On the first Tuesday of Wimbledon, with hot evening sunshine lighting up the deuce court, Jack Draper, the fourth seed in the gentlemen’s singles, was playing disconcertingly well. He was on serve in his opening match and, as he said later, “I was getting my tennis together a little bit.” Draper, who is twenty-three, was the No. 1-ranked British player in this year’s competition, which is not an uncomplicated place to be. Britain is a nation that ignores professional tennis for fifty weeks of the year and then focusses, raptly, on the beauty and skill on display at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, as if the event were an extremely successful garden party to which not everyone has been invited. The great British public, in floral dresses and questionable hats, will peer through the hedge if necessary. And this year it was Draper they wanted to see.
In the first round, he faced Sebastián Báez, an Argentinean ranked thirty-eighth in the world. Báez is deft but diminutive. Draper, who is about the size of a telephone box, was too strong for him; Draper broke Báez’s serve twice in the opening five games. When he was up 4–1, the crowd on Court 1 searched for ways to connect to him emotionally. After last summer’s Wimbledon, Draper enjoyed a breakout year: he reached the semifinals of the U.S. Open and won the BNP Paribas Open, at Indian Wells, in March. He rose from twenty-sixth in the world to fourth. This meant that he arrived at the tournament as a specimen of unusual rarity: a plausible British contender, largely unknown to his public. “Come on, Jack!” two teen-age girls yelled in unison, to make themselves heard. “Come on, Drapes!” a man’s voice called, reaching for familiarity.
A Wimbledon crowd is almost always engaged in a performance of middle-class English civility. Its default expression is modest applause. This might be for anything. It also quite likes shushing. (When the umpire reminds people to turn off their cellphones, there is an opportunity to combine the two.) A Wimbledon crowd also roars and shrieks with abandon, as and when the occasion requires. But its favorite mood, by far, is one of mild titillation, which arises whenever something slightly out of the ordinary occurs—a ball flies into the crowd, a baffled bird pecks at the service line, a champagne cork enters the field of play—and a burr of chatter rips round the court. Draper, up 30–love against Báez, sent a forehand into the corner that was so neat in its curve, so complete in its unanswerableness, that the crowd was very briefly silenced altogether. When Draper closed the game out with an ace, Court 1 frankly erupted in polite conversation.
Wimbledon has a curious relationship with its homegrown players. Male British dominance of lawn tennis came to an abrupt end in 1910, when A. F. Wilding, New Zealand’s first and so far only Grand Slam singles winner, turned up in London on a motorcycle, with a sidecar, and won the first of four consecutive championships. Wilding was killed in the trenches, in France, in May, 1915. (“A hearty burst of laughter” emanated from Wilding’s dugout, according to the Daily Telegraph’s tennis correspondent, just before a shell landed on it.) There have been only two male British Wimbledon singles champions since, including, most recently, Andy Murray, who won it twice.
For decades, Britain’s women fared better, regularly winning championships deep into the twentieth century. That run ended with Virginia Wade, however, in 1977. What occurs now at the All England Club each year is that a brilliant foreigner turns up, demolishes the competition, and is taken to the nation’s heart: Suzanne Lenglen, the balletic French star of the nineteen-twenties; Serena Williams, in the two-thousands; Carlos Alcaraz, the Spaniard hoping to win his third Wimbledon in a row this year.
And yet the annual British tribute—the sending forth of its best young men and women, however good at tennis they actually are—is a crucial, if not quite central, part of the championships. British players fulfill at least two ritual functions at Wimbledon. Tennis is stressful: stressful to play, stressful to watch. When you are dangerously immersed in the sport, for hours a day, after not paying attention for the previous eleven and a half months, it’s necessary to have a place to put your feelings. Robert Osborn, an early thinker on lawn tennis, was also a religious scholar. “Until the very last stroke of a game has been played, there remains the possibility—the hope—that past failures may be redeemed by sudden and continuous success,” he wrote in 1881.
