Notes on a freak show

Part freak show, part propagandist exercise, part train wreck, part sporting event, the 2013 Wimbledon tennis championships was never less than entertaining, surprising and worth watching, but there was a certain relief when it was over, for the neutral fans anyway.

Steve Darcis got the ball rolling and the heads spinning at a Weird and shock-ridden Wimbledon as he knocked out the two time former Champion Nadal in straight sets. It had a domino effect. Withdrawals, retirements and upsets piled up on top of one another. Errani, Ivanovic, Kirilenko, Isner, Wawrinka, Cilic all fell but the real cries of timber came as Azarenka, Sharapova and Federer hit the ground, literally at times as photos of a slidden Sharapova testify.

With grass being the freak surface it now is, with only five weeks of a ten month season played on it, the players come to it unprepared. They are then unforgiven by a surface that still requires the movement of a ballerina rather than the gallops into open stance groundies performed by most of the hard court proficient players who failed to clear the first post one after another.

As the big names were erased prematurely from the draw sheet, lesser-known names like Bouchard, Kubot, and Puig became less so, while names like Robson, Janowicz, Stephens, and Lisicki of whom great things are predicted, grew even bigger in the spotlight. These names should be the big ones in years to come, their success in this tournament sure to be repeated.

In the women’s draw, a name we have seen again and again over the years, appeared seven times before being immortalized on the Champion’s board: Marion Bartoli. The Frenchwoman surprised everyone by emerging from the train wreck that was the bottom half of the women’s draw to take a title there for the taking, a prospect that frightened the hell out of her stage-fright struck opponent, Lisicki. Where this victory takes Bartoli we do not know but tennis fans will have enjoyed being taken with her on quite a ride over her career and this victory will remained etched in the memory for some time.

Meanwhile, in the men’s, the final was played out by two names we have gotten used to competing for Major titles the last 12 months: Murray and Djokovic. It was the former who was engraved on the trophy and in the British sporting history books.

And it is a name that will ring in the ears of anyone who watched Wimbledon on the Scotsman’s home broadcasting channel. Even in matches he was not playing, his name was mentioned time and time again. Viewers watching not from Britain must have been doing so with the TV on mute. Worst of all, for those who were listening, during the lamenting of no British winner for 77 years, hung the forgetting of Virginia Wade in 1977.

This final’s excitement lay solely in the unveiling of Britain’s second post war champion. The match itself was a tame affair, the Serbian world number One Djokovic failing to perform. At times Murray did not let him but when Djokovic did get ahead he fell back again.

Unfortunately for this year’s Wimbledon, a lack of exciting matches was its Major flaw. While it had some riveting performances and the upsets were hugely entertaining but compared to last month’s French Open, in which the men’s tournament in particular had a couple of fistfuls of classics, this Wimbledon’s men’s tournament had only one, the Djokovic and Del Potro semi-final and three in the women’s (Knapp-Kerber, Serena-Lisicki, Radwanska-Lisicki). Not even a fistful. Indeed, while the shocks and injuries of the first week made it one of the more memorable Opens in years if not decades, it was memorable for all the wrong reasons.

A lack of nail-biting contests, and chewed off nails are what we hope for rather than lying down in shock at de Brito drubbing Sharapova on a freak surface that borders on irrelevance, means that Wimbledon 2013 will go down as infamously unforgettable rather than famously so.