The Evergreen Fairytale of Wimbledon

It's been 20 years since this writer got his first press pass to Wimbledon, but the school-boyish adulation remains

- Rahul Jacob

First impressions of places we have often day-dreamed about can have the hallucinatory effect of a fairy tale. As a teenager just graduating from high school in 1961, the teenaged Billie Jean Moffitt was taken to Centre Court at Wimbledon by a British journalist before the tournament started. As they ascended the final steps to the court, he asked her to close her eyes. A few seconds later, this is what she saw: "Down below was the most beautiful tennis court ever created. I was struck by the perfect symmetry of the place. The grass was perfectly groomed and a rich shade of green... The tiered stands at Centre Court held more than fourteen thousand people and yet, once we were inside, the space felt intimate." These lines from her 2021 autobiography, All In, is one of the most apt descriptions of the love at first sight that Centre Court evokes.

I have been obsessed with Wimbledon ever since I was a small boy after my eldest brother made a giant draw sheet for the men's and women's singles in the bedroom we shared in the summer of 1975. With astonishing beginner's luck, the players I was supporting became the men's and women's champions that year. Arthur Ashe won his first Wimbledon, aged 32, while Billie Jean King (née Moffitt) won her last women's singles final that year. I have written previews of the tournament on and off since 1983 and this never happened again.