Last word
Set and match
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Sport takes people in different ways. It is one of those happy things which divide men entirely regardless of class or intelligence. Some clever, educated people are not merely bored by sports and games but regard them with loathing and look back to the time when they were compelled to play games as a form of penance. Other men and women of the highest intelligence are fascinated by sport to the point of unreason: examples are too obvious and numerous to mention.
I am one of those who are besotted by sports and games (they are not the same thing: an interesting semantic question. Some sports, but not all, are games. Are all games sports? The Oxford Companion to Sports and Games only obfuscates the issue: it includes bull-fighting but not billiards). For some of us June is thus the pinnacle of the year. Football and Rugby are out of the way (though the football season comes more and more to resemble Byron's English winter, ending in July to recommence in August). This month sees in quick succession the Derby, the Lord's Test, Ascot, Henley and Wimbledon. (Actually, there is no Lord's Test until August this year but there should be one.) Wimbledon is nearly upon us — that fortnight when half the people I know stop working at four in the afternoon Thinking ahead I thought back.Last year I watched the televised Men's Final in a bar in Toulouse, for reasons which need not detain us. There, not for the first time, I pondered a modest proposal: that the rules of lawn tennis should be altered. It is quite untrue that the spirit of any game is all that matters, that the laws are insignificant. Look at the way in which a few deft changes in the Laws of Rugby football have turned international matches from being among the most boring spectacles imaginable (do you recall those interminable punt-intotouch England v. Wales games of 15 years ago?) into something so enthralling that people who have never touched a Rugby ball watch rapt.
Tennis works well enough, but there are two reforms needed, or so I would suggest, one more urgent than the other. The first change — called for irrefutably — is the abolition of the second service. This survivor from tennis's remote origins (when it was Tennis) is useful enough when you or I are playing and we may have difficulty getting the service over the net. At the top, at Wimbledon, it has plainly conduced towards that dominance of the Big Service which so diminishes the game.
My other proposed reform is more abstract: we should drop that other survivor, scoring by games, and instead score sets by points, as in ping-pong. (I am told by an OAP friend that ping-pong was once scored as tennis still is: true or false?) That's to say, a set would not be won 6-3, or 6-0, or 8-6, but( by the first player to reach a given number of points. How many points is a nice question. From my toulousien bar-stool I conducted a statistical analysis of last year's Final. It wasn't easy, as the match was repeatedly interrupted — only the Frogs would do this — by the Tour de France. So I cannot swear to the precise accuracy of my figures, but I think that Borg won the first set 36-26 points. One might set the figure at 35 points for the set (or 31 to make for rather shorter matches).
The reasoning, as I say, is theoretical but valid. It is possible for player A to take a set off player B while winning only 24 points to the loser's 28. That is, A wins 6-4, taking each of his games game-30 and winning no points in his losing games. Thus is would be possible for A to win the match 6-4, 0-6, 0-6, 6-4, 6-4 when he won a total of 72 points, while B (winning all his games to love and going to 30 in his losing games) collected 132 points: an absurd outcome.
Under my proposed reform service would change as in ping-pong after every five points: the players could change ends after every ten. Deuce would operate on the principle that players must win a set by two clear points — at 35-all one or other player would have to go 37-35 (or 41-39, or whatever), presumably with the service alternating point by point. This would have the additional advantage of obviating the tiebreaker which, far from producing an exciting end to a set, has the curious effect of dulling the drama. It would still be posible for the 'wrong' player to win: 35-33, 35-33, 0-35, 0-35, 35-33, that is to say the winner taking 105 points to the loser's 169, but this would (I think) be unlikely. I can imagine less opposition to this scheme — the change of scoring — than to the abolition of the second service, where as it were more vested interests are at stake. Still, I should confidently predict that both changes will come about in the forseeable future. Lawn tennis has, after all, steadilY evolved from the delightful but incontprehensible indoor Tennis. Changes or not! shall be glued to the screen during Wimbledon, and whatever happens I shall remind myself that it's of no consequence. Games don't matter. That is the splendid thing about them.
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