Well, we were beginning to run out of ferry puns anyway. Arthur Fery’s run to the semi-finals of Wimbledon always had a kind of glazed and surreal quality to it, a shaggy-dog story that kept adding more and more unbelievable layers: the fling that ended in marriage, the picnic that turned into an all-night rave, Super Hans accidentally running to Windsor.
When reality finally bit, it bit slowly and then all at once. It was when Sascha Zverev broke serve early in the second set that people first started to leave their seats: not many, but certainly enough to notice. Perhaps this was the moment a little of the air, a little of the belief, first began to leak out of Fery’s fantastical fever dream, a marvellous journey that – if we’re being brutally honest with ourselves – was probably always going to end like this.
For all the optimistic prognoses, Fery was always likely to struggle against the new French Open champion, particularly a man nine inches taller, landing 72% of his first serves, dominating the backhand-to-backhand exchanges, taking more than his usual share of points at the net. Simply put, Zverev just has a more expansive game than almost anyone else on tour right now, a game with big margins for error and a glut of free points.
And so perhaps the last person in the stadium who truly believed was Fery himself, outclassed but never outfought, a 5ft 9in battery pack in a world of power plants, swinging and scampering to the very end. In hindsight – and at the time, to be fair – the loss of that first set tie-break felt terminal, Fery’s last real chance of resisting the immense gravitational field dragging him back down to earth.
The boos that greeted the mention of Zverev’s name on Wednesday night, when Fery’s semi-final opponent was announced to the Centre Court crowd, did not materialise into anything more substantial here. Indeed the closest he got to genuine jeopardy came in the first set, when Fery broke Zverev to 15 and briefly, tantalisingly, the fourth wall remained intact.
Beyond this, not very much at all: the tie-break was crushed 7-0, the second set dispensed with in 38 minutes. Lots more people left after that. The Royal Box began to thin out. Virgil van Dijk drifted down the steps towards the refreshment area. Sachin Tendulkar, a man defined by stoic patience, decided he had seen enough. The break point Fery converted in the fifth game would, as it turned out, be his only one of the match.
So here lies Fery-mania, deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowing friends and very casual acquaintances. And perhaps the first and most natural reaction to Fery’s run is to acknowledge the strangeness of it, the sheer concussive speed with which a British tennis player can go from total anonymity to good-luck messages from Marc Guéhi and Dan Burn in the space of less than two weeks.
Fery is a fine player, but one with no recognisable brand or outsized character traits. So what was everyone cheering on, really? Three little letters on a television graphic. A flag. A passport. The imagined and unthinking kinship that only really sport can produce: the idea that this guy, the son of a French multimillionaire and a member of the All England Club, is somehow doing it for all of us.
But of course, insofar as British tennis has a system, this is basically it: a mixture of privilege and connections, generational wealth and happy accidents of birth. And this is not to malign the ones who made it, but to mourn those who never did: the players without the means to invest indefinitely in their career, without the effortless early exposure that comes when your parents are a part of the tennis establishment.
People have been talking all fortnight about Fery’s assurance and self-confidence. Perhaps on some level it comes from the way you were raised: a distinct absence of impostor syndrome, a belief in the inherent righteousness of the universe. Perhaps the reason Fery acts like he belongs is because he grew up in a world where he truly did belong in every room he entered.
This run may have come to an end, but in the short term he may well keep rising. Now the new British No 1 and No 36 in the world from Monday, he can enter pretty much any tournament he wants, and with relatively few ranking points to defend it’s not impossible that he could be seeded for the US Open. At the same time, this is a different game he’s playing now. After their quarter-final, the defeated Flavio Cobolli basically admitted he hadn’t bothered watching any of Fery’s games at Wimbledon.
That’s not going to happen again for a while. There will be a target on his back, expectations to meet, a higher physical level for a player who has struggled with injuries. Higher-bouncing surfaces, a tougher level of competition, no home crowd to help him, no surge of momentum to propel him, no sense of novelty or anonymity to shield him from analysis. It’s been a phantasmagorical fortnight in the manor. But in many ways, the real hard work starts now.
