Euan Ferguson TENNIS
Let’s put our hands right up here at the beginning and admit it: grass can, at times, be a little boring. I don’t mean “grass” grass, dope grass, the stuff that just makes boring people more boring; though that’s certainly pretty boring. I mean real grass, the green stuff, cow food, the stuff that stretches beyond the streams and crouches beside the motorways and skulks in London under a warm summer tonnage of dog poo. The stuff that covers the courts at Wimbledon.
Which is why I’m mildly surprised to realise, after an hour chatting to Wimbers’ chief groundsman, that we have spent that entire hour talking about nothing but grass, and that the subject is so inherently boring that it has become fascinating. It’s the details that do it.
It’s like meeting someone whose job is to watch paint dry, and realising that different paints do actually dry at different rates according to character, and that interesting studies are made of favourite paint-drying wall/colour/texture ratios.
It’s like carefully, forensically, reading a Lloyd Webber score and suddenly realising with a fright, well bejesus, there’s something interesting in here, even, could it be, the beginning of a … a tune? (No, nix that; I’m getting carried away).
Anyway, it is fascinating, because Eddie Seaward makes it fascinating, and because it is always fascinating to meet someone whose life is spent chasing the impossible: perfection.
It’s no ordinary grass we’re talking about here. To describe Seaward’s 42 acres of Wimbledon grass as simply “grass” is to describe those magnificent candied medieval fancies of lovingly-spun dulcified croquembouches as simply “sugar”. It is mere “grass” only in the same way as the thrillingly choreographed display of syntactical pyrotechnics displayed here before you could be described as mere “prose”. It is supergrass, bergrass, grass of the gods: spun and weaved and plaited and cajoled and loved into being; above Nature and beyond her.
More fundamentally, it is 70% perennial rye grass and 30% creeping red fescue. Ha! Your first surprise! You thought grass was just grass but it’s not; it’s rye and it’s red fescue, and at times there’s been bits of Chewings fescue in there, and sometimes even some Agrostis castillana; but for the moment Seaward’s happiest with the 70-30 mix.
It’s his eleventh Wimbledon as head groundsman. He knows he’ll never get it absolutely perfect, and accepts there’s something of Zeno’s Paradox here: the more one strives for perfection the further the remaining gradations will shift down towards infinity. “And the day you’re satisfied is probably the day it’s time to walk away.” But it sounds as if he’s getting close.
So the grass seed is carefully mixed and tested and sown by a specialist research institute in Bingley. The soil in which it’s sown – exactly the same at Bingley as at Wimbledon – “is produced for us by a firm in Farnham, to our own specification. It’s 22% clay precisely, the rest sand and soil, and it’s got to be able to be baked very dry.”
Rolled and rolled again throughout the year, after being laid to a depth of 22cm with a stone layer beneath for drainage (actually an ash layer on the older Centre Court), the soil produces the perfect base for the perfect bounce, and above it goes the perfect grass.
“It’s getting better all the time,” says Seaward. “The perfect grass has to be resistant to wear, and to drought, and yet survive in a very hard-baked clay soil … basically we’re asking a lot from a plant.” He beams proudly down at the Centre Court furze, and I nod knowingly along, gazing at this championship grass, half-hearing ghost crowds cheer its proud battle.
It also has to behave in distinctly un- grassy ways. “Grass has a habit of lateral growth, which can weave and create a thatch effect. We don’t want that, we want bounce, so we want it all growing upright. So, along with aerating and spiking it, we scarify it.”
I’m relieved to learn this doesn’t mean playing Lloyd Webber through the Tannoy at it, but cutting vertically down into it and 6mm into the soil below. Nor does it, as grass should, get that much water – “I watered the courts last week because it was so hot, but I won’t again.” Doesn’t he ever feel it’s all very … unnatural? Like forcing bonsai? He smiles, with understanding. “Of course. But it’s quite simple. We are creating a surface on which to play tennis. We are not growing grass.
“Our greatest enemy, of course, is rain.” Rain which three years ago damaged the bounce and led to complaints. “I understand why,” says this agreeable, non-tennis- playing 56-year-old who, after years as a groundsman and gaining a number of diplomas in turf culture and the like, now describes his job, delightedly, as “the pinnacle”.
Back then they had the wrong kind of covers, which didn’t let in enough light during three days of rain, and the grass weakened a little; he knows precisely by how much, and how he put it right, and it won’t happen again. But the rain still worries him in the last few days before the start of the tournament.
So his team have now got the timing down pat; it should take the 28 permanent and 120 booster staff, mainly students, “precisely 28 seconds from start to finish” to get the covers across. Across all 19 competition courts and 14 practice courts; for the aim here is not just perfection but unanimity of perfection. The precision is awesome, everywhere. It’s not 30 seconds but 28 seconds. Scarifying will cut not 5mm but precisely 6mm into the soil.
Seaward’s man mowing Centre Court before us knows precisely how many days before the first service to stop “crosshatch” mowing (which is better for the grass) and start the straight mowing – eight runs or “shades” in the centre, then three between the “tramlines’; and he knows the precise time in late afternoon to start doing this, to gain from shadow; and he knows his mower must be set at precisely 8mm.
I gaze out at the perfect, precise expanse and wonder, brain spinning with this whole new precise world of grass, how many blades of grass there are on the average court. “I haven’t a clue, you fool,” Seaward says, except he doesn’t actually say the last two words, except with the kind of body language you reserve for an approach from someone carrying a pig’s bladder on a stick.
At the end of the tournament time, I wonder, rather more cleverly, won’t he feel depressed? A whole long year to go again, working full-time, and all for … for this? Magnificent, but so short?
No, says the man who spends 50 weeks of every year letting the grass grow under his feet. “I’ll feel relief. There will have been a lot of pressure and tension, and long, long days; we’ll have been working non-stop for five weeks for about 14 or 16 hours a day.
“It’ll be nice just to get a day off, to get home for once. You should see the state of my lawn.”