the sporting scene

Murray was like Banquo’s ghost at this year’s Wimbledon. He retired from tennis last summer, nineteen years after his début at the championships. Two days before this year’s tournament began, he drove past the venue and, for the first time since he put away his racquet, he wished that he were playing. The following evening, he was onstage, reminiscing with fans, at the New Wimbledon Theatre, a gilded Edwardian auditorium that opened near the start of Wilding’s winning streak.

One of the reasons Murray triumphed at Wimbledon is that he is an extremely obdurate and literal person. He follows many sports and observed that, in almost all of them, home advantage is a real phenomenon, so he concluded that the hype, the hoopla, the dull, obsessional parsing of his dual British-Scottish identity that accompanied his every attempt to win seven successive matches at the All England Club must be helping him, too. His legs may have been shaking, but he was able to keep his identity and his ground strokes intact. On the night of July 10, 2016, after he won Wimbledon for the second time—an achievement for which he was knighted, three years later—Murray stopped off at a McDonald’s on his way to the annual players’ ball. “I don’t know about you, but, when I want to celebrate, I don’t eat, like, canapés,” he told his fans.

Murray also knew that until the very moment that a Djokovic backhand hit the net cord in the last game of the 2013 final—thereby breaking the seventy-seven-year curse on British gentlemen—he had failed. “That’s how it felt,” he said. The year before, Murray had felt ready to win, then lost to Roger Federer in the final. It is still upsetting for many British tennis fans to watch Murray’s interview on court after that match. “I’m going to try this, and it’s not going to be easy,” he said, before covering his face with his hand. Murray explained in the theatre that after that loss it took him several days to feel ready to go outside. When he did, he walked down to Wimbledon village with his partner, Kim Sears. A car pulled up beside them and the driver called out, “Loser.”

Draper’s opponent in the next round was Marin Čilić, a thirty-six-year-old Croatian, who reached the Wimbledon final in 2017. Čilić is a tall and languid player, with a game well suited to grass. But he has struggled with a persistent knee injury, and this was his first appearance at the championships in four years. According to my Wimbledon app, which was powered by data from I.B.M., Draper had an eighty-six-per-cent chance of victory.

I don’t think Čilić checked the app. From the opening exchanges, the Croatian was hitting the ball cleanly and true; Draper hustled to keep up. In the fourth game, there were signs that Draper’s rhythm was off: he hit three lets on his first serve and didn’t go for a Čilić shot that landed on the baseline. Three points later, the ball flew off Draper’s frame for deuce. “Come on, Jack!” “Come on, J.D.!” After the alienating efficiency of the first-round win, Draper’s tennis was more relatable. British stomachs tightened as he saved a break point and then barrelled down a hundred-and-thirty-four-mile-per-hour serve for the game. “C’mon!” Draper yelled, tightly.

Four games later, Čilić went after Draper’s serve again, sending big, cruising forehands that the British player could not cope with. Draper’s own forehand was misfiring, while his backhand—the dependable shot of his younger self—lacked the power to disturb someone in Čilić’s frame of mind. Down love–40, Draper won the following five points. But the effort drained him. The next time he served, he lost the set. One of the disadvantages for British players at Wimbledon is that it is pretty much everyone else’s favorite tennis tournament, too. “I’m aware that I’m playing well,” Čilić said afterward. “It’s nothing unusual.”

The second set slithered away from Draper. “The points are going by so quickly,” he said later. “I feel like every ball is on my feet on the returns.” He fought back to win the third and, for a time, he played furiously and well, like a man who had been stuck in terrible traffic and now the roads were finally clear. But he was still late. When the crowd wasn’t baying in support, an astonishing silence fell on Court 1, punctuated by the smallest sounds: a ball being bounced on the turf at the far end of the seventy-eight-foot court; birdsong; a door closing somewhere far away.

If hope persists until the last point of a tennis match, then fear does, too. As Draper was serving at 15–30 in the fourth set, 4–5 down, it was suddenly transparent that he was two points away from leaving the tournament. Čilić took a breath that was deep enough to be heard in the stands, and then won the match. When Draper appeared in the media center a few minutes later, his body hung with sadness. He lost in the second round of Wimbledon last year as well, but he hadn’t been the main hope then. He seemed stunned by how difficult this was going to be. “I mean, it makes me think that Andy’s achievement of what he did, winning here twice,” Draper said, not far from tears. “Just unbelievable.”

According to “A People’s History of Tennis” (2020), by David Berry, lawn tennis probably became inevitable following the invention of the lawnmower, in 1827, and the vulcanization of rubber, in the eighteen-forties. Someone had to dream it up, however, and that was Major Walter Wingfield, who began advertising portable lawn-tennis kits for sale in March, 1874. Wingfield’s vision was almost complete from the outset. He only got wrong the shape of the court (his was an hourglass) and the name (he wanted to call his game Σφαιριστική, ancient Greek for “belonging to the ball”).

Unusually for a Victorian sportsman, Wingfield marketed his game equally to men and women, and the fad spread rapidly through the gardens of England and beyond. Three years after Wingfield’s first kits went on sale, Henry James was in Warwickshire when he came across a party of graceful young folk, playing on a “cushiony lawn” next to a rectory. One of the girls was a twelve-year-old named Maud Watson, who became the first Wimbledon ladies’ champion, in 1884.

I met Berry for lunch one day during the championships, at the Centenary Seafood restaurant, which overlooks Court 7 and offers a sharing platter of trout, crevettes, dressed crab, and Severn & Wye smoked mackerel for seventy pounds. Berry learned to play tennis on a public court near the housing project where he grew up, in Berkshire. He first visited Wimbledon in 1968, to see Rod Laver. It rained all day and he went home. When Berry returned, fourteen years later, it was as a contributor to Marxism Today.

Berry spent most of his career as a documentary-maker for the BBC. For many years, he was skeptical of the exclusivity of Wimbledon and the implied superiority of the All England Club’s hyper-kempt lawns. (Centre Court is out of bounds even to the club’s own members.) But he came to admire how one of the world’s great sporting occasions rests on top of a small, suburban tennis club, with three hundred and seventy-five fanatical members. “It is bizarre,” Berry said. The membership fee is a closely held secret, but it is thought to be only a few hundred pounds a year. “That creates a sort of lower-middle-class gentility. It’s almost so clever the way they’ve done it that they couldn’t have planned it,” Berry said. “Somehow they’ve kept the great values of the British middle classes, which are around tolerance, politeness, and the great word that people use most in tennis, which is ‘sorry.’ ”

The suburban safeness of Wimbledon, characterized by its love of tradition and slightly appalling taste (pale woods and gold, plus geraniums everywhere), also helps to inspire the unspoken fatalism around the chances of almost every British player. The club is pervaded by “that kind of English sense that you’re not really expected to do well and that’s O.K.,” Berry added, consolingly. “It’s probably better, because nothing gets disturbed.”

“Wimbledon is accessible, but aspirational,” Jevans, the chair of the All England Club, said, when we met. The tournament is proud to offer a chance to queue up for same-day tickets; a grounds pass for a day of tennis costs thirty pounds. You can bring your own food and drink. The experience is especially accessible to those who excel at the two most ancient English sports of all, which are standing in line for hours and never needing to go to the bathroom. (If you give up your seat at an outer court during a hotly contested match, you are not getting it back.)