“Anyone can do magic, anyone can reach his goals if he can think, wait, and fast.” — Herman Hesse
“You take it on faith, you take it to the heart, the waiting is the hardest part.” — Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
They’re just three short words — delay of game. But in sports, they can have a devastating effect. Sure, in football, delay of game is merely a five-yard penalty, but it can prove a brutal, self-imposed wound. In baseball, rain delays are standard affairs. The sight of huge tarps protecting soggy infields are commonplace.
But nowhere else in the world of sport do we see the dreary effects of rain delays more than at Wimbledon. Here in England, which, remember, is a North Sea island outpost where “play is suspended” has become a dreaded mantra and rain delays are as common as breakfast porridge. They can seemingly go on forever, like the time it took Rafa Nadal three rain-soaked days to beat Mikhail Youzhny in ‘07 (while his rival Federer had his feet up, resting at home for six days). Or they can be brief false alarms, wet teases that flare for just a few minutes. So here meteorology becomes art. But so, too, as Steve Bierley noted, the weather bureau’s reports can devolve into “a farrago of obfuscation. Try this one: ‘As the showers are moving slower there may be longer dry periods.’” So players, reports Mike Bryan, take matters into their own hands and become instant experts at reading radar maps.
For many English fans, the rain is a way of life, yet another way to practice their stiff upper lip stoicism. To camp out all night on the sidewalk queue — even if it’s pouring buckets — is barely a bother. Umbrellas are as dear to fans as Blackberrys are to marketing VPs, and as Ronald Atkin observed, the skill of local fans “to hold an umbrella while eating strawberries and cream and downing champagne are enviable indeed.”
Of course, all this precipitation does affect play, for as Mary Carillo noted, many a bad bounce occurs when the worms emerge to get a breath of fresh air. During rain delays, an odd dynamic develops. While players retreat to locker room card games or snippy gossip sessions in the Tea Room, regular Joe fans and assorted celebs take it upon themselves to provide reams of self-entertainment. Guards in kilts or haughty uniforms offer up singsongs. Young groundsmen slide gleefully on wet tarps. Entire stadiums break out in English anthems. There was the time a member of the crew rushing to cover Centre Court was almost buried alive under the tarp. And Martina Navratilova, Pam Shriver and Virginia Wade once formed a back-up group for the insufferable pop star Sir Cliff Richey.
For reporters, the rain breaks are bothersome delays that wreak havoc on deadlines and within the pressroom. More often than not, we’re subjected to all those brutally familiar replays of old ironhorse matches. (Prompting the mind to wonder, so why did McEnroe and Borg actually play in slow motion back in ‘80?) Media know-it-alls indulge in hearty debates on the impact of delays on famous matches, like the time the heavens descended upon Paris when Agassi was leading Courier at the ‘91 French Open. During the pause in action, Andre, the highly favored boy wonder, saw his camera-happy coach, Nick Bollettieri, broadly grinning as he gave an interview, while Courier huddled down with his no-nonsense coach/tutor Jose Higueras to plot a stunning comeback.
For me, the rain delays often led to glorious adventures; like the time I traipsed around the grounds with Jack Nicholson, or when I was able to penetrate a web of security to track down and chat with President Clinton in the Royal Box. Rain delays will continue at Wimbledon, except on Centre Court. Now with its hi-tech, 3,000 ton, folding fabric retractable roof in place (which took three years to build and takes seven minutes and four seconds to close), play on the most celebrated court in our sport will totally change. Featuring a “folding concertina design,” the eye-pleasing, state-of-the-art ceiling will let natural light in while defying Britain’s obligatory monsoons. This will be a mini-boom for top players, like Federer, Nadal and Murray, who already benefit by tennis’ tradition of seeding. Now these top-of-the-game stars who’re invariably assigned to Centre Court will know their matches will go on, even if it’s raining buckets outside, while lesser warriors will still have to resort to all those nerve-fraying rituals that have evolved since the dawning of tennis to deal with the frustrations of tedious delays.
For some players it’s as simple as playing cards. For decades, from Bill Tilden to Tony Trabert, bridge was the game of choice. Charlie Pasarell promoted a game called Boule, while these days, doubles whiz Mike Bryan is partial to a luckless game called Killer, and says there’s no need to be careful about the almost legendary poker skills of James Blake, since there’s no serious gambling involved. Most players like to hunker down in the distant corners of the players lounge. Andy Roddick is partial to using the unseeded players locker room and, according to Dmitry Tursunov, some, like the Argentines, prefer to kick out the jams and race around the locker room. But, says Bryan, most just like to chill and “iPod out.”
But outside on Centre Court, the slow but dramatic incursion of the legendary English dusk will no longer come into play as it did during last year’s classic Federer vs. Nadal final. Likewise, matches may stretch well after midnight, as at the U.S. and Aussie Opens.
Yes, when they put up lights at Wrigley Field, the baseball universe continued to spin, and, as Simon Barnes noted, “All great advances come at a price. With the rise of science, came the decline of religion; with industrialization came the despoiling of the planet; with the center roof comes the loss of rain delay. Life will never be the same again.”
No, the emergence of Astroturf didn’t ruin baseball. And you can contend that both the 24-second rule and the three-point line notably improved basketball. The enclosing of the game’s most unique court is barely as consequential as say tennis shifting from an amateur to an open sport in ‘68. The roof’s presence doesn’t compare with the introduction of the tiebreak, or the instant success of instant replay electronic line calling. Still, there’s a place within me that’s nostalgic and sad. Call me a hopeless romantic, but I know a certain purity is lost forever. But I tell myself, be brave, be bold and charge into the future with joy in my heart (and an umbrella still in my hand).
