TENNIS.com - Blogs - Concrete Elbow by Steve Tignor

Each evening at Wimbedon, one of the young women who work in the pressroom winds through the rows of reporters and asks if you’d like a copy of the Order of Play. I’ve never seen anyone turn it down. In the midst of the chaos of keeping your eye on half a dozen results, typing furiously, and trying to pretend your stomach isn’t angry at you, having a clean slate of new and unspoiled matches to anticipate and ponder is a welcome distraction. Plus, there’s that Wimbledon touch at the very top:

So reassuring and official, that COMPLETE. From there, we all sit back and blurt out incredulous and borderline-pointless comments—“Poor Dinara, Court 2 again”; “Wow, Djokovic on Court 3 and Hewitt on Court 2!—to no one in particular. Then, unfortunately, it’s back to dealing with the unfinished article in front of us.

The middle Saturday of Wimbledon offers an especially momentous Order of Play. Here were are shown how all 16 fourth-round matches will play out on Monday, one of the busiest days (outside of first rounds) in tennis.

For today, that sacred parchment—it’s just a piece of white paper, but we can pretend—will serve as our way into the second week. Here’s a preview of what we might see on Monday, working from the outer courts in.

This is not unwinnable for U.S.-hope-of-the-nanosecond Oudin. Radwanska will give her a chance to hit her shots. Will enough of them go in, or will the crafty Pole push her just far enough out of position to keep her from getting a good look. Pick: Oudin

Razzano has been on a tear, relatively speaking, but I like Schiavone’s heavy strokes more. They’re safer, without being soft. Pick: Schiavone

This is a battle of European veterans on an intimate and picturesque side court. Andreev has more firepower with his forehand, but Haas looked more motivated and proactive against Cilic—as if he wanted to wipe the memory of his five-set defeat to Roger Federer in Paris out of his memory with a win—than he has in years. The old-timer is on the verge of becoming a story again. Pick: Haas

The two teens are 1-1, with Lisicki winning their last match, in the final in Charleston on clay. The German is the bigger hitter, but she’s also rawer than the unflashy but poised Woz. Pick: Wozniacki (in three)

The Graveyard begins with an intriguing and hard-to-figure matchup between young and (somewhat) old. Petrova is the more powerful athlete, but Azarenka has looked typically relentless so far. The question may be: Who can get their serve in if they get a lead? Pick: Azarenka

The last time Djokovic was shunted to a small show court was against Philipp Kohlscheiber in Paris. Hopefully for him, he won’t let the snub bother him—he does like being the man, after all. Sela is a tough out, but Djokovic seemed very happy with his performance in the last round. I’ll talk his word for it. Pick: Djokovic

I’ve been waiting to write something good about Simon for months, but he keeps disappearing before I get the chance. The smooth-moving French always thrive on grass, and Simon may have finally found his bearings after a poor season. This has the makings of a long, but enjoyable affair. I’ll take the younger guy. Pick: Simon

I’ve been at Wimbledon for a week, and this is the first I’ve heard os seen Vesnina’s name. Dementieva is making the most of her soft section. Pick: Dementieva

I remember watching these two play at the Open a few years ago and thinking that I’d never seen a greater disparity in power and physicality on a tennis court. Serena can go off, and she can be upset, but not by Hantuchova. Pick: Williams

Hewitt appears to be the Safin of 2009. Stepanek gets under your skin and forces you to make shots to beat him, but Hewitt has been making all the shots so far. He also hasn’t played a ridiculous amount of tennis over the first week. Pick: Hewitt

The AELTC has given Ana a shot by taking Venus off of Centre Court, where she’s won something like 30 sets in a row. And Ivanovic, after a very shaky start, has found her range in the second set in the last two matches. But it won’t be enough to dislodge Venus in the second week. Pick: Williams

Ivo the Terrible is back to destroy tennis after a series of Wimbledon disasters. I’ll make a guess: Dr. Ace vs. Mr. Sauce will come down to the tiebreakers. Karlovic won their last meeting, on grass at Nottingham last year, 10-8 in a third set breaker. I’m seeing a repeat. Pick: Karlovic

This will be interesting. These huge servers are 2-2 against each other, with Berdych having won the last time, on hard courts, in a third-set tiebreaker. The Czech is more dangerous all around, but Roddick has the better day-to-day head on his shoulders. It will be tricky for him; he may have to weather an early storm and find a way to keep it going long enough for Berdych to self-destruct. Pick: Roddick

The big court plays out as it has all week: Federer early, Murray late. Some British writers are worried that this will give Federer an advantage if they meet in the final. I’m not clear on why. Either way, he’ll have to survive the Sod first. Federer has been sharp for the most part so far, but I get the feeling Soderling will scare him Monday. The Swede has gotten better with each match and shaken off any possible letdown he may have felt after the French. He also has nothing to lose after taking his lumps in the final there; at the very least want he'll want to improve on that result. And now he knows that if he gets hot, anything can happen—he has the map to the big upset. But Federer, with a 10-0 head to head, has the map to beating Soderling. Pick: Federer

The world No. 1 makes her Centre Court debut against the 2006 champion. This seems like the perfect time for one more return to glory on the lawns for the Frenchwoman. She’s 4-2 against Safina, and almost beat her the last time they played, in 2008 on hard courts. Pick: Mauresmo

The BBC gets its late-afternoon Murray mania again. More than Federer, he has been flawless thus far. Stan beat Murray as recently as last year on clay, but the Scot mowed him down in straights at the U.S. Open. The low-key Wawrinka has never been at his best on the big Slam stage. This is the biggest of them all. Pick: Murray

That’s it, I’m going sneaker shopping. Thanks everyone for reading. I would have commented back, but Typepad had it in for me this week. Enjoy Monday at Wimbledon; I’ll join you on DVR back in New York. ESPN, NBC—so much better than actually being there, I’m sure.

Time is running out on my Wimbledon. That’s a bit of an understatement, to be honest. This is my last day here, but I didn’t want to have to come out and say it.

What have I not gotten enough of this week? Tennis matches, of all things. I kept unintentionally trapping myself in the pressroom, wracking my brain to find the very best way to describe a down-the-line backhand or a crosscourt forehand. “Drilled the ball,” “hammered the ball,” “smoked it”: What should it be?

Anyway, I vowed to make up for it today by getting out on the grounds and moving around as much as possible. Plus, it's Saturday. It's un-American not to get away from the office.

Naturally, the first place I go I’m confronted with a bona fide story—so much for the rambling for the moment. I’m in my seat just behind the court here for all of five minutes and I’m pouring sweat. The humidity has been peaking here for a couple days without any breaks for rain. Jelena Jankovic looks suitably sluggish, so much so that her opponent, Melanie Oudin, a 17-year-old from Georgia (yes, the one in the U.S.), looks like she’s running circles around her.

Oudin is, in the parlance of the sportswriter, a prototypical “spark plug.” She’s strong and squat, 5-foot-6 on her tip-toes. She’s also a prototypical low-to the ground baseliner, with an extremely clean and reliable crosscourt two-handed backhand that she can also slap down the line for winners. Her forehand is more of a rally shot than a point-ending weapon; she uses something more conservative than a Western grip on it, which makes it hard for her to come over the ball. But give her something high and she extends through it smoothly.

Not surprisingly, Oudin’s serve is her weak spot. She doesn’t get up for it, settling for middling slices instead. Her strong point? On the evidence in front of me today, I’d say it’s her head: She’s patient, she’s smart, and, it goes without saying for a successful young woman player, she’s a fighter.

Oudin is willing to take a hand off the racquet and take pace off the ball with a backhand slice, even though it can float on her. She pushed that shot down the line and got it to bounce away from Jankovic’s forehand, a tricky shot to handle. The American has the hands to hit a very finely gauged drop shot with her backhand, and when she gets a forehand in the middle of the court, she can flatten it out for winners. Primarily, though, she’s a grind, and very patient, both in her shot selection and the way she stays with each ball rather than rushing her stroke when she’s going for something big.

