White whales and green grass: Why Wimbledon is the Grand Slam title every player craves (2024)

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Iga Swiatek started flirting with a very strange idea last fall.

This was after she’d finished the season as world No. 1 for a second consecutive year. After she’d won her fourth Grand Slam title and her third French Open, while still just 22 years old. Last month those numbers flipped up to five Grand Slam titles and four French Opens at 23 — but it’s the flirtation with weirdness in late 2023 that is most vital right now as the lawns of SW19 in London emerge from under cover.

As the tennis season wound down, Swiatek had every reason to stick with the formula that had delivered her to the top of the mountain. Instead, she floated the idea of spending part of her off-season training — on grass.

She would not play another grass-court tournament for nearly eight months. Tennis spends the first three months of the season on hard courts. The Australian Open, a classic hard-court event, was a little more than six weeks away.

None of this stopped visions of tennis on the sport’s ultimate grass, at Wimbledon’s All England Club, dancing through her mind.

“I had these ideas,” Swiatek said last month as she sat next to the French Open trophy in Paris.

(Her coach had told her that these ideas were terrible.)

Then came the flex. “If I would lose here earlier, maybe I would be able to play two more weeks on grass, and then be a better grass player.”

Ah, the champion’s lament — and in Swiatek’s case a very specific one. She’s a wondrous player; a generational talent who could quit tomorrow and walk into the Hall of Fame. But the Pole, like so many who have come before her, knows that her career will remain incomplete unless she wins Wimbledon.

It’s a cruel joke that modern tennis has played on everyone.

Take the most mythical tournament on the calendar, the one that all truly great players believe they need to win to solidify that greatness — and keep it on the quirkiest surface, one that basically no one spends any significant time on growing up, and that takes up slightly more than a month of the tour calendar with little time to prepare for — that for so many matters more than any other.

And if you don’t win… Well, no one who enters with a legitimate chance really wants to talk about that possibility.

This is how it is for Swiatek, and for Jannik Sinner, the 22-year-old world No 1 from Italy and the reigning Australian Open champion. That’s all well and good kid, but can you win in the sport’s cradle, even though the tennis that happens at Wimbledon bears only a passing resemblance to the tennis that happens the rest of the year?

No one said life was fair on or off the tennis court.

Sinner is doing his darndest to make it happen, winning the warmup tournament in Halle this month to get the feel of grass back in his knees and hands.

After winning the French Open, Swiatek prioritized rest.

“I just want to do normal stuff, like clean up the house,” Swiatek said in the hours after winning in Paris. Grass remained way down on her priority list. She just wanted to have a home routine “like making myself breakfast”.

Other sports don’t do this. Championships are championships, regardless of location.

Sure, every golfer wants to win The Masters, but there are plenty of great players who haven’t, players who have won the other major championships in the sport, who (Greg Norman aside) don’t lie awake at night feeling tortured, or judged as lesser people, because they don’t have that particular trophy on their resume.

It’s more a pity than a professional failing.

Also, other than the azaleas, golf at Augusta National really does look like golf everywhere else. No one has ever not played golf for eight weeks ahead of The Masters to prepare specifically for the style of golf that Augusta requires, in the way that some tennis players will skip the clay season to focus on trying to win on the grass of Wimbledon.

(Casper Ruud, a clay aficionado, does the opposite. He spends grass season at concerts and on boats, then appears at Wimbledon with the right shoes and a dream.)

Ivan Lendl, who won basically everything else, was a dirt dodger. Wimbledon was his great white whale. He never won it, which still gets mentioned almost as often as his eight Grand Slam titles. Both Andy Murray and Roger Federer have done the same late in their careers as well, so they could give themselves the best chance to win where they most wanted to. Carlos Alcaraz, the defending champion, grew up playing on red clay, in a country whose tennis champions are synonymous with the French Open. Yet just days after he had won at Roland Garros for the the first time, he left no doubt about his priorities.

“I really want to win every title that I go for, and I think Wimbledon is even more special.”

Brad Gilbert, the former player who now coaches Coco Gauff, was living a nice life in California last year, commentating on Grand Slams, coaching promising college players and other people with big bank accounts who could afford him. He even taught Zendaya and her minions in Challengers how to play before they started filming the movie.

As a coach, Gilbert had been to the mountaintop, helping Andre Agassi and Andy Roddick win Grand Slams and join the No. 1 club. But something gnawed at him.

Gilbert had never watched one of his players win Wimbledon from the coaches’ box. He craved one more shot to guide a player who might give him that chance to win in the place he called “the cathedral of tennis”. “I get so excited every year as I go through the gates,” Gilbert said in a text message the other day.

Then Team Gauff called last summer — incidentally while he was at Wimbledon, calling matches for ESPN. She had just lost a tough first round match to Sofia Kenin, and had yet to get past the fourth round at the All England Club. But when it comes to winning on grass, a 125 mph serve is a pretty good place to start. Gauff, second seed this year, has a favorable draw at the tournament, and she’s already sorted out her own white whale by winning the U.S. Open last year.

How did this happen? How did one tournament played on what is now the oddball tennis surface come to mean so much more than everything else? How did Wimbledon become a kind of force of tennis nature, an idea, and a state of being as much as sports competition?

