Each year when Wimbledon rolls around, I think about getting back into tennis. Maybe it is because it happens during the height of summer, as I don't feel the same urge with the other major tournaments, or just the tradition that surrounds the event. It is the oldest of the Grand Slam tournaments, dating back to 1877. My father loved to talk about the great names from the 1920s when he played tennis, notably Wilmer Allison whom he played with at the University of Texas. Allison never won Wimbledon, losing to Bill Tilden in the 1930 final, but did win the US Open in 1935.
Tennis was mostly played on grass back then. You had clay courts but Dad said you had to adjust your game considerably as these courts were much more forgiving with a loftier bounce that made it difficult to defend the net. Like many players of his era, he played serve and volley. Grass was ideally suited for this style of tennis. Clay favored players who liked to stick to the baseline. Still, Dad liked Henri Lacoste, the French tennis star at that time.
My father didn't have much patience when it came to teaching me to play tennis as a preteen. Mom had bought a Wilson Jack Kramer autograph racket for him and a Dunlop junior racket for me. Both were wood rackets and we had to keep them in presses when we weren't using them, otherwise they would get warped from the tightly wound strings. Dad said he remembered when the strings were made of cat gut. They were made from cats, I exclaimed! Just a myth, he said, but they were bound with collagen which came from some animal, probably cows or horses. Anyway, strings were synthetic by this point so nothing to worry about. We would hit the ball back and forth and he would try to teach me the finer points of the game, but I was very erratic and he just didn't have time for this, so I would practice against the backboard until I had more consistent ground strokes.
Eventually I became good enough to play on the high school tennis team. By this point wood was out and composite rackets were in. I used my lawn mowing money to buy a Yamaha graphite tennis racket. Pretty ugly but it was considered a great racket at the time. I had started out with a cheaper Wilson T2000, as Jimmy Connors was my hero, but it wasn't a very pleasant racket to play with as it vibrated a lot. Dad didn't understand these composite rackets. He felt it was better to stick with wood rackets but the game was changing rapidly and all the major tennis players were using composite rackets.
It's funny that Wimbledon, which prided itself on tradition, didn't stick to wood rackets. After all, Major League Baseball still insists on the wood bat despite the widespread use of aluminum bats at the junior level. I imagine it was out of its control as the sport was governed by the ATP and they figured the composite rackets made for a faster game.
It also greatly diminished the serve and volley game, especially with the big head rackets of the 80s that had a much larger sweet spot so that it became even harder to defend the net. Dad couldn't stand the game after that. You still had John McEnroe and a few other serve and volley players, but for the most part professional tennis players chose to stick to the baseline. Pete Sampras revived this style in the 90s but it failed to take hold despite garnering 14 grand slam titles, a record many tennis pundits thought would never be broken.
Then along came Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. Tennis had never seen an era of such dominant players even in my father's time. Over the last 20 years there have been 80 grand slam tournaments and these three have won 65 of them. I don't know why that is as there have been other great players but very few could win at the grand slam level. These three have enjoyed near total dominance and now that Federer has retired and Nadal is plagued with injuries, Djokovic has what amounts to an empty court to possibly reach the magic number of 30.
I'm not a big fan of Djokovic for a number of reasons so it is a bit frustrating to see him garner all this attention. Mostly it stems from the pandemic when he refused to follow protocol and take a vaccine. He staged tournaments in his native Serbia which resulted in a number of COVID cases. He even came down with COVID himself, then tried to use it as an excuse for not taking the vaccine ahead of the 2022 Australian Open. Virtually all the other players took the vaccine despite many personal misgivings. Yet, the "Joker" remained undeterred, voicing no regrets over missing two tournaments last year because of his intransigence.
Tennis has become oddly politicized, first by COVID and later bans on Russian and Belarussian players at Wimbledon last year. The ATP stripped Wimbledon of its points as a result, believing that players should be allowed to play regardless of their national identity. It's not like many of these players live in the embattled nations but still very few of them have spoken out against the war, which has peeved others on the tour. Most notably Iga Swiatek, the standout Polish player who has strongly voiced her support for Ukrainian players, whom she feels aren't getting the attention they deserve on the tour. In fact, Ukrainian players were booed at the French Open when they refused to shake hands with Russian and Belarussian players after their matches.
While Djokovic has shown his sympathy for Ukraine, he has much more staunchly defended the right of Russian and Belarussian players in the tournaments. Then came his comments on Kosovo a couple months ago that left many wondering where he really stood on the war, as Serbia was contemplating military action much like Russia did in Ukraine in an effort to "restore" its boundaries. His entourage is dotted with Serbian nationalists and his father joined Pro-Russian fans after his son's match at the Australian Open earlier this year. It seems Pro-Russian sentiments run deep in the Djokovic family.
Of course no player is without controversy but Djokovic appears to court it while deflecting it at the same time. He realizes he is on the cusp of immortality as it is doubtful any player will ever come close to his grand slam record as the game becomes increasingly more diverse. So, he tries to cultivate the positive image most people have of him. I wonder how much his gluten-free diet has to do with his great success. I guess we will find out in the years to come if he used PED's to sustain his career much like Lance Armstrong did in bicycling.
Pete Sampras retired at 31, content with a 14th grand slam at the US Open in 2002. He was already feeling his age, having been booted out of Wimbledon in the second round earlier that summer. He had defied the conventional professional tennis lifespan by playing competitively into his 30s. By contrast, Djokovic has won 11 grand slam titles since turning 31, vaulting him past Federer and Nadal. He seems indomitable. He won three grand slam titles in 2021, ending in an emotional breakdown at the US Open when upset by Daniil Medvedev in the finals. But, here he is on the cusp off another calendar-year grand slam after winning the Australian and French Opens in dominant fashion.
I had hoped Carlos Alcaraz would have taken him down at the French Open, but the young Spanish ace cramped up in his semi-final match and Djokovic rolled over him in the remaining sets. It looks like Alcaraz will get another shot at Djokovic at Wimbledon, although now he faces the grand slam champion on his favorite surface. Novak has 7 Wimbledon titles. One more and he ties Federer. It is pretty amazing that the Serbian tennis king seems to defy age, being almost twice as old as his opponents.
This results in the inevitable question of who is the GOAT of tennis? You could say that Djokovic is the "goat" in more ways than one, but it is hard to argue with this incredible success unless of course it is learned he found a more conventional way to cheat age. It turns out Andre Agassi lied back in 1997 when he was charged with doping. He claimed it was a spiked drink but turns out he had been taking methamphetamine all the time. How much it added to his game is anyone's guess, but five of his eight grand slams came after he first tested positive for the drug.
It's not just the rackets that have changed but the whole way tennis is played today. The money is enormous. The Wimbledon winner will collect 2.35 million pounds! It's the lucrative nature of the game more than anything else that keeps the ATP from punishing its top athletes, as Djokovic, Medvedev and Aryna Sabalenka are all top draws. No one wants to get in the way of history either. Ron DeSantis was furious when Djokovic was banned from the Miami Open earlier this year because the star was refused entry for being unvaccinated. The Florida governor said he would "run a boat from the Bahamas" to get the tennis star to Miami. Fortunately, Djokovic was smart enough not to get into this political fray and quietly demurred. It is the grand slams he is after and he will be allowed to play in the US Open in New York later this summer as COVID restrictions have since been lifted.
I still pine for the old days when Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe had their epic matches on the Wimbledon grass. The only controversy was McEnroe challenging the line judges over seemingly every call before finally beating Borg in 1981 with a wood racket no less. He took home 322,000 pounds, which was a Queen's ransom at the time.
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