The combination eventually left Jankovic bamboozled. Oudin could have won in straights—she had four set points in the first but lost it in a tiebreaker—but she never looked even remotely down on herself. Oudin always seemed to be thinking out there, and in the third set it all came together. She won going away, belting bigger and bigger down the line backhands even as she got closer to the most important win of her career.

The young WTA names to watch at the start of the week were Robson and Larcher de Brito. They’re long gone, while Oudin, an unheralded qualifier, is in the fourth round. She was a little incredulous about it herself in her press conference, which she attended wearing hoop earrings and a glittery headband. She was ready for prime time, and she answered all questions as directly as anyone could hope. Asked if she had blocked out the fact that she was playing at Wimbledon, Oudin jumped right in, American teen style:

“I mean, I go into every match the exact same, you know, like no matter who I play. It’s not like, Oh my gosh, I’m playing the No. 1 player in the world. It all depends on what game I play and what shots I hit and that stuff.”

Oudin’s goal for the tournament was to qualify, but doing that gave her a further confidence boost. She has a twin sister, Katherine, who plays junior tennis and who went to high school. Melanie was home schooled, and like all of us, made it her lifelong goal as a kid to become No. 1 in the world. Her grandmother was the tennis inspiration in the family.

Oudin (ew-DAN) is a French name, and a couple of the country’s journalists attended her press conference. Told that they were trying to claim her as one of their own, she burst out laughing.

The match of the tournament thus far has been Tommy Haas and Marin Cilic, which was suspended last night at 6-6 in the fifth. When play resumes, Haas comes out serving and volleying, which seems to be a smart tactic, a way of forcing himself to be aggressive in this shortened time period. It works to start, but when he serves for the match, he loses two points at the net. Now serving and volleying looks tactically reckless—what are you thinking, Tommy? Moral: It’s all in the execution. But Haas gathers himself to serve it out. The man who is on his fourth of fifth tennis career, and is enjoying a very belated renaissance, faces Igor Andreev next. After that, he’d have a shot at getting Novak Djokovic, whom he beat last week.

Is there another American dream about to come true? Jesse Levine has won the first set over Stan Wawrinka and is up a break in the second, but the Swiss is in the process of finding his range. Everything turns in a second as Wawrinka asserts his more versatile shot-making. Levine has come down to earth, and he’s not happy about it. As I’m leaving, he spits at a spot on the grass where he thought he got a bad bounce. From Oudin’s joy to Levine’s bitter frustration, Wimbledon is nothing if not a living exhibit of emotional extremes.

Sabine Lisicki hits a long and heavy ball, and she’s had Svetlana Kuznetsova on her heels and spraying balls wide all day. But when it comes time to serve it out, for a seemingly routine 6-2, 6-3 win, Lisicki double faults to start the game. She’s broken, and over the next few games she squanders four match points. When Kuznetsova sprays another one wide on the fifth and it’s finally over, Lisicki is overcome. She pulls her visor down over her eyes—she can’t believe what they see, a win over the French Open champion, the biggest of her career. Everywhere you go, there are people going to extremes around here.

Like Tim Henman's back in the day, an Andy Murray match here has started to seem like a world event. Murray, so normal and wiry and unprepossessing as he walks into a jammed Centre Court, looks like he could be crushed under the weight of the stadium and the invisible expectations that swirl through it.

Murray doesn’t crumble. Instead, he is quietly braced by the atmosphere in the building. He says, in his plain and understated monotone, that the home crowd “helps him focus on the important points.” The stadium doesn’t veer as wildly between joy and trepidation as it did with Henman, because Murray has been in total control of the situation over the first week.

As he did against Ernests Gulbis on Thursday, Murray jumps out to an early lead over Victor Troicki, which gives him the confidence to begin carving up the court with his various changes of pace. The defensive forehand slice has become a staple of his arsenal, and while it doesn’t look like much, it’s tough to hit it past Murray, who can guard the entire baseline from his position of deep retreat.

The match is over in a hurry, but watching Murray hit a vicious side spinning backhand and follow it to net for a touch volley, I find time to ask: Is he the first player with a two-handed backhand to play like he has a one-hander? One thing I do know: The guy has grown up fast.

The roof has been closed as I’ve been speaking here, though no one is playing. It’s beautiful at first sight, and there's a sense of fun among the fans who stay and take photos of each other in what appears to everyone to be a brand new arena. Its historical and seemingly God-given atmosphere has been completely altered with one cosmetic change. “Is this Wimbledon?” is the question in everyone’s eyes.

The surface is brighter under the lights than it is much of the time under clouds, and the roof is held by triangular girders that descend surprisingly low. Knowing Wimbledon’s thoroughness, I can only assume they’re elevated enough to allow for a toweringly high desperation lob. You can take the rain out of tennis, but not the desperation.

What else will be lost with the roof? The sky, the clouds, the sun, a connection with something larger than life, which Centre Court in its old form, its form before today, seemed to be a part of. The old open overhang didn’t have the power to blot out the sky, but it did have the power to frame it. Maybe the best thing about the new roof is that we’ll appreciate even more the way Centre Court looks when it’s not there.

The static air, the tube lighting, the faint background hum of a thousand electrical outlets. By Thursday evening, there was no stopping me, I had to get out of the press room. I walked out and past the uniformed door monitors in navy-blue police caps that are too big for their heads—“Can I see your badge, sir? Thank you, sir”—just as the sun was beginning to disappear behind the media center. Its top half still sent a sharp ray into the eye. The big events of the afternoon were over, and all that was left were a few doubles teams fighting the encroaching darkness on the outer courts. Another day that had started with bright promise had stumbled to a tired end under the weight of too many tennis matches. Wimbledon felt woozy.

I sat down on a bench near what you might call the crossroads of the All England Club, a triangle bounded by Centre Court, the players’ area, and the media center. This is where the beautiful people pass you as they bound upstairs and out of sight, off to do whatever it is they do—sit and talk, as far as I can tell.

Next to me were three women in their early 20s, with accents that an American can only describe as “highly British.” They were working in some capacity at the tournament and were out for a smoke break. All three gazed up at the top of the TV centers, using their arms to shade their eyes from the sun. A blonde guy in jeans, somewhere in his 40s, was talking and gesturing into a camera.

“‘Excuse me, sirrr, I’m so sorry I spilled my coffee all over you.’” They giggled.

I shaded my eyes and looked more closely at the handsome bleach-blonde TV star. Pat Cash. Figures.

For a reporter who grew up playing and watching the sport, this crossroads, which begins at your desk and ends at the press benches in the Center Court, is as close as you get to the core of the tennis universe. I’ve run this gauntlet many times trying to get to the seats before the end of a changeover. It involves a lot of bobbing and weaving between players, agents, officials, cigarette-smoking press types, and the various hangers-on that constitute the sealed society Peter Bodo once referred to as “tennisworld” before he created his own.

Who could be found traversing this rarefied location Thursday evening? There were no more must-see matches left, so this was rambling time for anyone still able to ramble. Fans, by the dozen, by the hundred—young, old, male, female, parent, child—passed each other in both directions in a constantly reforming mass. Every second someone went around a corner out of sight; every second someone new came into the view:

A tan teenage girl with shoulder-length straight brown hair, braces, orange shorts, and a blue sweater with the sleeves rolled up past her elbows. She had the vicious ankle tan lines of a tennis player. She and a friend were throwing their heads forward and back as they laughed at some unheard joke.

Two ball girls, in their dark blue uniforms, the brims of their caps pulled over their eyes, leaning sleepily against a wall.

Andy Murray’s coach, Miles McLagan, his arms over the railing on the second floor of beautiful people land, keeping an eye on a match involving Andy Murray’s next opponent, Victor Troicki.

There were couple holding hands and parents being led by their kids. There was an Asian reporter on another bench in gray slacks with her head down and her legs curled around each other. There were linesmen in their yachting outfits. There was a woman in a bright red dress and an older couple in matching striped polo shirts studying the draw sheet together.