Second: What the British middle classes enjoy, more than anything, is being useful. There is no real point in cheering for Novak Djokovic. Jannik Sinner does not need you. The quintessential British Wimbledon competitor of modern times was Tim Henman, a slender serve-and-volley craftsman, who raised his level, improbably, every summer, lifted by a collective act of national yearning. Henman’s life changed in the first round in 1996, when he was losing 3–5 in the fifth set, on his serve, facing two match points against Yevgeny Kafelnikov, the French Open champion. Henman was twenty-one years old. “As I walked back to the baseline, I said to myself, in a split second, ‘There’s been a lot of very good British losers on Centre Court,’ ” he told me recently. “I remember saying to myself, ‘I don’t want to be a part of that.’ ”
Henman served two consecutive aces and went on to win the match. He reached four Wimbledon semifinals and lost them all. “He is the first human being called Tim to achieve anything at all,” Martin Amis wrote for this magazine, in June, 1997. British players say that they love Wimbledon. “The question I’m asked most often about my career is ‘How did you deal with the pressure?’ ” Henman said. “I revelled in it. I loved it. If I could have played my whole career on one court, it would have been Centre Court.” And why not? Wimbledon is glamorous and fun. This year, there were oversized tennis racquets on sale in the club shop for six hundred pounds and candles that offered a scent of fresh-cut grass. The stadium food consisted of poke bowls with cured chalk-stream trout and po’boy sandwiches with popcorn-fried cauliflower. Players were given iced towels, to help them cope with the unusual heat.
Still, no player knows how she will cope until the nation’s hopes fall on her. The current chair of the All England Club is Debbie Jevans, a sports administrator who helped deliver the 2012 London Olympics. In 1979, when Jevans was nineteen, she played Wade in the fourth round of Wimbledon. “I was sort of meant to be the next great thing,” Jevans told me, a few days before the tournament began. We were in her office, which has carpets the color of milky tea, emblazoned with black tennis racquets. Wade won, 6–1, 6–2. “I tried as hard as I could,” Jevans said. “But I knew I could have done better if I had been in a better place mentally.”
Draper is naturally right-handed, but he plays with his left. Until his late teens, he was comparatively small, and so he developed a patient, defensive style of tennis, built around his two-handed backhand, to which his right hand lent some extra power. A late growth spurt—he is six feet four—led to years of injuries. But it also created a player whose game is complex and difficult to read. One of his trademark shots is a “can-opener” serve, wide to a right-handed player’s backhand side, that can send an opponent off the court entirely. Other players are loud and expressive on court; Draper will say “Yup,” sharply, when an opponent’s shot lands out, and otherwise grunts and gasps in a mostly private way, like someone fixing a pipe under a sink.
In the run-up to Wimbledon, Draper said absolutely nothing out of turn. In person, he is large-limbed but contained. He is a jock who might have got a little fucked up last night but is now being polite to someone’s parents. (He might also be about to eat the contents of their fridge.) “I’ll keep trying to do my best, to try improving, to show my best tennis out there, to hopefully present myself as the player and the person I want to be,” Draper said in a news conference, just before the tournament began. His careful language didn’t make any difference to the role that he had been cast in. As I left the media center, I overheard Rob Maul, a tennis writer for the Sun, Britain’s biggest tabloid, talking on his phone: “He’s got the pressure of the whole nation on his shoulders.”
Against Báez, Draper played like the person he wanted to be. In the first game of the second set, he broke Báez again—mixing drop shots with another perfect forehand drive that dipped inside the baseline as if it were on a bombing run. Pulled this way and that, Báez slipped on the turf. There was rich applause for Draper’s winners, leavened with the faintest unease: But does he actually need us? In the fifth game, Draper pressured Báez’s serve again. When a Báez shot landed out, bringing the score to deuce, Draper gave a loud, slightly officious “Yup.”
