The writers who drew me to Wimbledon

Librarian was too limiting a word for him, for really he was a detective and a navigator.

- ROHIT BRIJNATH

A bespectacled, kind gentleman who would help you ferret out facts and direct you through the maze of knowledge. Shakti Roy ran the library at the Anandabazar Patrika group when I first started as a sportswriter in the mid-1980s. I was discovering new worlds and he knew where they might be found.

Clippings. Books. Micro film. He would help me hunt and I knew what I was looking for. Becker, Graf, Lendl, Wimbledon. Quotes, descriptions, scores. Anything, everything. In 1987, I would actually travel to Wimbledon and go on to report from there seven times over the years but most of my life I have seen this place through the sentences of others.

Now you can watch first rounds as broadcasters talk through first serves but then words had to be scrounged. The elegant prose of the finely-mannered David McMahon in the Wills Book Of Excellence: Tennis. Nirmal Shekar, my smoking buddy during rain breaks, who hammered out words on Friedrich Nietzsche and Pete Sampras for The Hindu.

So much we collect and can't let go of. I have a 1981 edition of the World Of Tennis, which was the official yearbook of the International Tennis Federation. Inside lives a poet. Rex Bellamy resembled a civil servant but wrote charming sentences. "The ball hovers," he scribbled once about the French Open, "rather like the kind of rain that seems to hang about, as distinct from merely falling." Words are still where I go to wander.

Words are a lesson and a force. Words bring me an understanding of craft, of tradition (read Aditya Iyer's splendid piece in The Indian Express on the Wimbledon queue) and help me surf through the past. Words like Marshall Jon Fisher's opening paragraph in his book, A Terrible Splendor.