I looked for someone I could identify as a representative Wimbledon spectator. Hip young British types floated in and out—red-cheeked girls in sweaters, their straight brown hair pinned to the side; young guys in shorts past their knees, white shoes and no socks, with short spiky dyed hair—but they constituted maybe one in every 100 people. The sheer volume and variety of humans destroyed all attempts at categorization.

There was a dull buzz of talk all around, but only a stray sentence or two made it over to where I was sitting.

Two women in their 50s took the place of the girls on the next bench. Robert Kendrick walked by. “Oh, he played Murray,” one of the women said. They stared. “Wow, he’s really nice.”

A blonde preppy character in a blue suit, red tie, and aviator shades appeared to the left. The two women saw him coming. “Who’s this with the big teeth,” one of them said in a voice of bottomless scorn. His teeth were big, and he was flashing them as much as possible.

On the whole, the fans at Wimbledon are a little scruffier than those at the U.S. Open, and, reputation to the contrary, more varied—there are suits, there are ties, there are jeans, there are baseball hats, there are even bandannas. On the other hand, the employees are infinitely spiffier. The press section is guarded zealously, not, as it is in Louis Armstrong Stadium, by retirees from the Bronx in sweat-stained, oversized, untucked T-shirts, but by a female usher in brown-and-red military regalia, complete with cap, tights, and shiny black dress shoes. She stands with arms folded behind her back in front of the entrance.

“Did you make that your uniform yourself?” she was asked by a tipsy-sounding American fan the other day.

“Is that a Wimble-ton uniform, or do you just wear that?” He and his friend chuckled.

“It’s military, sir.” She told them to go to the back of the line. She said please. They couldn’t think of anything to say and walked away.

A few minutes later a short, pudgy, prosperous-looking and overly tan British man in a bright striped shirt and an expensively cool haircut walked up and leaned against the railing where the usher was standing.

“Sir, the line starts over here, can you please move over here?” She gestured to the opposite railing from where he was loitering.

“I know where it starts,” he belched back sarcastically, without moving an inch. The usher sighed and shook her head.

Why do people come to tennis tournaments? Judging from the lost-looking, ever-shifting mass in front of me, you can spend a lot of time not knowing where the hell you’re going at one of these things. But you do see tennis balls hit eventually, and you don’t have to be a technical expert to be blown away by the perfection of the strokes that are on display a few feet in front of you. In that way, the tour really is a traveling circus, an exotic troupe of foreign freaks with science-fiction names who roll into town once a year and do stunning tricks for your benefit. It would also be silly to ignore that there’s a genteel sexiness to the display—athletic young people in white leap around on picturesque green grass as the sun sets over the trees in the distance. There are worse scenes to take in than that.

But I would say the tennis itself is mostly incidental. Walking to the All England Club each morning this week, I was passed by dozens of packed buses taking people to work. I kept thinking, “You’re going to work?” Of course this is the normal run of people’s lives, and my life, but that’s exactly what made it seem so dull. They were involved in their own lives, while the people walking down the hill with me were going to Wimbledon—an event.

In New York, the U.S. Open is an event. A ticket is a Manhattan status symbol. Wimbledon is bigger, at least from my vantage point, because it is an event for the nation. Snob appeal is undeniably a part of the excitement, but attending also means taking your own small and personal path and joining it to the world’s for an afternoon. You don’t have to know a forehand from a lob or Roger Federer from Roger Staubach to get a buzz out of that. Many of the people walking in front of my bench weren’t sure where they were going—“I think there are more courts over this way, come on”—but they were moving fast. They were enjoying the chase. This was their day away from the office and inside the gates, and they had to make the most of it. No matter how small the universe, it’s a fizzing, energizing pleasure to find yourself at the center of one for a day.

It's Saturday, the sun is back, and I feel like I haven't seen enough tennis this week. I'm hitting the grounds. Talk to you about it later.

It was a given that the story of the day would be the roof. Thunderstorms were in the forecast, and in the morning the All England Club slid its celebrated multimillion-dollar steel contraption across Centre Court. It may have been wishful thinking on their part. By the time a few of us walked over to check it out, the roof had been removed again. But the clouds continued to threaten, so I headed into the big stadium anyway. I'd never wished for a storm to hit at Wimbledon before.

That wasn't the only reason to hang around Centre Court today. Rain or shine, this was going to be my last chance to see Roger Federer play at this year’s Wimbledon. He hadn’t dropped a set in his first two matches, which had registered only in my peripheral vision on various TVs as I hustled from the courts to the interview room to my desk. Talking to a reporter in front of a flat-screen at the reception desk, I’d caught a glimpse of Federer flicking a backhand around the net for a winner. He seemed to have things under control, an observation that was confirmed when I ran into Federer’s agent, Tony Godsick, in Starbucks the other morning. Godsick said his man was “feeling good, no more pressure.” But then he would say that.

The sky stayed gray for much of the first two sets, something that always robs this arena of its highest level of intensity, no matter who's playing. There’s something a little ominous about Centre Court under clouds; grass needs sunlight, after all, and the vast green playing surface glows under it. Still, there was a new version of Federer to see. As 15-year-old Laura Robson, of all people, said in her Monday presser with a bewildered shrug of awe, the guy elevated himself still higher on the game's historical totem pole at the French Open.

Watching the first few games today made me wonder how, from his seat in the stands, Godsick could tell that Federer was more relaxed. His mannerisms—the ball-bounce between the legs; the racquet spin as he gets set to receive serve; the tap-without-looking of an unwanted ball to the ball kid before serving—have always been those of the nonchalant athlete. In fact, I’d say Federer looked a little edgier than normal, especially for a match he was winning so routinely through the first two sets. That shouldn’t be surprising; agitation is a prerequisite for serious competition. The linesmen provided plenty of it for Federer today. After his second successful challenge, he stared at chair umpire Lars Graff and threw his hands up—“who are these people,” he seemed to be asking. He may have had reason to ask; Federer won his first three challenges. That may have made him cocky, or paranoid, or both, because he then challenged unsuccessfully four times and played most of the third-set tiebreaker without any left.

Centre Court has long been Federer’s house. He loves it here and is loved back. But this crowd felt different. It seemed to be at attention. There was history in the air. It’s become unofficially official—fans now come to see the Greatest of All Time. I was outside Centre Court when the match finished and was caught in a sea of people making their exit. There was no end to them. To find refuge, I walked back in to watch a little of Victoria Azarenka and Sorana Cirstea. Centre Court looked like a salad bowl that had been turned over, with a few isolated scraps of people remaining. The air really had gone out of the place.

Federer said in his press conference that he had played well. It felt like a spirited performance to me. On most courts his shots don’t make much of a sound, but here the echo gave them a pistol-like crack. From a tactical perspective, on many occasions, I'm not sure what Federer is doing to win points, and then I look up and he’s got two sets in hand. Today, from up close, I immediately noticed the reserved violence in his style. Federer begins a point in a deliberately relaxed state. He wants as little interference with his instincts as possible—the big toe on his back foot just grazes the grass as he sets up to serve. But to hit a forehand, he springs forward and snaps over the ball with viciously contained power. To hit a slice backhand, he makes his entire body, from the head down, a part of the shot even when he’s sending it delicately short. Competitive violence channeled by classic technique. It's the tennis ideal, and what makes Federer so representative of the sport as a whole for so many people.

As I said during the French Open, that’s a tough thing to fight. Federer was on top of Kohlschreiber from the start today. He worked the points for forehands, returned accurately—he had 20 or so break points—and kept the shanks to a minimum. Kohlschreiber, disgusted with his second set, gave everything he had to win the third. He’s a strong enough shotmaker to get it done—they played some spectacular points late in the third—but he had nothing left for the fourth and was down a break in minutes.