Báez retired early in the third set, having been broken again. He shuffled off court, leaving Draper to pack his bags in front of his new and tentatively adoring public. There was a touch of awkwardness, as if no one knew quite what to do or say. Draper threw a towel into the crowd. He stepped up to the waiting microphone. “How do you deal with all that feeling of pressure?” Rishi Persad, the on-court interviewer for the BBC, promptly asked. “I don’t think about it,” Draper replied. “Until people mention it every five minutes.”
There were twenty-three British singles players in the first round of Wimbledon this year, the most since 1984. (That year, only Jo Durie made it past the third round.) The gentlemen contenders ranged from Draper to Oliver Tarvet, a rising senior at the University of San Diego, who was ranked seven hundred and thirty-third in the world and who likes to journal on court to process what he is feeling.
On the opening morning of the tournament, Tarvet played on Court 4, against Leandro Riedi, a Swiss journeyman. Court 4 is one of Wimbledon’s lesser courts, tucked alongside a walkway that goes under the raked seating of Court 3. As the morning progressed, the walkway became more or less impassable as the crowd thickened to watch Tarvet and Riedi slugging away. Tarvet won in three sets; Riedi compared him to a wall. Tarvet spent most of the ensuing news conference figuring out how to spend his hundred thousand pounds or so of prize money, in order to comply with N.C.A.A. regulations. “I’ve got to find sixty thousand, seventy thousand pounds of expenses,” he said. “Hopefully, I can make that happen. . . . Pay my coaches a little bit extra? I don’t know. We’ll figure something out. Fly business class.”
The British women were led by Emma Raducanu and Katie Boulter, two players with similar rankings—fortieth and forty-third—but whose careers have followed contrasting trajectories. Four years ago, Raducanu reached the last sixteen of Wimbledon and won the U.S. Open as an eighteen-year-old qualifier. Since then, she has been hampered by injuries, poor form, and an unhealthy level of attention. In February, a man who had been stalking her was removed from the crowd at a tournament in Dubai.
Boulter, who is twenty-eight, spent years hovering around the hundredth ranking before adjusting her game, adding a note of patience. Boulter and Raducanu play doubles together and came into Wimbledon speaking of liberation. “I’m kind of like a dark horse, and I like that feeling,” Boulter said. “I do like the fact that I can go out and swing free.” She beat the ninth seed, Paula Badosa, on Centre Court, in the first round. Raducanu dispatched Mimi Xu, a seventeen-year-old British wild card, in straight sets.
The next-highest-ranked British woman was Sonay Kartal, a compact, counterpunching player who trains in Brighton, on England’s southern coast. Karts, as she is known, recently broke into the top hundred and was barely talked about before the tournament. “I’ve kind of just been left in my own little lane to get along,” she told reporters. I watched Kartal lose the opening three games of her first-round match, against Jelena Ostapenko, the twentieth seed, from Latvia. Kartal, who was born in 2001, was wearing a boxy outfit inspired by the nineties, one of her favorite historical periods. The sun was oppressive and Ostapenko was stupendous. She had beaten Kartal with no problems in the Eastbourne Open, six days earlier. I got up and left. Kartal won in three sets.
The eldest of the British pack was Dan Evans, who was playing in his tenth Wimbledon. Evans is thirty-five, and he almost called time on his career earlier this year. “It’s scary, at the end of the day, to know sometimes you’re not good enough,” he told reporters, on the eve of the championships.
But form is a fickle thing. At Queen’s, the grass-court tournament that traditionally precedes Wimbledon, Evans knocked out Frances Tiafoe, the seventh seed. The following week, in Eastbourne, he beat Tommy Paul, who was ranked a hundred and fifty-seven places above him. Evans is a busy player, tetchy and alert. He grew up working class in the Hall Green neighborhood of Birmingham. He shouts “Vamos!” and “Allez!” after hitting winners. The only time Evans seems truly serene is when he is playing a backhand slice—my favorite shot on a grass court. The net seems to lower, obligingly. The ball slows, the air thickens, and summer stops, then accelerates again.
