Some things are special because they are consistent. You know what you’re going to get, and you get what you’re expecting every time. Permanence is prestige—a sentiment The Right Honourable ‘The Championships, Wimbledon’ (or as you might know it, simply, ‘Wimbledon’) understands well, and plays to its advantage. In a time where newness is currency, and reinvention is all the rage, the Grande Dame of Grand Slams remains stubbornly, steadfastly, and dare I say—snobbishly—itself. And along the way, it has, for generations, held Indian viewers in a chokehold.
It’s an unlikely romance. After all, Indians are hardly known for restraint or following rules. We dance on airport tarmacs and at the Great Wall of China, make loud video calls in public, break traffic signals, and simultaneously venerate and eviscerate our sporting icons with a raucous, vociferous passion that can unsettle the steeliest of monks. (It is no surprise that the Indian Premier League—the most audacious perversion of cricket’s genteel five-day origins—was thought up by an Indian).
Enter Wimbledon. It’s fastidious, elitist and pedantic.
It doesn’t allow players to wear anything other than white, even on the soles of their shoes. Darker-coloured underpants, provided they don’t show on the outside, were only allowed for women in 2022, after the tournament faced criticism for being insensitive to menstruating women. Did I mention problematic?
It invites the British Royals, complete with their stiff fabrics and upper lips, to clap politely from the Royal Box and present the winner’s trophy every year. Until 2003, it even made players bow to the Royals.
It turns up its nose at the party atmosphere of on-court logos, music and sponsors, and late matches that pervade the lesser echelons of the other three slams. It doesn’t feature any ads on court, doesn’t sell tickets online (except via the ballot queue), doesn’t play music in between points or during player walkouts, doesn’t allow play beyond 11pm local time, and doesn’t call the categories “Men’s” and “Women’s”, choosing instead the quaint “Gentlemen’s” and “Ladies”. It was also the last Slam to stop using white balls and switch to the now-iconic ‘optic yellow’ ones.
It doesn’t dictate a dress code for spectators, but the unspoken code frowns upon jeans (something even Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, was criticised for wearing) and other casual wear.
It is anathema to everything we are. And yet, we love it anyway.
Maybe it has to do with our colonial past. Wimbledon offers a tenuous connection to British-era nobility that we decry but grudgingly aspire to anyway. Look at our fascination with royalty or our fervid adoption of cricket. Tennis is an expensive, complicated sport, but I have a hunch that watching and tracking Wimbledon, with its aura of aristocracy, lets us aspire to the fringes of taste, etiquette and upward social mobility.
The seeds were sown in 1960, when Ramanathan Krishnan reached the Wimbledon Men’s Singles semi-finals. Vijay Amritraj followed with quarter-final appearances in 1973 and 1981, while Krishnan’s son, Ramesh, reached the last eight in 1986. But it wasn’t until 1999 that Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi got us over the hump, becoming the first Indians to win a Wimbledon Men’s Doubles title. Sania Mirza repeated the feat in 2015, winning the Women’s Doubles title, pairing with Swiss legend Martina Hingis.
In the years since, there has been a conspicuous lack of Indians at the top in tennis. But our fascination with Wimbledon has only grown. Come June, it's one of the hottest tickets in town. The stands overlooking the manicured grass are increasingly filled with Indian celebrities and influencers, whose pictures flood our social media feeds the next day. They may not know the rules of the game or even a first serve from a second, but they sure know how to serve looks.
It wasn’t always like this. Little was known about the oldest Slam of all, except for the drips of information that would come through the sports columns on Sunday.
But Wimbledon was always a preoccupation of Indian dads. Older Millennials will recall hearing from their fathers about Bjorn Borg and Boris Becker’s antics as teenage prodigies. I have memories of my dad waxing poetic about the contrast of white clothes against the crisp green grass, and the cracking sound of heavy wooden rackets hitting Slazenger balls. He first heard tennis on the radio, before watching it on colour TV later in life, and never got over the pleasing visuals. He told me how as a boy, he raced with friends to a terrace overlooking Calcutta South Club, to watch Ramanathan Krishnan beat Thomas Koch in the Davis Cup Interzone finals in 1966. Why the frenzy? Because Krishnan had been in the semi-finals at—where else but Wimbledon—six years ago and had remained a hero ever since.
Over the years, I learnt from him the rationale for the (oh so) complicated scoring format, and why the server controls the point and the pace. We watched as the baton passed from Becker (acrobatic) to Pete Sampras (precise) to Roger Federer (balletic) to today’s Jannik Sinner (relentless) and Carlos Alcaraz (magnetic)—each player’s style marking the evolution of the game. Along the way, the grass grew greener (quite literally) near the net as players shifted away from serve-and-volley to baseline play, but Wimbledon retained its place at the apogee of tennis in a way that the other Slams simply don’t.
Mindy Kaling also used this quirk of the Millennial desi upbringing to have John McEnroe voice the inner monologue of the lead character Devi in her Netflix show Never Have I Ever, to unlikely success.
Kaling also had a father who was a huge tennis fan, and told the press, “One thing that's common for a lot of Indian parents is a love of tennis, it’s like an English Anglophile kind of thing... Indian people, particularly Indian men, love tennis… ".
For the players, Wimbledon’s unattainability is what lends it allure. It is a singular irony of the sport that the most coveted Slam is also the most elusive one. The challenges begin in the run-up itself. Wimbledon takes place a mere three weeks after the clay season, forcing players to transition quickly from heavy, hard hitting, slip-and-slide play, to a low, fast bounce that makes the ball skid and accelerate off the grass, needing strong knees and quick, explosive footwork. And there are only a handful of grass court Masters and practice tournaments for players to acclimate, unlike the other three slams, which are preceded by plentiful clay and hard court tourneys.
And so it has bested many champions, many of whom adapted their game just to add that venerated pineapple-topped trophy to their kitty.
Starting today that dream will be alive once again, for both players and fans. Generations of Indian families will track first-serve aces, grumble about the line calling, and sigh contentedly at the patrician purple and green colour scheme on TV. Our nation that threw off the yoke of the British Raj will once again fall deeply in love with its most fiercely guarded cultural relic.
Two weeks later, after one player walks home with a glistening trophy, fans will resign themselves to watching lesser Slams for another 12 months. Because some rituals feel more romantic than dogmatic. And Wimbledon is one of them.