Andy Capostagno Tennis
There is only one thing better than winning Wimbledon and thats winning it again, said the late Arthur Ashe. The 1975 mens champion just about summed up most peoples feelings about the All England Championships.
For while Wimbledon is full of cant and class distinctions it is also full of people, and it is nearly always the crowd which confers greatness on an event.
People have been moaning about the championships for a while now. The players have turned into robots, you cant rely on the weather and the strawberries are too expensive. But that is to ignore the facts.
Any tournament which can boast the presence of players as different as Andre Agassi and Goran Ivanisevic, Amanda Coetzer and Venus Williams is a long way from being a battle between automatons.
And as to the weather, it might seem like it always rains at Wimbledon, but last year when two days out of the fortnight were lost to the weather was actually the worst disruption in the tournaments history. And thirdly, the strawberries are apparently far more expensive at Royal Ascot, so there.
It may seem contradictory, considering the pre-tournament withdrawal of Russian wunderkind (or should that be Wonderbra?) Anna Kournikova, but the ladies tournament is looking far more attractive than the mens at this stage. For unlike the 1970s and 1980s when there were only three or four women who actually had the game to win Wimbledon, this year there are at least 10 and probably a lot more.
Monica Seles has never enjoyed playing on grass, but Chris Evert proved long ago that a baseline basher can win Wimbledon, and Seless confidence is sky-high after her French Open victory. She beat Martina Hingis in the final and the Swiss miss is inevitably the top seed.
Hingis looked nicely grooved in her opening round win over Lisa Raymond, suggesting that her all-court game is set to peak at the right time, a week from now. She does not have a big shot, but in some respects that is to her advantage.
The players know that if they can keep the ball away from Steffi Grafs forehand, they can frustrate her into errors. Whether it is owing to the fearlessness of youth, or the confidence which comes from mastery, Hingis does not appear to get frustrated.
It is possible that Hingis and Graf could meet in the final and what a relishable contest that would be. Graf says that injuries have caught up with her and that this could be her last year. Hingiss only injuries stem from such things as falling off a horse or taking a bend too acutely on her rollerblades. What it is to be young.
Hingis beat Jana Novotna in last years final, finding her range after losing the first set to the big-hitting Czech. And while it was scarcely a classic encounter it had a lot more to recommend it than the mens final where Pete Sampras blew away Frenchman Cedric Pioline 6-4 6-2 6-4.
The ambivalent estimation of Wimbledon these days is largely owing to the domination of Sampras. The American with the Hansie Cronje eyebrows has been champion for four of the last five years.
This year, we are told, Sampras will struggle. He was briefly ousted as world number one by Marcelo Rios a few months ago and again failed to make an impact in this years French Open.
But putting Sampras on a grass court is a little like pouring blood on Draculas ashes; it brings him back to life. Sampras may have had a poor season, but betting against him at Wimbledon is scarcely an option.
Those critics who suggest that Sampras is whats wrong with Wimbledon are wrong. It is not his fault that his serve is the most reliable in the game, or that he is capable of hitting winners from the front row of the stalls.
What is really wrong with Wimbledon is the same malaise that affects most other areas of the modern game, racquet technology. Oversized metal heads have allowed fundamentally limited players like Richard Krajicek and Marc Rosset to blast their way to victory around the world. Give them a wooden racquet like the one John McEnroe used to beat Bjorn Borg in 1981 and they would not make the worlds top 100.
Sampras would hit fewer aces with a wooden racquet, but he at least has the game to be mentioned in the same breath as McEnroe and Rod Laver. So, oddly enough, does Wayne Ferreira. When Ferreira first came on the scene he was regarded as a natural Wimbledon champion.
He has moments of sublime form when he combines a powerful serve with the kind of touch volleying that Sampras can only dream about. But 20 years ago Borg proved to the world that if your mind is strong enough, the ability to volley is not necessarily the vital component of a Wimbledon champion. Ferreiras mind will probably never be strong enough to win Wimbledon, but this could be the year that the status quo is interrupted.
Six years ago Agassi beat Ivanisevic in the final, proving like Borg before him that there is more than one way to skin a cat (or should that be gut a cat?). The time has again arrived when the All England Championships need someone unusual to lift the trophy. And no, that doesnt mean theres going to be an English winner.