There was a group of 10 demonstrators outside the main gates of the All England Club on Monday morning, protesting against Barclays’ sponsorship of the championship on the grounds that as well as providing its customers here with deckchairs and free strawberries and cream, as well as the chance to visit something called the Clubhouse by Barclays at Aorangi, they are also heavily invested in various weapons manufacturers who are supplying the Israeli Defense Forces.
“We’re not against tennis,” one of the protesters shouted out through a loudhailer. “We just want the Championships to drop Barclays.”
There were people shouting “C’mon Tim” on Centre Court who got more of a reaction out of the crowd. No one comes here to worry about what’s going on out there, beyond the bounds of the grounds.
The only thing anyone here is concerned about in this little corner of England is the state of Jack’s arm (bad, he’s out), Emma’s foot (worse, she’s out too), what Naomi was wearing during her warm-up (a kimono, I think) and whether the queue has gone down at the strawberries-and-cream booth (no).
That line was running to a couple of hundred people by midday. By the time the man at the back had made it to the front the protesters had gone, leaving only the one sad-looking chap in a West Ham shirt to man the signs while a troop of policemen stood nearby. He was as welcome as a crusty juggler in Sandford town square.
Everything here is exactly so. Every privet trimmed, every berry topped. It is what England would look like if the Rotary Club was running things, a retired brigadier’s dream of how things ought to be. The odd thing is that the more they buff this championship (and all the money they make on those debentures pays for an awful lot of spit and polish), the more it comes to be a little like every place else on the luxury sports circuit. You will find the very same things in the shops at Wimbledon and Augusta National. Just change the scent of the £35 candles and a lot of the very same sorts of people buying them, too.
The same sort of Jehovah’s Witnesses standing out front, too. They were standing in front of racks of magazines with a cover story on How To Cope With Rising Prices. This, too, seemed to be slow business. It’s true that the cost of a bottle of Lanson Rose champagne is up £1.10 this year, but then if you’re the sort who’s going to spend £102 on it to begin with you are probably not stopping to argue the difference, never mind the extra 15p on strawberries.
They do say the going rate for debenture tickets have tripled in the past three years and that since the government kindly decided that Centre Court debentures were exempt from the new legislation restricting the sale of sports tickets for more than face value many of the people who used to get them for a few thousand pounds on the secondary market have found themselves priced out of the market by buyers from overseas who are happy to pay a hundred-times the number. It is easier for a rich man to get into heaven than a moderately wealthy one to make it into Centre Court these days.
Although, and here’s a little secret for you, it’s in the out courts where all the really fun stuff happens in the first week. Watching the world’s 100th-best player from a seat three feet away beats watching the world’s 10th-best from 30 rows back. Early Monday morning you could have your pick of luckless Britons.
On Court 18, Mika Stojsavljevic, 17, the US Open girls champion from two years back, was beaten by Belinda Bencic before the coffee machine had warmed up. From there it is a short hop across to No 14, where Max Basing, a spry 23-year-old, and the world No 331, was playing Japan’s Shintaro Mochizuki, the world No 151.
Basing had a small band of fans with him, friends, you guess, who were doing their best to keep his morale up as he went down 6-3, 6-0, 1-0 down. “He hasn’t won a game in a while has he?” the old gent next to me said to his wife. “No, not since we got here.”
Basing won a second service point to go 30-0 up. “Comeback time,” the old man said. Then he lost four straight points to go 2-0 down in the third. “Good try Max,” shouted a kindly Japanese fan as he whistled a forehand into the net. “What time did you say play started on Centre Court?” the old man asked his partner.
Over on No 3 Court, another Briton, the world No 220, Felix Gill, was taking another beating, 6-3, 6-3, 5-4 by the time I arrived, against Spain’s world No 23, Rafael Jodar. Gill at least seemed pretty damn angry about it, all huff and grunt as he thumped a couple of aces to forced Jodar to play a 13th game to win the third set. There was Cam Norrie, out on No 2 Court, who lost in five sets, and Harriet Dart on No 1, who lost in three.
All this feels every bit as familiarly English as the rest of it, the trimmed privets, Pimm’s, polite applause and passive aggression, part of the Wimbledon experience along with posing for a photo by the statue of Fred Perry.
