WEEKEND COLUMNISTS The last time I was so affected by a Wimbledon final was in 1972. When the moustachioed, military efficiency of Stan Smith defeated the mercurial artistry and natural grace of Ilie Nastase in a five-set thriller, I paced up and down the high street of the little town where I went to school, for what seemed hours, too upset to speak. It wasn’t just that the wrong man had won, or the man I did not support, but that some exemplary drama, or tragedy, had been played out, with implications beyond the sport of tennis, or any sport. Implacable force had won over finesse and imagination, teaching a lesson I wanted with all my heart to resist. I have felt the same way after great performances in the theatre, but very seldom in connection with sport.
So it was last Sunday during and after the finest and most dramatic Wimbledon final, or perhaps sporting event, in living memory. We had invited friends round for our regular Sunday morning ritual (the nearest we have in our bit of London to a village get-together, or even religious service) of a visit to the farmers market followed by a light lunch of Cambridgeshire salad and Kent berries. Scudding clouds covered the sky; only the chilly, hunting winds kept the showers from joining up into uninterrupted rain. Tennis did not seem remotely on the cards.
The summery gazpacho I had made should have been turned into a hotpot, but our Spanish friend Barbara’s tortilla de patatas, with a bottle of 1978 Ducru-Beaucaillou, cellared for 27 years, wonderfully elegant, aromatic and lifted, like no wine made in the post-Parker era, was more appropriate for the wintry, weeping weather. Even better was the Christmas pudding that my partner Ching Ling, with prophetic brilliance, had steamed the night before.
Then, improbably, the tennis began. We watched, and we went on watching, with the odd breaks for weather, for the opening of another bottle of wine (a £5 supermarket Chinon), then another (the naturally made Contadino of Frank Cornelissen from the north slope of Etna), for supper at the start of the fifth set, and when the tension became unbearable, until the last ball (Federer’s cross-court forehand into the net) was struck in the gloom at 9.16pm.
By that time the match had not just been through many phases, or acts of drama, but had transcended genres and dimensions. There were the first two sets when the champion seemed to reflect the weather: under a cloud, unable to lift into the light. The coming of the rain changed the mood. Federer would not crumble, as he had at the French Open a month before. In the third set tie-break, he exploded into brilliance, a Greek hero fighting not just for his life, but for immortality.
The fourth set tie-break brought the unimaginable: the young warrior and iron man, Nadal, choking when he had a 5-2 lead, double-faulting weakly. The climax of this breaker brought the two sublime shots that will be replayed for as long as tennis captures people’s minds and hearts – Nadal’s laser-like forehand down the line and Federer’s riposte at championship point down, the running backhand of sublime beauty and pinpoint accuracy.
By the stage of the fifth set, the match, for me at least, had already gone beyond the sphere of winning and losing. Both men had already both won and lost. Federer’s fight-back was a magnificent achievement. It came down, in the end, not so much to the particular niceties of tennis, as to sheer hunger and will power; even beyond that, to natural changes in the order of things. Perhaps the hunger and will of the young pretender will always, at a certain point, be stronger than that of the established champion. The grip of the strongest must at last be loosened.
All this happened, as the distinguished California tennis pro and writer Doug King put it in an e-mail sent to me on Sunday night, “not without struggle and not without pathos”. The pathos for me, as it had been in 1972, was almost unbearable. The graciousness of both winner and loser was admirable, but nothing could disguise the sadness of the end of an era. That at least was the view of the weather gods, who delivered a Monday of unrelenting rain and thunder. I thought of the lines written by Miguel Hernández after the murder of his friend Federíco Garcia Lorca: “a poet dies and creation feels/Wounded, sick to death in its entrails”.
But what had happened was no murder. Two equally valid, opposite principles, the hardness of muscle and steely will, and the elusive spirit of pure poetry, had been set against each other and had fought it out not to the extinction of either. Perhaps it was always likely that in such gusty, gloomy conditions the style of play that relies on the smallest margin of error, Federer’s, would not prevail against the relentless assault of heavy top-spin. The broadsword beats the rapier. But the rapier’s finest thrusts live longer in the memory.
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