Afterward, Federer said that he was happy with the match because the “rhythm was high.” The points were fast-paced, and he was sharp. He’ll need to be again for his next round, when he'll face Robin Soderling. Sir Sod has been up and down in all of his wins so far, and he says he’s had stomach problems all week. He’ll have a couple days to recover, which Federer slyly insinuated he may need. “It’s going to be interesting to see,” Federer said of Soderling, “how he’s going to enter that match after coping with such a long tournament in Paris.” In other words, welcome to my world, Robin.

There was also a brief moment of humor in Federer’s presser, at least to my ears. He was asked to comment on playing Fabrice Santoro, who just went out of his final Wimbledon. Federer said, “He’s a great test for youngsters coming up, because it doesn’t matter how great you are, he’ll find a weakness in your game. Even though maybe there’s not many there, he’ll still make it really difficult for you…”

I laughed at that line, but there was a moment that left me shaking my head in Centre Court today and realizing again how few exploitable weaknesses Federer really does have. Serving to stay in the third set at 5-6, Federer made an incorrect challenge to go down 0-15. He was annoyed. Kohlschreiber was on fire. The set was in the balance. On the next point, the German bullied Federer out of position and seemed to have the point wrapped up with a perfect drop volley. But Federer, with that violent stride, reached the ball at the last second and guided it past a shocked Kohlschreiber and into the corner for a winner. He hit two aces and held. Where can a man like Philipp Kohlschreiber go after that? He ended up winning the set, but in his presser he said that even doing that didn't make him think he could win the match.

Like I said, I won’t see Federer again at this Wimbledon, the one that may be his crowning achievement. Most of the people who were in Centre Court today won’t see him again either. But we knew we'd gotten his best. As Federer hinted in his comments about Soderling today, a champion has to bring all of it—the cool head and the raw speed, the God-given instincts and the proud determination—to each match, to each point. There was a word that came to my mind to describe the way Federer played the point I just mentioned. It wasn’t calm. It wasn’t elegant. It wasn’t superhuman. It was a hard-edged, single-minded effort with a sheen of graceful athleticism. It was a steely shot. (Who needs a steel roof?) It's the same word I would use to describe Federer's ultimate achievement, the one he most likely doubts that Robin Soderling can put an end to on Monday: 20 consecutive Grand Slam semifinals. That unprecedented mark of consistency will be pretty much impossible to surpass—to break. It may become Federer's signature legacy, because, more than anything else, it's a testament to the steeliness of its holder.

It’s an epochal day for the tabloids, as they say goodbye to an enduring obsession. On their way to work on this gray and humid morning, the people of Great Britain were greeted by two stark words in big white block lettering on multiple front pages: Jacko Dead. (I've got more on MJ at the bottom of this post, if you're interested.)

Gracing the other side of the London papers today is a distinctly happier story: The sudden rise to brilliance of Andy Murray. The pundits, naturally, keep his 88-minute second-round win over Ernests Gulbis in level-headed perspective:

“Murray is the Magic Man: Andy Shows He is No Illusion,” says the Express’ Bob McKenzie

“Awesome Andy Shows Gulbis What Happens When You Call Him a Cheat,” says the Mirror

“Murray Hits the Heights: His Show Screamed, Stop Me if You Can,” says the Mail’s Mike Dickson

“It’s Quite Simple to Me and You, This Guy is Quality,” says the Mail’s Martin Samuel

The Mail, just to make you sure you get the point, adds an unsigned article at the bottom of its Murray page: “He Was Unbelievable Today”

Was there anything other than Murray worth talking about here yesterday? Oh yes:

—It's the age-old question: What it is it about Sam Querrey that the indigent don’t approve of? The laid-back Californian was punched in the arm by a homeless man in Wimbledon at the start of the tournament, and yesterday he sent this tweet out: “On my return home from my close, five-set loss, I was struck, yet again, by a drunk vagrant in Wimbledon village, this time in the gut.”

—Marital strife might soon be in the air for Andy Roddick. He had tweeted recently about how bad his wife’s taste in music is, so she avenged herself by revealing that Andy’s IPod includes '80s camp-dance classic “Never Gonna Stop Me Now,” by Rick Astley. As you might expect, Andy was asked about this by the British press yesterday. He didn’t take it all that well. “I bet Rick Astley is in your IPod, too, so shut up,” was his final answer on the subject. But he came back to it unsolicited later. Asked where he likes to go in London, Roddick said, “The Ivy, it’s nice. But I go wherever Rick Astley is going.”

(Don’t feel too bad, Andy, I recently downloaded a relic from the same decade: “In a Big Country.” As the kids say, not proud. But it sounds good.)

—The Sun’s verdict on Tim Henman as a broadcaster: “Tim’s Nice, But Dim”

—Svetlana Kuznetsova still doesn’t love grass, even after her second-round demolition yesterday. Playing on the surface, Kuzzie said, is like “a person who dives in a pool to play water polo after finishing handball.” But she was motivated yesterday. She wanted to finish early so she “could go shopping.”

—Rafael Nadal put down 10,000 pounds on a house in Wimbledon and didn’t bother to get his money back, the Sun reports. It’s being used by other Spanish players now, who, as you might expect from those crazy Spanish, are having a "party."

—There’s a theme developing when it stories about Ana Ivanovic. I can't quite put my finger on what it is, but it's there, I know it. Maybe you can help.

The caption on her photo in the Mail is very simple: “Ivanovic: pin-up.” The headline to the accompanying story is: “It’s Not Pretty But Ana Wins.” This may be a step up from the Mirror and Sun, which rarely mention her name without preferencing it with these two words: “Serbian babe.”

—Here's my favorite ongoing tab story from this year’s Wimbledon. John McEnroe is incensed that he doesn't have access to the player’s locker room this year. It’s the first time he hasn't been entered in some sort of senior draw, so the doors have been shut—apparently Federer and Nadal themselves had requested tighter restrictions this year (not on Mac, per se, just in general). McEnroe went so far as to call the president of the All England Club himself about it, who said, in these beautiful words, words that come 30 years too late: “We can’t have a rule for John McEnroe and a rule for everybody else.” Don't cave, All England, you're renewing my faith in justice.

Rain is on the way, we’ve heard, and the roof may be closing soon. Naturally, it looks like it will be Roger Federer who plays the first match under it. I was hoping it would be the second match scheduled there today, Victoria Azarenka vs. Sorana Cirstea, so those two fabulous names would live in history.

Michael Jackson was 50, a number that might come as more of a shock than his early demise—did we see another way out for this black man who made his body white, who lived so deeply within his childhood memories of the Beatles that he decided to buy their songs as an adult, this ultra-expressive human who was at sea everywhere but the stage. In a Rolling Stone profile from the early 1980s, Jackson is described ordering a quiche at an expensive Manhattan restaurant and then eating it with his hands. My favorite bit of his music, and it rolls through my head at odd moments, are those sparkingly luxurious words from his early song “Off the Wall”:

Jackson, who was the furthest thing from a regular guy, knew little about the 9 to 5, and it’s hard to see him laying back and just enjoying himself at any time. But no singer has ever caught the feeling of abandon that comes with throwing work out the window the way he did in that song.

I remember Jackson most from an awards show in 1983—the Grammy’s?—when he sent his brothers off the stage, told us he’d had enough of the “old songs,” and basically invented the '80s by tearing down the house with “Billie Jean” and introducing the world—or maybe just the white world—to the moonwalk. It was, indeed, a thrill. Even by then, though, his best—or at least his freest and most joyful—dancing days were behind him. See the clip below with his brothers, as well as a struttin’ Red Foxx, on their variety show in 1977. "Enjoy Yourself" is the name of the video. Michael Jackson struggled to do it himself, but he gave everyone who watched him a chance.

That would be Lleyton Hewitt, of course, who kept jabbing his finger toward his loyal and long-suffering supporters in the stands this afternoon as he turned the clock back inside Centre Court. The aging, scrapping Aussie upset No. 5 seed Juan Martin del Potro, and briefly returned us to an earlier and . . . well, not a better time, exactly, but at least to a time when he was the No. 1 player in the world. Those two years, 2001 and 2002, the rarely mentioned interim period between the reigns of Pete Sampras and Roger Federer, will never be remembered as a glorious era for the sport. But for a couple of hours it felt like they had never ended.

