Wimbledon Notebook : Great View, If You Can Still Stand

For all its stuffiness--this is one of the few events furnished with an actual royal box--the Wimbledon tennis championships have a certain democratic quality.

With an investment of some time and hardship it is possible, for example, for any plebe to watch the same matches on Centre Court that Princesses Diana and Sarah see. There is a standing-room-only gallery that is the tennis equivalent of football’s 50-yard line. You just stand in line on Church Road. All night.

Also, just about anybody can watch a defending champion play, a tough ticket you’d think.

Pat Cash served a short exile on Court 14 the other day, where his preteen fans--what people will do for a checkered headband--could better glimpse him, from a distance of perhaps 10 feet. The preteen girls had only to walk up, filling in any and all air spaces with Instamatics and squeals.

“It’s a zoo,” Cash agreed, feeding it another headband.

Boris Becker, Jimmy Connors, Martina Navratilova--they’ve all appeared in the tournament’s outer boroughs, where anyone willing to queue can get a seat. In fact, most of the good matches this year have been off Centre Court, away from the dukes and duchesses, who are chained in the royal box, unable to take off their jackets until that day’s head duke does so. The common man is served, except of course for the poor chuckleheads who stood in line for the SRO gallery there.

And not all the food here, happily, is fit for a king. There is a strawberries-and-cream booth (one pound-fifty), but far more popular is the booth for Little Dutchees. The NBC folks never tell you about that, do they? It’s a hot dog, also one pound-fifty. More popular yet, truth be told, is the Champagne-and-Pimms booth. No matter what you eat, you can wash it down with champagne.

The other thing about Wimbledon, when it rains it rains on everybody. It often rains here, less this year than some others. But Monday night and Tuesday, it indeed rained, a light drizzle out of dreary skies, scattering plebes and royals alike. Centre Court fans didn’t scatter, however. A juggler there threw pins for six hours and the people stayed, just to see if he’d stop.

About this rain: Considering that there is no thing such as a rain check here, in a country where the state bird should be an umbrella, the crowds were surprisingly cheerful, milling and buying up all kinds of tennis-related merchandise.

This is in contrast to Sunday’s performance of Aida at the Fabulous Earl’s Court, where the swells in the pit couldn’t see and staged a “mini-riot.”

A good-natured folk at Wimbledon. Perhaps the Champagne-and-Pimms booth is the reason for that.

Every first-year visitor to Wimbledon takes a pledge to ignore London’s tabloids in his or her tennis coverage. Nobody’s kept it yet. If this, a headline that took up all of the Sunday Sport’s cover, doesn’t get in a story somewhere, well, it’s just a shame: “Marilyn Monroe is alive and working as a nanny.” This report is unconfirmed, however.

Progress toward the Grand Slam has gone apace for both contenders.

Steffi Graf, the Australian and French Opens victories down pat, has yet to lose a set, or to take longer than an hour per match. Neither has Mats Wilander, going after the men’s version, lost a set.

Yet, neither has attracted much attention so far. Wilander especially has been the overlooked man. But he always is.

Becker said: “I think Wilander prefers the way it is around him, then he can walk from the practice courts of Wimbledon without any guards and probably almost unknown through the crowd to the courts. McEnroe and myself have different personalities.

“I just look different from Mats. My hair is different, I am bigger, wider. . . . At the French Open, Wilander won twice (actually, three titles) and it’s still a big difference when Noah (Yannick) walks in and when Wilander walks in. They are different human beings.”

Tim Mayotte added: “Mats has a quiet approach. There’s not as much hype about it as you might expect, and that’s probably going to work in his favor. He has a real shot to win.”

The Sun had a nice as-told-to from Patti Connors, less remarkable for its headline, “I hate those bitchy tennis wives,” than its byline, By Mrs. Jimbo.

And to think that Spencer Gore, the first Wimbledon champion in 1877, said: “Rackets and croquet are far more interesting.”