Evans has reached the third round of Wimbledon three times. He asks not to play on Court 3, because it is underneath a balcony from which the other players often watch. “I think it’s mythical, a bit, about the pressure at Wimbledon,” he told me. Fifteen of the British players at this year’s championships were given a wild card by the All England Club. “In all honesty,” he said, “if you’ve not got a chance of winning the tournament, there is actually not a lot of pressure on you from anybody else.”
Senior players, such as Evans (who went out in the second round, to Djokovic), have long observed that it doesn’t matter how many British players there are at Wimbledon—what counts is the level at which they play. “If British people come here and they watch Jack win and Emma win,” he said, of Draper and Raducanu, “but they watch seven Brits lose, they’re not going to be bothered about British tennis.” Wimbledon gives ninety per cent of its profits to Britain’s Lawn Tennis Association, to encourage participation in the sport and to support the next generation of élite players. For years, the L.T.A. has been criticized for focussing its resources on a handful of promising juniors—who are invariably from “tennis families” and have already benefitted from years of expensive coaching—rather than funding a broader-based approach.
“I just don’t think there’s a chance for people from working-class backgrounds to get into the sport,” Evans said, after he was knocked out of the French Open in 2023. Britain’s National Tennis Centre, which opened in 2007 and was designed to nurture the next Murray (the country’s sole multiple Grand Slam winner of the last generation), is widely regarded as a failure. Increasingly, young male players of potential—such as Tarvet; Jacob Fearnley, the fifty-first-ranked player, who lost in the first round at Wimbledon; and Cameron Norrie, a semifinalist in 2022—are choosing the U.S.-college route to the professional game. Draper is an exception, for being an entirely British-made contender. His father, Roger, was the chief executive of the L.T.A.
Murray was like Banquo’s ghost at this year’s Wimbledon. He retired from tennis last summer, nineteen years after his début at the championships. Two days before this year’s tournament began, he drove past the venue and, for the first time since he put away his racquet, he wished that he were playing. The following evening, he was onstage, reminiscing with fans, at the New Wimbledon Theatre, a gilded Edwardian auditorium that opened near the start of Wilding’s winning streak.
One of the reasons Murray triumphed at Wimbledon is that he is an extremely obdurate and literal person. He follows many sports and observed that, in almost all of them, home advantage is a real phenomenon, so he concluded that the hype, the hoopla, the dull, obsessional parsing of his dual British-Scottish identity that accompanied his every attempt to win seven successive matches at the All England Club must be helping him, too. His legs may have been shaking, but he was able to keep his identity and his ground strokes intact. On the night of July 10, 2016, after he won Wimbledon for the second time—an achievement for which he was knighted, three years later—Murray stopped off at a McDonald’s on his way to the annual players’ ball. “I don’t know about you, but, when I want to celebrate, I don’t eat, like, canapés,” he told his fans.
Murray also knew that until the very moment that a Djokovic backhand hit the net cord in the last game of the 2013 final—thereby breaking the seventy-seven-year curse on British gentlemen—he had failed. “That’s how it felt,” he said. The year before, Murray had felt ready to win, then lost to Roger Federer in the final. It is still upsetting for many British tennis fans to watch Murray’s interview on court after that match. “I’m going to try this, and it’s not going to be easy,” he said, before covering his face with his hand. Murray explained in the theatre that after that loss it took him several days to feel ready to go outside. When he did, he walked down to Wimbledon village with his partner, Kim Sears. A car pulled up beside them and the driver called out, “Loser.”
Draper’s opponent in the next round was Marin Čilić, a thirty-six-year-old Croatian, who reached the Wimbledon final in 2017. Čilić is a tall and languid player, with a game well suited to grass. But he has struggled with a persistent knee injury, and this was his first appearance at the championships in four years. According to my Wimbledon app, which was powered by data from I.B.M., Draper had an eighty-six-per-cent chance of victory.
