Four years ago, Wimbledon’s lawns were seen as a problem. “The U.S. Open and Australian Open championships get the best games, you get a better standard of tennis at those,” David Lloyd, a former British Davis Cup captain, told the Times of London in 2005. “The grass will eventually go.” Grass courts have been under attack for years by sharp-tongued players, from Manuel Santana–“Grass is for cows,” he said, before he finally won Wimbledon in 1966–to Marat Safin, who simply said, “I hate this.” The bounces were too unpredictable. The modern grass “season,” if you could call it that, was too short: a mere five weeks. There wasn’t time to adjust one’s footwork and strokes. Why bother playing on the stuff at all? Even Sue Barker, a former pro and beloved BBC tennis commentator, said that the end of grasscourt tennis at Wimbledon was only a matter of time.
Luckily for us, the folks at the All England Club are too stubborn to listen to the likes of Lloyd. Since he delivered his ill-informed attack (and not for the first time), Wimbledon, the most wonderful tennis tournament on the annual calendar, has hosted hour upon hour of the finest tennis one could ever hope to see. On July 5, Roger Federer won his sixth Wimbledon title–and a record 15th major title, surpassing Pete Sampras–in a tense five-set final that spanned a record 77 games and broke the heart of Andy Roddick, the American whose greatest performance was not quite good enough to defeat the sport’s greatest player.
Last year, Rafael Nadal defeated Federer in what most tennis observers consider the finest match in history, a 4-hour-and-48-minute drama that played out over the course of a stormy London day and ended in near-darkness after 9 P.M. Nadal and Federer played five sets nearly as compelling the year before, and four entertaining sets the year before that. Even women’s tennis, mostly in a funk these days owing to early retirements and a less-than-dazzling crop of youngsters, has glistened on the grass. In 2005, Venus Williams saved a match point against Lindsay Davenport in a superb women’s final; this year, her sister Serena battled Elena Dementieva for nearly three hours in the semifinals, and saved a match point, too. Compare that to the French Open, which hasn’t had a women’s final extend to a third set since 2001.
Until recently, Wimbledon, and grass in general, was not known for producing good theater–the thrillers between John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg in 1980 and 1981 being the exception rather than the rule. “Grass isn’t practical,” Arthur Ashe, then the U.S. Davis Cup captain, told the Washington Post in 1985 when asked the Great Grass Question. “I’m just afraid it might get to the point where they just say the hell with this.” At the time, Wimbledon officials were driven mad by high-tech tennis shoes transforming their tidy grass into piles of dirt, and they seemed to be fighting a losing battle. Ten years earlier, the U.S. Open had abandoned grass for clay. Then in 1988, the Australian Open moved to Melbourne and a new park of hard courts, leaving Wimbledon as the last of the major tournaments played on the sport’s traditional surface. Grass had become predictable and boring. Armed with deadly serves, lesser men like Kevin Curren could drub the likes of John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors (Curren beat them both in straights at the 1985 Wimbledon). Ace, service winner, ace, ace–on and on it went, ad nauseam. If the trend continued, many feared, Wimbledon would lose its place atop the tennis world.
Much has changed since then, but in unanticipated, and welcome, ways. For starters, the All England Club did ditch the grass–at least, the grass it used to use. Since 2001, the club has sown its courts with 100 percent perennial ryegrass, rather than a weaker blend of ryegrass and creeping red fescue. The dirt beneath the grass is harder, too, to keep the lawns looking as respectable as possible after two weeks of trampling by the feet of increasingly large athletes. Wimbledon insists that it did not intend to produce slower courts, but one consequence of its turf tinkering is that balls bounce higher on the firmer ground, giving players more options and slightly more time to position themselves.
In no time at all the players adapted to the new grass and made it the sport’s premier surface once again. Today’s tennis pros swing harder and impart more topspin than those from previous generations, and so the ball bounces higher still on the lawns and allows for longer rallies. They don’t follow their serves to the net because their colleagues return so well, and because there is scarcely time to charge behind a ball that is struck at 140 mph. Still, even big lugs like Roddick know the value of a slice–that slick shot of yore–on grass. Volleys have their place, too, as the 31-year-old Tommy Haas proved during his semifinal run this year. Have a good drop shot? It will help you at Wimbledon. So will the lob. So, for that matter, will serve-and-volley, if used wisely. Nadal successfully employed the tactic in the final game of last year’s championships, as a desperate Federer floated back returns in the fading light.
Tennis lovers always think that the game has too much of something or too little, that players are too bratty or too dim, that the sport is either so predictable as to be boring (a common swipe at the Federer Era) or so unpredictable as to be maddening (women’s tennis in the last few years). But we ought all to agree that the lawns at Wimbledon are perfect. No surface is better suited to the way the sport and the players have evolved. On hard courts, the bounces are true, rather than tricky, and power can more easily snuff out touch and artistry. On clay, endurance carries the day. Only on Wimbledon’s lawns do tennis players regularly show us the full range of their talents. It took Roddick four years, several coaches, a remodeled backhand, better volleys, and a diet that trimmed 15 pounds from his body before he was fit for another Wimbledon final after two successive trips in 2004 and 2005. His serve alone, while better than ever, was no longer up to the task.
Still, despite the quality of the tennis seen at Wimbledon in the last few years, it’s unlikely we will have a grass-court resurgence. In professional and public tennis, grass courts have been on the decline for years. Other than Wimbledon, only five professional tournaments still use them. Most recreational players have never set foot on a grass court, and the chance of their doing so isn’t about to increase. Bob Ingersole, the tennis director at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, New York, former home of the U.S. Open and a rare spot maintaining some grass courts, explains why:
Grass also costs more than clay or hard courts. “One hundred percent more, easy,” Ingersole says. He pauses, taps his finger, and then adds, “Easily double, probably triple.”
This might have been the best reason for Wimbledon to abandon its lawns. Whatever abuse it might take from local papers and tennis traditionalists around the globe, its tournament would still sell half-a-million tickets, nearly 22,000 towels, dozens of hours of television rights, 200,000 glasses of Pimm’s (an increase of 50,000 from 2008, the club reports), and 28,000 kilos of strawberries whether Centre Court was made of grass, granite, or fiberglass. The office might not be as pretty, but the tournament would see its already substantial profit multiply. Digging up the lawns makes good business sense, and that’s true for the West Side Tennis Club, too. The club once had 38 grass courts. It now has eight. Yet Ingersole says his club wouldn’t be the same without grass, just as Wimbledon wouldn’t be Wimbledon, no matter how many times someone like David Lloyd might say otherwise.
“We’ll keep grass forever,” Ingersole says. Praise him for saying so, and the All England Club for doing the same.
Tom Perrotta is a senior editor at Tennis magazine.