So much was unchanged. The hat was still backwards. The stringy yellow mullet was still poking out below. The backhand was still straight-armed and the wheels were still churning along the baseline. The return and the lob were still first-class, while the serve, up to 122 and painting the sidelines, was better than ever. Even the moribund and much maligned “Come on!”/fist-pump-to-the-face combination was broken out after a crucial crosscourt pass late in the third set. The audience kept up a low but vivid hum of support through it all. It was like Federer and Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray—and Juan Martin del Potro—had never happened.

“I executed perfectly, hit the ball great,” Hewitt said afterward. He still looks as compact and solid and unadorned up at the mike as he always did. Most pros are bigger than they appear to be on TV—encountered on the street, they can seem like a line of supersized human dolls—but not Hewitt. He looks pretty much as you would expect, just redder. “I served unbelievable throughout the match. Took it to him right from the start.”

The first impression I had upon sitting down in the second set was how much closer to the grass Hewitt looked than del Potro. He was low to the ground and blocking the Argentine's slap-shot ground strokes like a hockey goalie. Del Potro simply looked too tall out there. This was partly due to his size, but it was also due to what Hewitt was forcing him to do. The Aussie came into the match planning to move del Potro along the baseline, and, as Hewitt himself said, he executed that plan perfectly. When he needed a point, it usually went like this: Serve wide on the line, move forward, hit next shot into open court, watch del Potro almost trip over himself getting to it, then send next shot behind him for a winner. Those rare times when Hewitt found himself in trouble, he was able to handle del Potro’s pace and take the air out of the point with a softly carved slice up the line. (Underspin: It’s getting to be a theme around here this week.)

Del Potro himself thought there wasn’t much he could have done about it. “I thought I played a good match,” he said, while admitting that, as little as they might seem to have in common, Hewitt had been one of his idols growing up (so someone does remember the Hewitt Era!). In this sense, this match is virtually a carbon copy of Marat Safin's upset of Novak Djokovic in the second round last year. Again, the legend taught the student a lesson as his expense.

The student was asked to rate his performance on a scale of 1 to 10. When he thought for a second and came back with “8,” his questioner was incredulous. “An 8!?” Del Potro stuck by it, and it sounded like he was being honest. By the end of his presser, the Argentine had begun to come off as admirably level-headed in the face of defeat. He said that he had learned a lot from the match, especially how Hewitt hadn’t missed his returns on break points, and that this tournament and the French Open were already in the past in his mind—he had a lot more to worry about in the months ahead.

While I was in Centre Court, I had begun to ask myself whether del Potro would ever master the finer points of the game—he stoned one drop shot right into the air—to challenge for Slams. Was he really too machine-like in his approach, after all? Could he ever learn not to go for a dead flat winner on his return on a crucial point, the way he did so often today? If the first step to a solution is to realize you have a problem, DP is on his way. His presser made realize why he has always bounced back from losses like this in the past—Del Potro has the gift of rationality.

Yesterday, in talking about Maria Sharapova, I said that many of the sport’s beloved older champions began as villains. During his prime, Hewitt, who is blue collar and anti-establishment to the core, had a testy relationship with virtually the entire tennis world, from fans to press to tour authorities. His 2002 final-round win at Wimbledon had to be the least memorable in recent history (do you know who he beat?)—I know, I was there, and I walked out in the third set to watch a hot shot named Maria Sharapova lose the junior girls final.

All was forgiven, but not forgotten, in Centre Court today, as Hewitt ripped off his cap and shook out his sweaty locks after the final point—another déjà vu moment. I wonder sometimes, Does the game really evolve as much as we think? Does it change and improve every few years? This match made it obvious that it does. Hewitt had his old defensive, leg-based, low-to-the-ground game working its magic again. But just like the mullet, it looked dated and earthbound in the high-flying, highly physical, highly varied era of Federer, Nadal, and Murray. The men’s game has evolved for the good.

No matter. This time Hewitt was the scrappy hero rebelling against the new generation, a guy who had overcome years of decline and frustration, as well as last summer’s hip surgery, an operation that typically spells the end for tennis pros (ask Guga and Magnus Norman). Hewitt refused to let it end when it looked bleak and pointless last year. I said at the time that "he really must not want to sit around changing diapers in Australia." Hewitt at least party verified my theory today. When he was asked whether he ever considered calling it a career, he thought for a few seconds and said, “The motivation was there. I think it really hit home more when the U.S. Open was on last year after I’d had the surgery and I was sitting back at home just twiddling my thumbs, changing nappies and stuff, but not a doing a lot of things. I was really missing, you know, not being at the U.S. Open, which is one of my favorite tournaments.”

Hey, we all have our reasons, and that sounds as good as any. If Hewitt’s game looks dated, his presence in this tournament is welcome. While the current No. 1 tries out a new outfit at Wimbledon each year, Hewitt sticks with the tried and true. He’s always known exactly who he is. You might think, now that he’s a father, that he might retire the old backwards hat. Trying to take it off him would probably be like trying to get him to hang up his racquet. It would be like trying to get a working man to leave his lunchbucket at home.

Have you ever stood and listened to a tennis match? I tried it for a few minutes yesterday. You can’t do it with just anyone; you need a pair of opponents with special talents to make it entertaining. The distinctive thud and thwack that Marat Safin and Richard Gasquet make with their backhands might suffice for a few games, but yesterday the outer courts at Wimbledon offered a higher order of sonic stars on Court 12. That’s where 16-year-old Michelle Larcher de Brito faced 29-year-old Francesca Schiavone in the final match of the day. Tournament officials apparently couldn’t bear the thought of putting these two women within earshot. Either that or they wanted to have some fun at the neighbors’ expense.

De Brito’s squeal you know about. The teenager lets loose with a long, single, high-pitched note that explodes out of her at contact and gradually tails off as the ball gets farther away. It isn’t just the hit itself that she seems to want to accompany, but the entire trajectory of the shot as it travels from her racquet to her opponent’s racquet. It kind of goes like this: “Ahhhhhh-eeeeeeeeee-eeeee-eeeee!” That may be illegal, but Schiavone is hardly the person to make a stink about it. The Italian produces her own unmistakable soundtrack, a laborious, guttural, two-note grunt that goes, “Ah-unh!” There’s no doubt about it: Francesca is working out there.

The stands, naturally, were full. De Brito has a way of attracting throngs of spectators, many of whom you suspect would be the first to say that what she does is bloody offensive and should be banned forever. There was also a small ocean of people wobbling together just outside the gates, waiting to get in. Rather than join them, I stood against a bench within shouting—er, grunting—distance.

There was a lot to hear. It sounded like what it was, winner-take-all competition. De Brito’s youthful, there-is-this-match-and-this-match-only-and-I-will-die-if-I-lose desperation alternated with Schiavone’s professional pleasure in the physical test. Then there was the crowd. I had just come from Centre Court, where Marin Cilic and Sam Querrey had blitzed winners past each other from the baseline with rapid disdain. The audience blinked and clapped politely. Could it really be as easy as they were making it look? On Court 12, the spectators were caught up in the points. The winners here came with a sound that let everyone know how well-earned they really were. How did I know they were winners, if I couldn’t see them? Because the crowd didn’t just blink and clap politely: They stood, they gasped, they whooped, they tittered. Like the players, they made a lot of noise.

(Boilerplate disclaimer: The above should not be construed as a plea in favor of ever more massive grunting in tennis. It is an observation of a single match. Thank you for understanding.)

It’s not that Querrey-Cilic had nothing to offer, exactly. First and foremost, there was the surreal sight of these two second-tier players inside Centre Court. They’d been given the run of the mansion and had a great time exploring every corner. As to why they were there, it seems that ESPN had requested that they be placed on a “prominent TV court.” The network got more than its wish, and was pleased with the result.