I don’t think Čilić checked the app. From the opening exchanges, the Croatian was hitting the ball cleanly and true; Draper hustled to keep up. In the fourth game, there were signs that Draper’s rhythm was off: he hit three lets on his first serve and didn’t go for a Čilić shot that landed on the baseline. Three points later, the ball flew off Draper’s frame for deuce. “Come on, Jack!” “Come on, J.D.!” After the alienating efficiency of the first-round win, Draper’s tennis was more relatable. British stomachs tightened as he saved a break point and then barrelled down a hundred-and-thirty-four-mile-per-hour serve for the game. “C’mon!” Draper yelled, tightly.
Four games later, Čilić went after Draper’s serve again, sending big, cruising forehands that the British player could not cope with. Draper’s own forehand was misfiring, while his backhand—the dependable shot of his younger self—lacked the power to disturb someone in Čilić’s frame of mind. Down love–40, Draper won the following five points. But the effort drained him. The next time he served, he lost the set. One of the disadvantages for British players at Wimbledon is that it is pretty much everyone else’s favorite tennis tournament, too. “I’m aware that I’m playing well,” Čilić said afterward. “It’s nothing unusual.”
The second set slithered away from Draper. “The points are going by so quickly,” he said later. “I feel like every ball is on my feet on the returns.” He fought back to win the third and, for a time, he played furiously and well, like a man who had been stuck in terrible traffic and now the roads were finally clear. But he was still late. When the crowd wasn’t baying in support, an astonishing silence fell on Court 1, punctuated by the smallest sounds: a ball being bounced on the turf at the far end of the seventy-eight-foot court; birdsong; a door closing somewhere far away.
If hope persists until the last point of a tennis match, then fear does, too. As Draper was serving at 15–30 in the fourth set, 4–5 down, it was suddenly transparent that he was two points away from leaving the tournament. Čilić took a breath that was deep enough to be heard in the stands, and then won the match. When Draper appeared in the media center a few minutes later, his body hung with sadness. He lost in the second round of Wimbledon last year as well, but he hadn’t been the main hope then. He seemed stunned by how difficult this was going to be. “I mean, it makes me think that Andy’s achievement of what he did, winning here twice,” Draper said, not far from tears. “Just unbelievable.”
According to “A People’s History of Tennis” (2020), by David Berry, lawn tennis probably became inevitable following the invention of the lawnmower, in 1827, and the vulcanization of rubber, in the eighteen-forties. Someone had to dream it up, however, and that was Major Walter Wingfield, who began advertising portable lawn-tennis kits for sale in March, 1874. Wingfield’s vision was almost complete from the outset. He only got wrong the shape of the court (his was an hourglass) and the name (he wanted to call his game Σφαιριστικὴ, ancient Greek for “belonging to the ball”).
Unusually for a Victorian sportsman, Wingfield marketed his game equally to men and women, and the fad spread rapidly through the gardens of England and beyond. Three years after Wingfield’s first kits went on sale, Henry James was in Warwickshire when he came across a party of graceful young folk, playing on a “cushiony lawn” next to a rectory. One of the girls was a twelve-year-old named Maud Watson, who became the first Wimbledon ladies’ champion, in 1884.
I met Berry for lunch one day during the championships, at the Centenary Seafood restaurant, which overlooks Court 7 and offers a sharing platter of trout, crevettes, dressed crab, and Severn & Wye smoked mackerel for seventy pounds. Berry learned to play tennis on a public court near the housing project where he grew up, in Berkshire. He first visited Wimbledon in 1968, to see Rod Laver. It rained all day and he went home. When Berry returned, fourteen years later, it was as a contributor to Marxism Today.
