The Rain & the Drama

Today’s rain delay might be depressing, but it provides a fantastic occasion to say a few things about Wimbledon and why it makes for great television. Unlike so many of the TV dramas and reality shows, Wimbledon is completely unpredictable. For instance, in 2005, 31-year-old journeywoman Jill Craybas took out world #4 Serena Williams on Centre Court. How improbable was that? Craybas has never in her career been ranked higher than 47th in the world, and even that had been quite a few years ago. She’s a small woman who does not hit with much power, while Serena Williams might hit the ball harder than anyone else on the WTA tour. Grass is a surface that favors big hitters. Craybas had never in more than a decade on tour defeated anyone ranked in the top twenty. And yet, there it was, the most improbable kind of upset in tennis, a small, older player in the twilight of her career took out the formidable Serena Williams.

Wimbledon also provides some of the most exiting points in tennis because players can dive onto the grass, and thus reach for shots much farther away from them than they could on a hard court. In one of the highest level matches I’ve ever seen, Patrick Rafter beat Andre Agassi in a five-set extravaganza in the 2000 Wimbledon semi-finals. Rafter charged the net and dove for winning volley after volley, barely dinking Agassi’s world-class passing shots back over the net with so much backspin that even quick-footed Agassi couldn’t run in quickly enough to get them. Agassi played the best tennis I’ve ever seen him play, and it still wasn’t enough to beat Rafter at his all-time best. The only bad part of the match was that it tired Rafter out enough for Sampras to beat him in four sets in the final. Still, it was great television that I was fortunate enough to watch on Mike E.’s little TV in the infamous, Skyla Court place in Missoula.

Another great Wimbledon memory comes from the 2004 women’s final. On a tiny TV getting reception from bunny ears on the top floor of an old Toronto bed and breakfast, Mariah and I watched the attractive, teenage Maria Sharapova out hit the heavily favored Serena Williams. She beat Williams at her own hard-hitting game, and at that moment, the tennis world knew that the domination of the two Williams sisters over the women’s circuit was over. It was the end of an era, and for many, it meant that the game would become more exciting since we wouldn’t be seeing the same two women in every Grand Slam final. The previous two women’s finals had been boring, error-filled Venus vs. Serena matches. When Sharapova won, it was the first time in five years that a Williams sister hadn’t taken home the trophy. It was glorious.

This year, we are spending the middle weekend in Seattle with Simon and Ginny. While rain has prevented much of the play since we’ve been here, we did see a spectacular Blake diving volley against “The Mosquito,” Juan Carlos Ferrero. The Mosquito prevailed, and he has been playing as well as I’ve seen him play since he won the French many years ago. Roddick stands as the only American man left in the draw, but will he finally be able to bring his A-game to a match-up with four-time champ Roger Federer? Will a Frenchman win the title for the first time in more than twenty years? Will an Englishman win a doubles title for the first time in more than forty-five years? All of these things are still possible. The rain will certainly let up sometime, and then we’ll find out.

Wimbledon?

Of course, I haven’t even scratched the surface with that whole High Fidelity thing, but I spent today at St. Vincent College out in Latrobe playing in an ultimate frisbee tournament. And now the ubiquitous Saturday college football is on TV, so I’m thinking about sports movies. I know there are a lot of people out there who would bring up Rudy, Field of Dreams, Hoosiers, or even Major League here to my Any Given Sunday and Bend it Like Beckham, but I want to take a minute to talk about Wimbledon, that 2004 movie most people have never seen. I think that when people see something like that (it was billed as a romantic comedy for crying out loud), they assume automatically that it’s going to suck. Usually they’re right, but this time it isn’t so.

Instead, Wimbledon opens up with a rad and accurate voiceover describing the thought process of this likeable pro tennis player who is, of all things, an Englishman. As this is going on, you see the guy playing at some red-clay European event probably intended to resemble ATP tour’s actual Monte-Carlo event. Red clay, of course, is the most authentic, the most hard-core surface in pro tennis. There are professionals who could go through their whole careers without ever leaving the dirt. And even though (or perhaps, I’m willing to concede, because) events on that surface get horrible ratings in American and are famously unpopular here, that’s where we see our first glimpse of Peter Colt. This, for me, was an unexpected and creative way to start the film.

And it’s not just the beginning that’s good from a tennis player’s point of view. At no point in Wimbledon is there a scene in which someone practices in the pouring rain. Every other tennis movie I’ve seen includes such a scene, and any jackass who’s ever picked up a racquet knows that when tennis balls get wet, they simply don’t bounce. Therefore, it’s literally impossible to practice in the pouring rain. How does something so simple escape so many moviemakers? But this time, at least, it hasn’t.

Of course, I wouldn’t be talking about this if Mariah hadn’t suggested once when we were marooned in the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport for something like 10 hours that we rent one of those portable DVD players and watch a movie right there in the departures gate. Wimbledon was quite a suitable movie for a situation like that because it allows its viewers to escape completely into the story of, well, mostly of Peter Colt, but also of Lizzie Bradbury (played by Kirsten Dunst), a famous American woman at the top of the sport. But anyway, viewers are able to escape into their story in part because it’s done in a clever way that’s funny without the usual tired jokes of the romantic comedy genre. It also helps that their little tryst doesn’t quite overshadow the tennis. The film manages to do all of this while depicting something of the tradition of Wimbledon and the frenzy which surrounds it in England.

Wimbledon brings to mind the greatest Wimbledons I can recall. A number of years ago, I watched Patrick Rafter beat Andre Agassi on the grass in what might be the best match I’ve ever seen. Agassi played the best tennis of his career, and Rafter dove all over centre court to produce what might be the greatest single-match performance of all time. As I watched that match in Mike E’s room, back when he lived with JJ, Megan, and Mariah in the Skyla place in Missoula, I was jumping up and down, cheering to the TV, etc. Those of you who know me understand that I’m not generally the sort of person who does things like that, but hey man, it was Wimbledon. For a little over two weeks, there exists a society over there in England where hordes of real, normal people watch, care about, know about, and talk about tennis. They get excited about it. Something like that, as you can imagine, is quite appealing to me, and my DVD copy of Wimbledon enables me to experience a taste of that society for an hour and a half whenever I feel like it. And if that doesn’t constitute a good sports movie, I don’t know what does.