender her belief that in any confrontation she is the one who plays the unorthodox, dashing (if sometimes slapdash) and piratical (hence the bandana headband) tennis. I think she will be vulnerable to younger exponents of her own romantic and risky style until she gets the knack of delighting in herself as a foxy old master, a self-image that was the secret, I suspect, of Rod Layer's late-developing but long-lasting mastery.
Although some players are known, in a quasi-technical term, as 'artists', tennis is not an art. The players are not striving to create a beautiful match, but to win. There are no marks, as in competitive skating, for 'artistic impression'. Even so, the Muses sometimes nudge the seeding committee. This year they were at fault in ordaining that one of the two most beautiful games in women's tennis, Ms Navratilova's and Ms Mandlikova's, must be eliminated before the final, and from an aesthetic point of view it was the wrong one that went out. Not only did Dan Maskell demonstrate that Czechoslovakia is still a far-away country of whose nomenclature we know nothing by his apparent refusal to believe that Ms Mandlikova's father, who was watching, could bear a surname not to the letter identical with hers (he spoke of him under what I take to be the hermaphrodite form, 'Mr Mandlikova'); but the beauty of Ms Mandlikova's game, which had flowered over the courts in earlier rounds, was crushed in advance of the final by the weight of the occasion. The Muses did, however, lay on a classically beautiful quarter-final between Mr Connors and Vijay Amritraj. If players were divided, like sopranos, into dramatic and lyric, here was a top instance of each. Mr Amritraj possesses the comliest style since Mr Nastase was at his peak. He took enough points to set the umpire the persistent tongue-twister 'Advantage — Amritral and did it by tennis of such grace as to refashion Wimbledon into one of those pastoral miniatures where Krishna sports with the milkmaids.
In the future this Wimbledon may be noted as the first to see the talents of Corinne Vanier and Kathy Rinaldi. It felt like the first Wimbledon of an approaching ice age. I wonder what sort of playing surface tundra will make? And now it's over I wonder whether John McEnroe pere will crown his son's championship by divulging to him that useful secret of adult life, how to secure one's shoelaces with a double knot?
* Brigid Brophy 1981
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