As for the match itself, it was five sets of tall man baseline tennis. Once an oddity, it’s verging on becoming the norm. Querrey fought long and well, but he was hurt by the fact that he served last in the final set. Cilic was sloppy enough to make me believe, through most of the fifth set, that he would lose. As my colleague Chris Clarey put it, the Croat is “good at everything, but not great at anything.” One of his skills seems to be the ability to close a long match with energy. When he was in trouble in the fifth, Cilic gathered strength from the moment and become more single-mindedly aggressive. In the final two games, he was better than good.

What happens in London on the Day After the Day of Carnage? I think you can guess. The city’s pundits swoop in for their yearly survey of the wreckage that is euphemistically known as British tennis. They target the LTA, naturally, which is responsible for directing the sport in this country. But these armchair quarterbacks can’t settle on a diagnosis for the disease, beyond telling us that the tennis authorities in the U.K. have done every single thing wrong. There are complaints about the lack of minority outreach, as well as the top-down approach of paying famous coaches “princely sums” to come to London and instruct a bunch of no-names for three-quarters of the year.

While no conclusions are drawn, of course, the Mirror’s Oliver Holt does make humorous headway at the expense of one of those famous well-paid coaches, Paul Annacone.

Calling his explanations “excuses,” Holt says that Annacone “came up with some corkers . . . wreathed in psychobabble and gobbledegook, but the essence of denial still managed to shine through.” Talking about Brit Dan Evans’ defeat at the hands of Nikolay Davydenko in the first round, Annacone says, “That match was 6-2, 6-2, 6-3, but it easily could have been 6-1, 6-1, 6-1 if he wasn’t careful.” Talk about keeping your expectations low!

—But Holt is upstaged by the headline writers at the Mail, who have the final and most sensible word on the subject. The paper puts this solemnly damning sentence across the top of its back page:

—Hyping today’s Murray-Gulbis match, or, as the Sun puts it, the “Murray Cheat Storm—Angry Andy Ready to Rumble After Cheap Gulbis Cheat Gibe.” This line is accompanied by a shot of Murray in a cricket helmet with face mask.

Gulbis’ crime? Actually, it is real, and a little weird. He accused Murray this week of having taken an unnecessary injury timeout during their match in Queens a couple of years ago. Murray denies it, saying that he had to pull out the next round with the same injury. Gulbis does seem to suffer from a faulty memory. He says the timeout adversely affected him because he was too young to handle it, when in fact he served out the first set immediately afterward, before Murray won in three.

—The Sun also kisses a happy goodbye to the “annoying” Larcher de Brito with the headline, “Screamers Dream Dies.”

—You know it wouldn’t take long. Gisela Dulko has been crowned the “new queen” of tennis by the Express, having “deposed” Maria Sharapova yesterday. The Mail follows suit, commanding us to, “Hail Gisela, the New Queen of Wimbledon’s Catwalk Court.” Even the normally sober Independent asks, “Dulko Charms, but Can She Wear Crown?”

—From the be-careful-what-you-wish-for-department. I recently came across this description of Wimbledon in 1972 by British tennis writer Rex Bellamy.

"Two strokes, the service and volley, are often tediously dominant. All is split-second timing. When a men’s event is pared down to the later rounds, the dreamland of clay memories becomes ever more appealing."

Bellamy laments that Wimbledon, the sport’s finest shop window, offers a dull and mediocre product. He also correctly predicts that the surface will have to be fixed at some point for Wimbledon to matter again.

—Finally, love that photo at the top, right? It's 15-year-old ball girl Chloe Chambers rallying with Tommy Haas yesterday. Who says the U.K. doesn’t have tennis players?

The sun is out, the pleasant man on the loudpeaker is talking to us, and the players are loosening themselves up all over the grounds with that little nervous, twisting hop they do at the baseline. I’m heading out to join them. Or at least watch them. Talk to you later.

The common trait that unites the best women's tennis players isn't the quality of their forehands or their ability to dart across the baseline. It's their presence. This is true for the men as well, but the stars of the WTA tend to arrive on tour with it fully formed. The men, with the recent exception of Rafael Nadal, who was pumping his fists of fury in his mid-teens, develop it through their on-court accomplishments. Roger Federer didn't make his Centre Court debut in cream trousers and a handbag.

But from the first time we saw them, Steffi Graf was a furiously shy fighter, Monica Seles was a grittily single-minded grunter, Venus and Serena were willfully unique teens in beads, and Maria Sharapova was gazing at her strings, doing hair-flips before her serve, and screaming bloody murder when she hit the ball. If you can impose your presence on another player from the beginning of a match, you force them to react to you—it's called getting in their heads. With help from her highly animated and faintly manic father, Yuri, in the stands, as well as her own diva strut, few players have ever entered the court, and the sport, with such aggressive concentration and desire.

Sharapova gave a player no choice: You had to react to her. That was Maria Stage 1, a period highlighted by three Grand Slam titles. After nearly a year away and a serious shoulder injury, she successfully entered Stage II in Paris last month and continued it at Wimbledon. Yuri was nowhere to be seen during his daughter's match on Centre Court today—apparently he's exploring, as hard as it may be to get your mind around, his love of the great outdoors. But the presence is still with Maria. On a shiny day, she was the bright white center of Centre Court, her beanpole figure, fluctuating shriek levels, and deliberate way of moving around the court—no motion is purposeless with Sharapova—making her a fixture for all eyes. Her lean and much shorter opponent, Gisela Dulko, while she's the faster and smoother player, looked like she was playing in very tall shadows. Still, by the end of the first set, Dulko had the crowd won over. We like to say that Sharapova is "good for tennis," but it will be a while before she takes her turn as a beloved champion among the game's fans. Her presence is a little off-putting for opponents and listeners alike.

While Sharapova has kept her aggressive posture intact, this match proved she's not completely comfortable using it yet. It's obvious to say, but she reminded me of someone who hasn't played in a while. She hit the ball well when she had time; she remembered her game when it was absolutely necessary, at 0-3 in the second set; she fired winners early in rallies but missed if they lasted longer than a few shots; she didn't react well to Dulko's serve; and she struggled with balls out of her strike zone. Early in the second set, Sharapova was forced to run forward and bend for two short balls. She netted them both.

"There was no real gray area today," Sharapova said in subdued, resigned tones in her press conference afterward. "I had so many easy balls, and I just made unforced errors on those. When I've had those situations before, those balls would be pieces of cake, and today they weren't."

Sharapova was wrong-footed regularly, hit some mystifying second serves that landed many feet from the box—though she said she felt "no pain" in her shoulder—and rushed dozens of forehands into the net. From a technical perspective, she seemed to be swinging late and close to her body; grass really does do different things to the ball. At the same time, Sharapova battled for every shot, point, and piece of turf, and she willed herself to hold at 0-3 in the second and keep some degree of pressure on Dulko. The Russian also played a fabulous drop shot to save one match point and put a backhand return on the outside edge of the line to save another. But she gave away the last one because she didn't get all the way down for a forehand and sent it long.

Getting into perfect position will never be Sharapova's strong suit. In many ways, based on her natural athletic gifts and racquet skills, she is a supreme overachiever. Are the days of overachieving over? Should she get Yuri on her Sony Ericsson phone right now?

In other words, the old fierce presence isn't going anywhere, even if the "pieces of cake" get harder to find. Even in the latter years of Stage I, Sharapova was a quick-strike, up-and-down Slam champion, an Agassi rather than a Sampras, a player who could fly through two weeks untouched (see the 2006 U.S. Open) or suffer helplessly as her game abandoned her (see the 2007 Australian Open final). Today she gave us a little of both. I'd expect more of both—championship runs and flat-on-her-face disasters—over the next few years.

