Click here to visit the Scotland home page for the latest news and sport In the year I started watching Wimbledon a Romanian hothead called ...
- Click here to visit the Scotland home page for the latest news and sport
In the year I started watching Wimbledon a Romanian hothead called Ilie Nastase remonstrated most amusingly with an umpire who dared to address him by his surname.
‘Don’t call me Nastase. You call me MISTER Nastase,’ raged the original superbrat. Across the net from him, ice cool reigning champion Bjorn Borg waited to complete the demolition, his bearded face a study of inscrutability. The Swede was 21 years old. I was nine – and mesmerised.
Another fiery-tempered upstart made his Wimbledon debut that year. John McEnroe, my first tennis hero, was put to the sword in the semi-final by fellow American Jimmy Connors who, I remember, emitted a squawk every time he served.
My mum used to say Connors had the best legs in tennis. I thought he maybe had the coolest racquet – a futuristic metal one when everyone else was using wood. Both of us hoped that grunt wouldn’t catch on.
In the ladies’ singles championship Britain’s Virginia Wade went all the way, lifting the Venus Rosewater Dish after a tense three-set final against Betty Stöve. Wade turned 80 yesterday.
Decades passed before there was another homegrown singles champion at Wimbledon. Watching the UK cannon fodder fall in the early skirmishes became one of the traditions of this tournament until a boy from Dunblane arrived with a fanciful re-write of the script.
But I am getting ahead of myself. For this viewer, year dot for Wimbledon was 1977 and I have devoured every edition of it ever since. I remember where I was – Aviemore – when Borg faced McEnroe in the classic 1980 final.
I ducked out of a wedding reception eight years later to watch Steffi Graf end Martina Navratilova’s decade of dominance. It was in the elegant German, dare I say it, that I discovered the best legs in tennis.
Even in 2025, tennis rules my early July diary.
‘Can’t you get an earlier bus?’ I said to my daughter when she asked if I could collect her at 3pm tomorrow from the station in Glasgow. ‘You know there’s a Wimbledon final on.’
She’s getting an earlier bus.
There is one constant through all those years of summer viewing that perhaps does not receive all the credit it deserves. Indeed, every July, it is more used to moans.
I refer, of course, to the BBC which, frequently in the last fortnight, has screened Wimbledon matches on channels one and two for most of the afternoon.
‘Does our national broadcaster think the whole of Britain is obsessed with the events at SW19?’ goes the typical complaint. ‘Hour after hour of insufferable tennis … etc.’
Really? Have you tried watching cricket?
I may be biased. I adore tennis, consider it my healthiest, most rewarding addiction and thank heaven the BBC has been my faithful enabler these last five decades.
But let us look at the issue in an unbiased way. In recent years all manner of showpiece sporting events have been snapped up by subscription channels placing financial and practical obstacles in the way of our viewing pleasure.
Golf fans can no longer watch the US Masters from Augusta without a subscription. The Open, which begins later this month, is behind a paywall.
For years I was able to enjoy the other tennis grand slam tournaments, the French, the US and the Australian Opens, without signing up to a channel I’d never watch for anything else. Impossible now.
Last month, when the best two players in the world, Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz faced off in the final at Roland Garros for what turned out to be one of the greatest tennis matches ever played, I was dismayed to find there was not even a one-day subscription option available.
No, anyone wanting to watch the French Open final had to pay £30.99 for the first month to Discovery+ and then remember to cancel it the following month. Still, had I known how seminal a match it would be, I’d probably have paid it.
But this isn’t the outfit screening the golf. You have to take out a subscription with Sky Sports to see that.
We are living in an age where the desire to enjoy televised sport must be counterbalanced with the hassle and the expense of bringing it into our living rooms. Fine, perhaps, if you are a sports nut who knows you’ll get your money’s worth over the course of a year. Not so much fun for those with neither the time nor the inclination to be glued to sport every day.
What a blessed relief then, never to endure this rigmarole with my beloved Wimbledon whose status as a ‘Crown Jewel’ event ensures it must be available for free-to-air terrestrial television.
But what the 1996 Broadcasting Act doesn’t ensure is that the BBC is the terrestrial channel which must have exclusive rights to the tournament. After 2027, its contract expires and the cost of securing an extension to the reported £60 million it currently pays is expected to be well above that.
Even from two years away I can hear the chorus of outrage. Wimbledon is costing licence fee payers 'how much?'
When the uproar kicks off, I hope people also remember to wonder how much the BBC pays for the rights to screen Glastonbury every year and why it considers sending almost 500 staff to cover a pop festival an effective use of their time and our money.
To each their own, but I know which one I’d be waving off to a subscription channel – and sooner than 2027.
None of this, of course, is to say the BBC’s Wimbledon coverage is beyond reproach. In Andrew Castle, they have perhaps the most irritating commentator in all sport.
Rightly, the other day, he identified John McEnroe as the perfect man to put on the spot about the introduction of electronic line calling this year.
Wrongly – indeed, infuriatingly – he interrupted the former champion with his own tuppenceworth every time he tried to answer. Take a wild guess, Andrew – which of the two of you would the average viewer prefer to be talking right now?
The BBC’s iPlayer coverage is completely out of whack. You choose the match you want to watch, then a voice comes on telling you they’re switching to another match, or stopping for the news, or moving over to BBC2.
‘Live coverage of this match continues, of course, on iPlayer.’
But I’m on iPlayer watching live coverage and you’ve just discontinued it!
Much else about the Beeb’s coverage of my favourite sporting event grinds my gears but, ultimately, I remember to be grateful. There are simply too many wonderful memories down the decades to feel any other way.
McEnroe’s stately progress from on court enfant terrible to wizened Wimbledon sage; the Becker years; the Williams’ sibling rivalry; the rise of Federer – the best player the world had seen – and the arrival a few years later two men who would ultimately put even his sublime talents in the shade.
It was at the height of the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic era that a fourth man, Scotland’s Andy Murray, contrived to put a title bid together in 2013. His victory that year was the most pleasurable afternoon I’ve spent watching television.
Wimbledon? It’s the best thing the BBC do.
Read more
COMMENTS