Sun never sets on Henman hysteria

Sideline Cut: Wimbledon is weird and getting weirder. In about 40 years' time, the BBC will devote its daytime summer schedule to the Norwich Rubber Fetish Fair while Wimbledon will be an underground cult, a sanctuary for fans of whipped cream, Virginia Wade and royalty, writes Keith Duggan.

Although the players are getting younger - at least three of this year's Russians appear to be under 10 - the tournament still seems to belong to the Jubilee year of 1977. The BBC is central to the effect and just for atmosphere broadcasts classic series like Fawlty Towers and dusts down the All-Lawn champions of yesteryear and patrons of the tournament like Princess Michael of Kent.

In Wimbledonland, Britannia still rules the waves. Those curtsies, the starched whites, those accents - it is not the Wimbledon of Joe Kinnear. Or even Uncle Bulgaria.

We in this country have a soft spot for Wimbledon because we have all had at least one summer when we were too young to get a job and too adolescent to do anything other than mope and so viewed the daily transmissions from the All-England club as pure Heaven. Commentators agonise over the social problems now sweeping this country, forgetting that an entire generation of vulnerable youth looked out on the world in search of a hero to identify with and saw only Mats Wilander. Now, we must all live with the terrible consequences.

Tennis is, according to reliable sources, an absurdly difficult game. Sometime around the Edberg era, a club was formed near where I grew up but was disbanded after the ball was lost in a gale. This column's enthusiasm for the sport took a nosedive after it endured a love set from a lad serving, due to a severe shortage of equipment, with a hurley. But that experience was not enough to end the general, vague interest in tennis that Wimbledon is primarily responsible for cultivating in us all. One could not but be fascinated by the succession of oddball characters that visited us each year, people for whom the lifestyle choice between tennis and serial killing appeared to be a close call.

Could you honestly have opened Ivan Lendl's fridge doors and be 100 per cent certain of just finding strawberries? And when the commentators said something like "Michael Pernfors has totally disappeared from the game over the past few years", what exactly did they mean? With guys like Jimmy Connors around, you had to wonder.

Of course, the cast of characters has become regrettably bland since the golden era of the late 1970s/'80s. The main characteristic of the current heroes is that they all have surnames that defy pronunciation. Players with over five syllables should be banned or made to enter a separate tournament for a wild-card entry. Philippoussis. Nalbandian. Nieminen. Fine if you are a manufacturer of car stereos. But it runs against the Wimbledon grain, where they like neat and unfussy names. Laver. Borg, Graf. Becker. Martina. And now, Tim.

Imagine being Tim Henman. Overnight, it seems he has gone from being the fresh prince of British tennis to a clapped out royal under excruciating pressure to sire an heir. It is as if his failure to land the Wimbledon championship will be regarded by future historians as the definitive end of Empire.

Tennis, with its etiquette and rules, its associations with barley water and preoccupation with rain, its echoes of chauvinism and John Betjeman's visions of comeliness (To see the golden hiking girl/ With wind about her hair, the tennis playing, biking girl/ The wholly-to-my-liking girl/ To see and not to care) . . . tennis is the game that best sums up the England of manners.

This week alone brought proof the Empire was probably not worth persevering with in the first place - Greg Rusedski's unmasking as a barbarian. The torrent that flew from Rusedski's mouth just highlighted how cultured, how very English, John McEnroe's celebrated centre-court performances were.

McEnroe played the game. In hindsight, there is something Shakespearean about his howling against the deity in the high wooden chair. "You are the pits of the world." It was a classical rage against the gods. In comparison, Rusedski was merely uncouth.

Now that Canada is welcome to keep poor Greg, hope springs eternal in the slender breast of poor Tim. The emotion that such a mild-mannered young man provokes is a perfect example of why Wimbledon is weird.

Fate and circumstance have thrust Tim forward as the man who would be king. Young William is only trotting after him. Most of England, it seems, descends with wicker baskets and Union Jacks and umbrellas to relive, through Tim's fortunes on a tennis court, a sun-drenched, crust-cut-sandwich, boozy and ever so slightly naughty way of life that seems almost elegiac in its merriment.

Tim is perfect in image and spirit. He looks like he enjoys nothing more than a good tramp through the woods. And while he is good enough at tennis to inspire genuine hopes, old bean, he is flaky enough to almost guarantee heartbreak, the exquisite clause of the Wimbledon experience.

I have seen Tim interviewed about one million times this week but cannot remember a word he said. The overriding impression is of a decent fellow who finds the whole Wimbledon thing a bit bewildering.

It is hard to imagine that the fans of Henman would care - or even know - if he won a major tournament abroad. Their feeling is that tennis begins and ends with the centre court of Wimbledon.

This is the only event in the world that still allows those stiff-lipped BBC types to use phrases like "the last surviving Briton". The solemn roll-call of the fallen after the first day's play makes Wimbledon sound like Flanders.

Once more into the breach, then, for poor Tim. Sometime over the next few days he will undoubtedly be crushed by some crass American or an automaton from new Europe. But on middle Saturday, the champagne flows and the strawberries taste sweet and the sun never sets.

Dear old Wimbledon. It is the last cry of a land that no longer exists, if indeed it ever did. So strange and English. So certain to end in tears. What would the summer be without it?