The Grass Is Greener

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.