As for Wimbledon, is the tournament poorer without Maria? Is she as good for the game as some of us began to think when she was gone? Like I said, in their youths, many tennis greats are resented by fans as interlopers, and then embraced by those same fans as they age. A new champion is like a new person in our lives—it takes time to judge them for what they are and not keep wishing they would change. We may never forgive Sharapova her grunt, but today, while it still sounded pretty awful inside Centre Court, I didn't notice it much. I expected it from her. Like a friend's annoying habit, I'm starting to tune it out. It will help Sharapova if she's upstaged by a new and bolder generation of deci-belles. It will also help if she establishes an identity separate from her father.

All that's for the future. Today, during one point early in the third set, a ball by Dulko floated lazily toward the baseline. Sharapova couldn't tell whether it was going to be in or out. She struggled frantically to get her feet and body in a place where she could hit a shot at shoulder level. Just as she got there, the ball touched down an inch behind the line and was called out. Sharapova had started her swing from an awkward, tip-toe stance, but she ended up slapping through air as the ball went past. As she swung, she made a face that was equal parts relieved, intense, and humorously exasperated at her less-than-graceful stab at getting into position. I wondered: Could Maria Sharapova's blind competitiveness ever come to seem . . . cute?

The tabs are unanimous: It hasn't been a good week for British tennis. Well, they aren't quite unanimous. The Mirror calls Tuesday at Wimbledon, after which only two of the original 11 U.K. players in the draws were still standing, a "day of shame." The Mail sees it differently. They dub it "The Day of Carnage." The Express goes for something less poetic: "What a Bunch of Losers." Surprisingly, it’s the Times that is most outraged of all. "LTA Must Take Blame for the Procession of Hollow-Eyed British Losers," is the headline to lead tennis correspondent Neil Harman's column.

Wait, I take that back. The Sun is the angriest. They can barely speak. The paper hangs its head on the back page and sends this simple and damning message to all of the country's tennis players:

You begin to wonder why anyone tries to play this sport over here. In fact, British pro Dan Evans, who lost to Nikolay Davydenko, is wondering that himself. Afterward, he speculated that he might soon quit the sport and start "stacking shelves" at a grocery chain. Of course, the Sun doesn't like that much either, titling its article on Evans, "Loser Dan Looks Forward to Life as Tesco Shelf Stacker." The Mirror, blessedly, mixes it up by going after a different Brit, the long-suffering Alex "Duffer Bogg" Bogdanovich, who also went down in straight sets yesterday for his eighth straight first-round defeat at Wimbledon: "Serial Loser Alex is Simply the Worst as Brits Gets Battered."

I think you get the picture: Losing seems to be a theme here, an unspoken, unconscious truth waiting to be screamed at the first possible moment. But the tabs have more to offer today. Here are a few of their nuggets.

—There's a match-fixing investigation underway concerning the first-rounder between Jurgen Melzer and Wayne Odesnik. Wagering on Betfair was unusually heavy on Melzer's routine three-set win. Odesnik says he doesn't know anything about it and would never do anything to "jeopardize my future." The Express reports, "Betfair said the odds on a straight sets victory tumbled from even to 1-5 in the run up to the match as 365,000 pounds were wagered."

—Curiously, the Mirror turns around and gives us a hot betting tip: "Get on Karol Beck at even to beat Nicolas Almagro today."

—You can also bet on whether Michelle Larcher de Brito "loosens her tonsils," as the Mirror puts it, at some point during the tournament. "Sporting Index," the paper reports, "is predicting a loudest grunt of 108 decibels over the fortnight (personal record: 109)."

—Andy Roddick is a tabloid movie critic. He saw The Hangover before his first-round match. "It was OK. I think it got hyped a little bit. It's not on a par with Wedding Crashers." Your standards are just too high, Andy.

—Strawberries and cream remains about $4.50, but a beer at Wimbledon is up to nearly $8. The tournament reports less revenue in its corporate hospitality services, but is making up for it with record ticket sales (the place is crowded). It expects to match or surpass last year's profit—"surplus" in the parlance of the All England Club—of 25 million pounds. In the Times, Wimbledon is declared recession-proof, a "golden-ticketed event," by one corporate analyst.

—Worst, and Best, Grammar in a Columnist's Headline: "Henman and Me Never Faced Pressure This Serious," by Greg Rusedski. No, it was just you Greg. You're Canadian.

You might think blogging from a tennis tournament is an easy gig, but there's the editing. You can only put so much in, and that's hard. Yesterday I had planned to do five "character studies" instead of three, but at 10:30 P.M., with the cleaning crew hovering around me, I had to leave two of them—Andy Murray and Fabrice Santoro—on the cutting-room floor (I'm sure they would be crushed if they knew). But I did watch their matches and make more than a few trips around the grounds. Here's some of what didn't make it in from those adventures.

—Nicolas Kiefer pretty much tanked the last two sets to Santoro. When he saw that a ball he'd hit was heading long—it wasn't hard to tell; they were very long—he would point to the ball kid and ask for the next ball before the last one had even landed. After one horrid miss, he nodded his head twice in a sarcastic pump-up venture. What made it all worse for the edgy German was that one fan at the top of the Court 3 bleachers insisted on continuing to cheer for him. "Come on, Nicolai!" he yelled after every point. As the sets wore on and Kiefer got even more listless, the cry grew more desperate, "Come on, Nicolai!" The words punctured the bored silence that enveloped the court. Finally, after Kiefer seemed to intentionally hit a ball 10 feet wide, his fan reached the end of his rope. "Kiefer!" he barked in a stern tone of admonishment and exasperation, "Come on now!" It sounded like he was giving him one more chance. Kiefer didn't take it.

—Seeing Santoro up close is to realize that he isn't just a Magician. He's a jock. The real reason he's still winning matches at 36 is that he can bang a 120 m.p.h. ace, he can take a first serve and knock it down the line for a winner, and he can step into a backhand at the baseline and hit it for an outright crosscourt winner. Of course, he can also end a point with a sharply sliced two-handed overhead. That's pretty magical.

—I made my first trip to Centre Court yesterday for the Murray-Kendrick match. Kendrick played good old American tennis: strong, sloppy. Watching, I began to think of Murray as having invented a new style of play. He doesn't counterpunch so much as he neutralizes. His returns, his slice backhand with its uncanny depth, his stab saves, his passing shots—they're all designed to neutralize whomever is on the other side of the net until that person screws up. Still, this wouldn't work for Murray if he couldn't also get free points with his serve.

—The roof is there, waiting. Odds have gone from 6-1 to 10-1 that it will be used at all during the fortnight. Yesterday, it looked like a blindingly white UFO had landed on the top of Centre Court to have a look at Murray's match. Talk about extra pressure. The poor kid was holding up the weight of two worlds. Seriously, the thing takes some getting used to: It's bulk is out of all proportion to the compact arena below it.

—This question tortures me: What is the right music to listen to at Wimbledon? Each day when I leave, I walk up Church Road, past the trademark black cabs and long lines of people hailing them, past red chimneys and trimmed trees and wobbling red buses. It feels like London, which makes me want to hear London albums—late-60s London albums, from the swinging mod version of the city that Americans like myself will never give up. The epitome of these in my mind are Something Else by the Kinks and The Who Sell Out. You walk out of the gates, put your IPod on, and you hear Ray Davies, with a hard, no-nonsense edge in his voice, tell the band to play "Nice and smooth." Then they launch into a raw story of class resentment, and oddly, class admiration, called "David Watts," about a much-envied big man on campus.

—Each morning at 10 before noon, a pleasant-sounding gentleman begins to speak over the PA system around the grounds at Wimbledon. He tells us the weather forecast—more sun today; does it really rain here? (forget I asked that, I don't want to jinx anything)—and politely "points out" that spectators should be quiet during play. Today he finished his spiel with these words: "I'm delighted to tell you that, as always, the schedule contains many fascinating matches for your enjoyment."

I'll see if he's right. One thing that's fascinating me is, What the heck are Sam Querrey and Marin Cilic doing in Centre Court this afternoon? Does ESPN have that much juice? Otherwise, I'm looking to check out Jo-Wilfried Tsonga from up close in the Graveyard. Could he do some damage on grass?

