Why is Wimbledon so boring?
Christopher Booker
Last Saturday, for the first time in my life, I paid a visit to that holy of holies of the tennis world, Wimbledon. On the face of it, it would be hard to imagine a more agreeable or enviable way of spending the day. In the outside world, hundreds of millions of people were eagerly hanging on the outcome of events of which I was an intimate and privileged spectator. Indeed the day was by no means lacking in incident or excitement — the number two seed, John McEnroe, being walked all over by the comparatively unknown Gullikson; the great Borg faltering and then triumphing as he exchanged relentless base-line rallies with the even less favoured Teacher; Britain's Mark Cox being steamrollered by the unstoppable power drives of Jimmy Connors.
Yet as I gazed upon these scenes I could not help feeling a certain melancholy. It was not just that the whole event seemed rather tattier and more commonplace than I had expected (drawing on ancient race memories of gracious lawns, the old Duchess of Kent eating strawberries and cream, Jean Borotra in faultless white flannels). Even the stars themselves these days, despite their adoring retinues of fans, have little magic about their appearance — the hirsutely scruffy Borg and McEnroe, Billie-Jean King looking like a stumpy, rather bad-tempered traffic warden.
Beyond everything else, however, there seemed to be a strange air of weariness about the proceedings. As I watched Cox and Connors coming out onto the Centre Court, I could not help thinking of the dozens of times they must have walked out together onto courts before — in Los Angeles, in Houston, in Stockholm, in Sydney, in almost every continent and tennisplaying centre in the world. Apart from the odd moments of rather synthetic excitement, when it looked as if a top seed might lose to a lesser seed, there was about much of the tennis the air of players just going through the motions — with enormous skill, perhaps, but deep-down simply jaded by having spent too much of their lives travelling round the world with the same tiny, familiar group of their fellow professionals, hitting the same old balls with the same old rackets, before the eyes of the same old anonymous chorus of devoted fans and the same old TV cameras. It was certainly an impression that was confirmed by the sight of a huge scoreboard advertising the latest placings in this year's Colgate Championships (with prizes totalling more than £1,500,000') showing the same old collection of names — Borg, Connors, McEnroe etc — stacking up their hundreds and thousands of points for their performances in no less than thirteen 'major championships' so far this year, with several more to come.
Why is it that, in the past two decades, sport has come to play such an important part in the life of our civilisation? I say 'in the past two decades' advisedly. Obviously sport and sporting heroes have been accorded a growing popular reverence ever since the outlines of our present world sporting calendar began to emerge at the end of the nineteenth century (the first Wimbledon 1877, the first Test Match in the same year, the Olympic Games 1896). It is many decades since that numinosity which had once attached to kings and princes first spread down far enough through society to make giants not just out of millionaires, explorers and film stars, but also of the great sportsmen — W.G. Grace, Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Stanley Matthews. In the Sixties, the high priests of pop music, the Beatles and Rolling Stones, rose briefly to occupy the centre of the limelight. But in the Seventies, as the glamour attaching to pop music and the cinema has receded somewhat, it is sport which has at last been left in central, undisputed command in the field. Today, amid the horrors, disasters and gloom which generally pervade the world's news, it is the one great refuge left, exercising universal sway all over the world. The rapt attention which follows such great rituals as the Olympic Games, the World Cup, even the world chess championship, has no equal. The minutely chronicled doings, ailments and lapses of Borg and Nastase, Nicklaus and Watson, Keegan and Cruyff, have become the last great opium of the people.
The most obvious explanation for sport's new predominance in our culture is simply the astonishing power of that universal new presence in our lives, television. Infinitely more hours are devoted to the coverage and watching of different types of sport than any other form of human activity. There is almost literally no type of sporting contest which has not been hauled into the net, to gratify the insatiable demand for watching one lot of human beings competing against another — whether it be show-jumping or ski-jumping, wrestling or snooker, darts or bowls, marbles or Monopoly — until half the population can talk in instantly knowledgeable cliches about 'double lutzes', `beuatiful passing slices' and all the rest.