Here is what Rod Laver, four-time champion, wrote in his 1971 memoir, The Education of a Tennis Player:

“The actor on Broadway, the singer at La Scala, [and] the dancer at the Bolshoi Theater understand what the tennis player at Wimbledon feels.”

And this:

“My love for tennis goes to my depths but when the time comes that I can’t play the Centre Court at Wimbledon, something vital will have gone out of that love.”

Laver, it’s worth noting, has very nice things to say about the center court at the Australian Open that bears his name, Rod Laver Arena. But not that nice.

Cliff Drysdale, the former player and longtime commentator, said Wimbledon was always the place players strived to be at their best even before the era of modern professional tennis that began in 1968 — but this was for very utilitarian reasons. In the 1950s and 1960s, before there was a computer that ranked players, most of the tournament directors from across the world would gather at Wimbledon to figure out whom to invite to their tournaments.

“They were just looking for attractive players,” Drysdale said — players who could play well and had the kind of flair that would sell tickets in New Jersey or Basel or wherever tennis might be happening during the next year.

That didn’t happen at the other Grand Slams played on grass. Australia was so far from everything else that plenty of players skipped it. The event that was then called the U.S. National Championships took place on what Drysdale described as “mediocre grass” at the West Side Tennis Club in New York City. Roland Garros had plenty of prestige but was more of a clay court championship.

And so Wimbledon, the oldest of the big tournaments, became the place where if you played well and impressed a handful of tournament directors, they would offer to cover your expenses and pay you $500 under the table to come to their events.

A good showing at Wimbledon set up the rest of the year, or even your life.It also set itself apart with certain perks players did not receive elsewhere. The club picked up players for their matches in Bentleys. There were masseurs in the locker rooms.

Over time, even with the advent of prize money and with the help of some crafty marketing by the sports impresario and agent Mark McCormack, the founder of IMG, Wimbledon became a kind of Holy Grail.

Ash Barty, the Australian former world No 1, used to refer to it as “the dream”. Her home slam, the Australian Open, was merely “the goal”. Barty won Wimbledon in 2021 for the first and only time, then won the Australian Open the following January.

She quit tennis, as world No. 1, two months later.

Nick Kyrgios, another Australian, said he would have retired had he beaten Novak Djokovic in the final in 2022; Ons Jabeur, a finalist the past two years, put an image of the Wimbledon trophy on her lock screen on her phone that same year, and had she won the 2023 final against Marketa Vondrousova she would have stopped playing tennis indefinitely and tried to have a baby.

She lost the final. She kept playing. Having a baby is on hold for now.

Wimbledon is also the tournament that made Novak Djokovic want to become a tennis player, with his earliest tennis memory (outside of playing) being watching the Wimbledon final as a small boy in early 1990s Serbia. Its pull remains so strong that he became desperate to rush back from his surgery on June 5, even if that meant a higher risk of another injury that could jeopardize the Olympic Games and the U.S. Open, where he is the defending champion.

“It is Wimbledon, the tournament that always has been a dream tournament for me when I was a kid,” he said Saturday. “The thought of me missing Wimbledon was just not correct.”

Djokovic eats a few blades of Centre Court grass every time he wins. He’s won seven times. That’s a lot of grass.

As for Sinner? “Grass season is different,” the Italian said before he left Paris after his semi-final loss at Roland Garros.

“The preparation is different. You use different muscles.”

Sinner lost in straight sets to Djokovic in the Wimbledon semi-finals last year but said he felt far more comfortable in that match than when he played Djokovic in the quarter-finals in 2022 and lost in five sets after having taken the lead.

“We see how it goes,” Sinner said.

It appears to be going well. Sinner spent last week playing like an action hero, diving into shots and rolling across the grass like Jason Bourne with a tennis racket, then springing to his feet to chase down the next ball.

About that grass — the stuff that helps make Wimbledon the perfectly manicured tennis Shangri-La, where every flower appears set just so and the court feels different under foot than it does at the other grass-court events.

That’s because it is. It’s different now than it once was, players and coaches say. Slower than in days of yore, when grass-court tennis was far more prevalent and serving and volleying was so essential for winning. Gavin MacMillan, a coach who specializes in biomechanics and works with Aryna Sabalenka, visited earlier this month with the reigning Australian Open champion and two-time Wimbledon semi-finalist. He said he couldn’t believe how slow the courts were.

“It’s like they’ve turned a grass court into a clay court,” MacMillan said. Early reports from the tournament, however, are that some of that old speed is renewed. Players and fans alike will have to wait and see what happens come July 1, with the first drop of a Slazenger ball onto the turf.

Any slowness will be music to the ears of Swiatek, a clay court savant whose topspin forehand — which requires an intricate grip and swing motion — doesn’t work as well off the lower bounce on grass. She lost in the third round in 2022 and then in the quarter-finals last year, but those experiences don’t remain in a capsule, she said. Each one builds on the next, as though the Wimbledon of now is itself a grass-court training session for the Wimbledon that will come next year.

“Every year it’s easier for me to adapt to grass,” Swiatek said. “I felt like last year I could adapt quicker.”

After winning five Grand Slams in five years, maybe now she will get the one that really, really matters to her. The champion’s lament.

(Top photos: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis; Shi Tang / Getty Images; Design: Eamonn Dalton for The Athletic)