Berry spent most of his career as a documentary-maker for the BBC. For many years, he was skeptical of the exclusivity of Wimbledon and the implied superiority of the All England Club’s hyper-kempt lawns. (Centre Court is out of bounds even to the club’s own members.) But he came to admire how one of the world’s great sporting occasions rests on top of a small, suburban tennis club, with three hundred and seventy-five fanatical members. “It is bizarre,” Berry said. The membership fee is a closely held secret, but it is thought to be only a few hundred pounds a year. “That creates a sort of lower-middle-class gentility. It’s almost so clever the way they’ve done it that they couldn’t have planned it,” Berry said. “Somehow they’ve kept the great values of the British middle classes, which are around tolerance, politeness, and the great word that people use most in tennis, which is ‘sorry.’ ”
The suburban safeness of Wimbledon, characterized by its love of tradition and slightly appalling taste (pale woods and gold, plus geraniums everywhere), also helps to inspire the unspoken fatalism around the chances of almost every British player. The club is pervaded by “that kind of English sense that you’re not really expected to do well and that’s O.K.,” Berry added, consolingly. “It’s probably better, because nothing gets disturbed.”
“Wimbledon is accessible, but aspirational,” Jevans, the chair of the All England Club, said, when we met. The tournament is proud to offer a chance to queue up for same-day tickets; a grounds pass for a day of tennis costs thirty pounds. You can bring your own food and drink. The experience is especially accessible to those who excel at the two most ancient English sports of all, which are standing in line for hours and never needing to go to the bathroom. (If you give up your seat at an outer court during a hotly contested match, you are not getting it back.)
One afternoon, by the line for strawberries and cream, I fell into conversation with Belinda Donaldson, who was in her late sixties and had come to the tournament, by her estimate, about twenty times. Donaldson, who was from Tooting Bec, in South London, had joined the line for a grounds pass at five o’clock that morning with her daughter and a friend. “No one pushes. Nobody queue-jumps,” she said. (The guide for the queue is five pages long.) “Whoever we turned up with at five was still in front of us and behind us when we got in, at eleven,” Donaldson said. “There was no rubbish. Very clean.” When I asked if she thought that the British population put unreasonable expectations on its players, she looked slightly startled. “No,” she replied. “You have to win every game you play, whether it’s a game of cards. You go to win. Sorry, you probably don’t want me to say that. Do you?”
It’s not for everyone, of course. That evening, I came across Esteban Fernandez, a financial consultant, sitting alone in the front row of Court 8. A grounds team, working in unison, was brushing down the baseline with wooden brooms. Fernandez had taken his shoes off and was having a beer. He had come over from Dublin, where he works, and joined the queue for two successive mornings, waiting for seven hours the first time and more than ten hours that day. “For me, the queue is not a very efficient system, O.K.?” he said.
He looked at the freshly swept court. “It’s still very British,” he said. “The way they move, the way they speak, how everything is organized.” I asked him how he had spent all that time waiting, and he lowered his voice and confessed that he had sneaked into London and gone to a museum for a few hours before returning to his place in the line. Nobody else had moved. He asked me not to reveal where he was from. “That wasn’t British at all,” he said.
On the seventh day, it rained. A thunderstorm moved over the grounds, and the roofs on Centre Court and Court 1 were closed, encasing the tennis inside. Twenty-one of the twenty-three British players had been knocked out. The night after Draper lost, Raducanu played one of her best matches in years, against Aryna Sabalenka, the world No. 1. Raducanu was lithe and aggressive. She had a set point in the first-set tiebreak and was up a break in the second. But Sabalenka, who plays smoothly and fast, pausing only—on occasion and in outrage—to marvel at her rare errors, was unstoppable. She pretended that the crowd was cheering for her. The two British survivors to make it to the fourth round were Kartal, the counterpuncher from Brighton, and Norrie, the former semifinalist.