But the real question is —why is it that sport should have come out at the top of the heap? Why should mere games-playing have become the chief source of the heroes whom we exalt above all others? Part of the explanation is simply that, in an age when values are more than ever before dictated by the mass, sport depends upon the lowest common denominator of all our faculties — physical power, skill and co-ordination. To say this is not to devalue physical capability: in its place, as the expression of disciplined youthful energy, it has rightly been highly regarded since the dawn of civilisation. But after centuries of descent from the perhaps over-valued spiritual peaks of the Middle Ages, through times when intellectual and ansthetic values became dominant in our culture, we have today reached an age when, of all ouriunctions, those of the body alone are looked on as most important. Now that religion, the arts and intellectual activity no longer provide our civilisation with its most obvious transcendent experiences, we have come to concentrate our need for grace, beauty and perfection more and more on mere physical achievement. In a mindless, de-spiritualised mass-age which is hardly likely to respond to the delights of Platonic debate, or even those religious processions which formed such a large part of the 'entertainment' of our ancestors, physical display is the most widely and instantly accessible form of entertainment left. And in an age when, as I was writing last week, machines have usurped so much of the natural exercise of our own physical functions, we can elevate the physical excellences of a few, outstanding individuals into a kind of grand collective surrogate.
But even more important is the fact that every form of sport stages a contest. If all we required from our spectator sport was the contemplation of physical grace, we might just as well sit staring at a tank of goldfish and have done with it. In fact there seems to be little point in watching any form of sporting event unless we can somehow identify with one of the contestants, even if it is only putting imaginary money on a horse, as we sit slumped in front of the telly. However idly, we always want someone to win, or at least to break a record — anti herein, of course, we get down to the fundamental psychological origins of why the human race ever devised games in the first place.
A large part of the value of games, ever since civilisation began, is that they are one of the ritual ways we have evolved to defuse the potentially disastrous pressures of the human ego. Without such ritual frameworks, as we all know, the exercise of the ego, individual or collective, leads to bloodshed, wars, genocide and all sorts of problems. When that competitive energy is channelled into the harmless rituals of sport, we begin to see games in their ideal light as a means whereby ultimately all those involved — whether as competitors or spectators — can transcend the ego altogether. The game itself becomes the thing, as exemplified perhaps at its highest in the Zen theory of archery where the aim is that the archer may so forget himself, become so totally integrated — mind, body, heart and soul — with the energy of the universe, that the arrow supposedly flies effortlessly to its mark. But as one contemplates the astonishing predominance of sport in our culture today, one of the first things likely to strike one is the extent to which the game has not remained the thing — the extent to which winning, either for reasons of national or local prestige, or to lay hold of the astronomic prizes provided by advertisers, has become really the central obsession. Sport has become not so much a means to transcend as a mere function of the ego, yet another symptom of the profoundly neurotic rootlessness of our age, a recourse whereby untold millions of people can lay claim to some pitiful shred of identity — as one sees nowhere more poignantly than in the high-rise deserts of Liverpool or East London, where almost the only sign of a human presence amid the mechanical vistas of concrete is the endlessly repeated scrawling on every wall of 'Everton Rules', Liverpool Rules', 'West Ham Rules' (or even occasionally, to vary the message with a dash of humour, 'Jesus Saves but Brookings Nets the Rebounds').
It is of course no accident that the one vast region of the world where competitive sport has above all been elevated into a national pseudo-religion is in the Socialist East. Where whole societies have been reduced quite deliberately to the lowest common denominator of a materialist ideology, where human beings are only seen as units in the collective identity, then, short of war itself, sport is the only means of expressing that collective pseudo-identity, that collectivised ego. But it cannot be said that, in our own dehumanised, materialistic culture, we have not made a pretty substantial advance in the same direction. And the rather seedy and jaded atmosphere surrounding this year's Wimbledon tournament is just one of its lesser, but inevitable consequences.
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