SPECTATOR SPORT
Wet, woeful Wimbledon
Simon Barnes
THE BAND played on. Everybody drowned, but on Centre Court they jazzed in syncopated four-time, in a doomed attempt to reconcile us to our misery. Keep going, lads. If you stop for a second they'll bring on Cliff.
Wimbledon fortnight is England's annual triumph of hope over experience. Tennis is a great game, but it is not entirely suitable for the English summer. This is why Wimbledon is England's great summer festival.
Perpetual hope, the occasional fleeting moment of gold. They did not play on Sun- day this year; they only resort to that when the usual rains are replaced by floods, like last year. That was enough to guarantee a golden day at the end of a rain-soaked week. I was taking part in an endurance riding event, and revelled, Blake-like, in the opening of a brief window of delight.
Blake summed up Wimbledon for all time: 'He who kisses a joy as it flies/Lives in Eternity's sunrise.' All of us trapped in Wimbledon's press room can relate to that, condemned as we are to the endless wait.
Few joys to kiss, even fleetingly. The ranks of televisions, which we can use at the touch of a button to transport us from one soaked tarpaulin-covered court to the next, were tuned to a man called Jerry Springer and his programme Choose Me or Lose Me, in which various items of white trash from trailer-park America were encouraged to speak their — to use the term loosely — minds. Why had your wife left you for another woman? You punk, you bitch.
On Centre Court, they turned to John McEnroe to bring us a more acceptable face of America, the big, green tent hang- ing over the precious grass. And we in the press room remembered nostalgically the time — did it really happen, or do we only wish it did? — when they rolled back the tarp to find a bottle of champagne, a pair of knickers and a condom.
And then somebody — was it me? — made the first sliding-roof joke of the tour- nament. Every year, when the skies grow irredeemably black, some poor soul is forced to write a story about why they don't put a sliding roof over Centre Court.
They really did put a sliding roof over the centre court in Melbourne, where they hold the Australian Open. They normally use it when the heat of the sun grows too intense. Still, we can't all be Australians.
I remember one year my then sports edi- tor had a brainstorm. 'Why can't they put a roof over the whole bloody lot?' There it was in the paper next day: the All-England Club, and a damn great bubble over the whole thing. Dome. You saw it in the Times first.
It is the genius of this country to invent the world's great games, and then to get beaten at them. Perhaps it is our ancestors we have to blame. They invented games suitable for a golden Victorian afternoon. It is impossible not to feel that our ances- tors based their policy about everything not on the world as it is, but on the world as they wished it to be.
Stand at Wimbledon on a rainy day, and you understand why the first world war was inevitable.
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