It's a storyteller's dream: Whatever type of character you like, the first week of a Grand Slam offers it to you. Wide-eyed up-and-comer, star in free fall, underachieving sure-shot—all three were out on the grounds on a hot Tuesday at Wimbledon. Here's a look at how each of them struggled, straggled, succeeded, and failed to make the best of their particular situations.

She's sitting forward, her shoulders pressed up against the wall at the back of the north side of Court 3. Her frosted hair and glinting sunglasses make her an unmistakable presence, though it's odd to hear her using her daughter's nickname to cheer her on, like any other fan.

It's 1:00 and the sun is at its peak. The view south runs in an invisible cone from the base of tennis courts at the club to the steeple of St. Mary's Church on the hill above. In between, trees alternate with white houses, and red-double-deckers run back and forth between them. A new bus has joined them this year, a yellow double-decker sponsored by Corona and topped with a giant plastic beer bottle. It's a jarring sight.

Whatever number it is currently assigned, this court is best known as the Graveyard of Champions. It's open to the elements—gusts of wind, blinding sun, attacks of noise—but high seeds are forced to venture out here nonetheless. The combination has produced dozens of stunning upsets; yesterday James Blake lost in the first round. As Tuesday begins, it seems like it could be Jankovic's turn.

After starting the year at No. 1, she has had a disastrous 2009. Her season bottomed out last week in Eastbourne, where lost in the first round and watched her ranking slip to No. 6. Jankovic's opponent today, Germany's Julia Georges, hits a heavier ball than she does. Her serve is strong enough to knock Jankovic a full step backward. From the first row of the press seats, it's easy to see JJ's fundamental flaw: Compared even to this journeywoman player, her shots have no heft. Her whippy strokes produce a light, pingy sound when she makes contact. When Georges gives Jankovic a short ball, she doesn't know what to do with it. Without pace coming in, she can't make it go out.

Jankovic begins to falter, and now it's her coach, Ricardo Sanchez—sitting well away from her mother—who does the urging. For anyone who thinks there is a lot of detailed instruction given during matches, here is what Sanchez says when Jankovic looks up to him after a changeover: "Go for it."

Somehow that advice doesn't help her turn things around. Early in the second set, Jankovic begins to spray balls. She's broken, and on the first point of the next game, she frames a forehand that ends up in the first row. Jankovic looks back at Sanchez. She keeps her eyes on him the entire time it takes her to cross the baseline. Typically, when she looks into the crowd, she's kvetching about an opponent's luck or a chair umpire's incompetence. This is different. This is a cold, silent, fearful stare. Every tennis player knows the look: Jankovic is beginning to panic. Sanchez doesn't say a word.

Georges sprints out to a 5-2 lead; the set is essentially over. Jankovic appears to be tanking the last game. But her shots begin to find the mark despite her intentions. She extends the set to a tiebreaker, goes up 3-0, and lofts up a lob that should be an easy putaway. Jankovic stops playing, but Georges mishits the sitter overhead long. Jankovic wins 7-0. After the last point, she turns to face her coach again. A broad smile has replaced the look of cold-eyed panic. The free fall is over for today.

At some point in their press conferences, every tennis player reverts to a litany of platitudes. Jankovic, while she can be funny, is no exception. Today she utters the most famous platitude of all: "I've got to take it one match at a time." For once, those words have significance. At this point JJ has to take every win she can get. More than that, like most of us, she knows that even a seemingly routine win in a tennis match often involves moments of desperate, soul-clutching, I-can't-breathe panic moments that are conveniently forgotten after the last ball is hit, but which every player knows can return at any point. Knowing that, who would want to take more than one match at a time?

A year ago Ernests Gulbis was the young man of this moment. The 19-year-old played Rafael Nadal in the second round and took a set, the only one Nadal would lose until the final. That match took place on Court 1. Today Gulbis, who has struggled for the last 10 months and failed to build on what most observers say is Top 5 talent, has been assigned Court 6. It's the last in a row of outer courts with no bleachers. Fans come and go as they please, and say what they please.

Gulbis, a child of privilege who has had his motivation questioned, is out with the masses. After an early loss at the French Open, his ranking has fallen to No. 67, the lowest it has been since 2007. Despite his wiry explosiveness, he has reached a stage in his slump that every losing player knows well: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Whatever a player's talent may be, losing can often be a matter of building up a momentum of misfortune—in other words, one unlucky break seems to lead to another. And another.

Case in point: Up a set and a break against an overmatched opponent, Gulbis holds game point on his serve. He hits what he thinks is an ace and slaps the ball to the ball kid, believing the game is over. But his serve has been called a let. He double faults and eventually loses the game.

The crowds get bigger and the noise increases. Creaking food carts are hauled past. But Gulbis is calm; it's obvious he's a cut above his opponent. When he has time to set up, he hits his windmill two-hand backhand to the corners like it's batting practice. But for every buzzing winner he puts past his opponent, Gulbis does something to keep the match close. He gets ahead on his serve and double-faults. He has an open court for an easy forehand, but he sends it whistling wide. In the end, its Gulbis who gets the lucky break. Serving for the match at 5-4 in the third, his opponent commits a crucial unforced error. Gulbis, like Jankovic, has found the bottom for now. Sometimes talent is enough. Sometimes the wheel of good fortune spins in your direction.

Gulbis' tournament is starting to look like last year's: He plays Andy Murray in the second round on Thursday. It's been a bad season, but one win can turn your mindset 180 degrees. Gulbis is 0-2 against Murray, though after his match today he said brightly, "I think it’s going to be like a new match and the past won't count as much." Call it a good sign—Gulbis is living for tomorrow again.

"Who's this girl?" a young man asks his friend as they walk past 19-year-old American Alexa Glatch on Court 6. "She's—" he stops as Glatch glides her racquet under an elegant two-handed drop shot that clears the net by an inch and bounces backward for a winner. "Jesus Christ, did you see that? Unbelievable hands!"

The kid had been about to remark on how big Glatch is. She is—6-feet and muscular, with a gait like her fellow Southern Californian Lindsay Davenport. She has followed Gulbis onto Court 6. The sun is low and casting long shadows now. Sunglasses aren't enough; spectators have to shade their eyes with their hands as well. Glatch has said she is looking forward to bringing her heavy-hitting game to grass. But early nerves affect her footwork—a chronic problem—and she loses the first set of her Wimbledon debut to Peng Shuai.

In the second, Glatch makes it look easy. There's a lot to her game. Mellow power—she appears to hit downhill to Peng. Variety—few if any women have the athleticism to hit a full-blooded slice forehand return and follow it to the net. A versatile serve—she has a biting hook to back up her flat one. And, as the kid said, very good hands. A drastic 2005 motorbike accident set Glatch's career back years, and she may never reach her early potential. But her game remains unlike any on the WTA tour.

It appears that Glatch will cruise to a win. She breaks, goes up 4-2, and has points for 5-2. Her friends on the sidelines sit back, texting and waiting happily for the inevitable. But out of nowhere, she can't finish. Peng shovels the ball down the middle of the court. Glatch, her footwork slowing again, hits from a wide-open stance and pops a ball long. She rushes a backhand into the tape. Up 4-3 in the third but down break point, she seizes up completely and sends her second serve on a violent downward arc to the bottom of the net. At no point does Glatch show the slightest emotion. Even her body language is unchanged.

On the final point, Glatch cuts under another perfect drop shot. Peng scrapes it up and hits a ball that appears to be heading well long. But Glatch reaches up with her racquet and it ticks off the top. Somehow, the match is over. It almost looks like she has lost the final point intentionally. Glatch strides laconically to the sidelines, gathers her racquets, and disappears into the blinding sun.

Glatch knows how to do everything on a tennis court. But that's just the start. Before players can win, they must learn all the ways they can lose. The young American is learning those ways as we speak. Now she must learn to forget them.