Kartal was experiencing her first contact with the British media’s wish-fulfillment complex. At the news conference after her third-round win, she took a barrage of questions about her tattoos, her musical taste, whether she had a partner, and her proficiency in Turkish. (Her father is from Turkey.) Was tennis always her chosen sport? It was. Kartal had never played on Centre Court before her last-sixteen match against Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, a Russian veteran eleven years her senior. Kartal visited the court in the morning with her phone, to take some pictures and to visualize what would be happening. “It’s not easy coming out on Centre Court as a Brit,” she said later.
The match was scrappy and turned on a line call. This year, for the first time, Wimbledon had no line judges. (During Covid, the Australian Open and the U.S. Open switched to automated Hawk-Eye line-calling.) At 4–4 in the first set, a Kartal backhand dropped clearly behind the baseline, and Pavlyuchenkova thought she had won the game. No call came. The umpire asked the players to replay the point. Kartal ended up breaking Pavlyuchenkova’s serve. The Russian lost her temper. “I don’t know if it’s something to do because she’s local,” she mused, after the match. “But, yeah, that was a particular moment.”
Pavlyuchenkova channelled her anger. She broke Kartal’s serve the following game and raised a silent fist to the crowd. Then she won a tiebreak. After Pavlyuchenkova wrapped up the second set, I snuck out, into the rain and over to Court 1, where Norrie was two sets up against Nicolás Jarry, a tall, huge-serving Chilean, whose world ranking had fallen from sixteen to a hundred and fifty in the past year, after a case of vestibular neuritis, an inner-ear condition that resulted in an unsettling rolling sensation.
Jarry was having an emotional tournament. In the previous round, he had beaten João Fonseca, a gifted young Brazilian, progressing to the stage that his grandfather Jaime Fillol had reached in 1974. “I came here with him when I was ten years old and eleven,” Jarry said. “Since then, I’m in love with this tournament.” His balance was steady, for now. But he wasn’t enjoying playing against Norrie, who has a reputation for gamesmanship. When I took my seat, Jarry was complaining to the umpire about the Briton’s prolonged ball-bouncing before his second serve: “Do you have to intervene there, or do I have to suck it?”
Before the tournament, Norrie had told me that what he associated with Wimbledon was its sounds: the polite ecstasy of the crowds, the progression of a tennis shot from strings to grass to strings. “The acoustics of the ball coming through,” he said. “The whole history of the club just kind of takes you away.” In his matches, Norrie had adopted a technique, popularized by Murray, of choosing a few raucous fans in the crowd and seeking to draw energy from them. During the third set against Jarry, Norrie gesticulated often at a row of young men just in front of me, who were urging him on. “Come on, Cam!” “Let’s go, Noz!” “Break him, baby!” Norrie walks with his feet slightly splayed. His backhand stays unusually low over the net. His second serve is often slower than ninety miles an hour. His philosophy of tennis is to embrace every aspect. “If it’s a cheap point, I was enjoying it. If it was a long rally, I was enjoying it. If I had a forehand winner, I was enjoying it,” he said later. “He served forty-six aces in the match, and I didn’t want to let that bother me.”
Jarry was hitting for the lines and Norrie was scurrying after, shovelling the ball back into play. Just when it seemed as if Norrie were out of ideas, he would produce an immaculate passing shot and whip the crowd up further. In the second game of the fifth set, he broke Jarry after a rattling exchange in which the Chilean pushed the ball long.
Norrie doesn’t have the ability of Murray, or Raducanu, or Draper, but he had a grasp of the occasion, of the role he was playing and what his people longed to see. The last point of the match was tremendous. At 5–3, Norrie was up 40–love. The rally went on for fourteen shots before Jarry advanced to the net. Norrie aimed a backhand down the line that Jarry dived at vainly, falling on the perfect turf. Norrie had an instant to decide, and he decided that he would throw himself to the grass as well. It was performative. It verged on bad taste. “It was a well-deserved fall,” Norrie insisted later. (Jarry didn’t like it.) Alcaraz beat Norrie two days later, in the quarterfinals. But, for a second or two, Norrie lay on his back, the noise rained down, and Britain had its champion for the year. ♦
