T A B L E_T A L K Calling all expats! Share your tales of living abroad in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y The Cup runneth over and over By Ethan Zindler Professional scalpers and amateur partyers in Marseille (07/07/98) World Cup scenes By Matthew McAllester Passion and indifference mix in rural France (07/07/98) Hog heaven By David Kohn At the Memphis World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest (07/03/98) Mondo Weirdo Nude Beach of the Week Readers bare all on an isolated Maui beach -- and in the heart of Munich (07/03/98) Yankee, go home! By Michaela Griffin Being an American expatriate in Beijing was great -- until the president's visit (07/02/98) Browse the Wanderlust Postmark archives		________- - - - - - - - - MICE AND MIST AND MIRTHLESSNESS MIX AT THE ALL ENGLAND LAWN TENNIS AND CROQUET CLUB. BY SIMON WORRALL | WIMBLEDON, England-- Toward the end of the first day of play on the Centre Court at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, in the leafy borough of Wimbledon, where the gardens groan with hollyhocks and buddleia, broom and roses, Yevgeny Kafelnikov, the No. 7 seed from Russia, was about to receive service from Mark Philippoussis, when he spotted a small, tan-colored field mouse tiptoeing about in the corner of the court. Professional tennis players have many things to distract them: their love lives, the state of their bank accounts, their rankings and, above all, their egos. Field mice are usually not one of them. But this is the land of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and the tailor of Gloucester, so Kafelnikov greeted the appearance of a mouse on Centre Court with the same bemused indulgence that foreign players treat Wimbledon's other eccentricities -- its unpredictable grass and mercurial weather, its baffling line calls and obscure codes of manners. He walked over to the mouse and, politely waving his racket, shooed it away. Still, the incident clearly unnerved him, for a few hours later he was packing his bags, having been knocked out, in four sets, by the bullet-serving Australian. For its part, the field mouse disappeared down its hole, and has not been seen again. It is not the first time that nature has intervened at Wimbledon. Some years ago, a pigeon got into Centre Court and play had to be suspended as the bird flapped around the stands. Another year, a pied wagtail landed on the grass and began hopping about, setting off Cyclops each time it stepped on the lines. And this year, as it nearly always does, the weather has played as important a role in the outcome of the first week's matches as the mental preparedness of the players or their first serve percentage. The rain in Spain may stay mainly on the plain. In England, it falls on SW19 -- right where Wimbledon is located. Indeed, a whole section of "The Wimbledon Compendium," by Alan Little, is devoted to the weather at Wimbledon since the tournament moved to its present location in 1922. It makes depressing reading: "The first meeting at the Church Road ground was plagued by rain each day" begins the entry for 1922. "Much of the fortnight was dogged by wind and rain" (1939). "One of the wettest first weeks ever" (1958). "A cold miserable meeting" (1963). There are occasional memories of fine weather -- 1964 is lauded as "a fortnight of warm and sunny weather" -- and even the occasional back-to-back run of sunshine: 1983's "wonderful weather" is followed by "superb weather" for 1984. But only four years -- 1931, 1976, 1993 and 1995 -- receive the supreme accolade, italicized for emphasis: "No rain during meeting." As the District Line train pulled into Southfields tube station, the mercury was barely into the 50s. (One more eccentricity is that you do not get out at the station named Wimbledon, or even Wimbledon Park, if you want to go to the tennis tournament of that name, but at Southfields.) People were dressed in anoraks and pullovers. Everyone had an umbrella. And though the rain had not actually started to fall by the time I reached Court 2, where Goran Ivanesevic was two sets up against the Czech, Daniel Vacek, the sky looked like the horizon in one of William Turner's more tempestuous seascapes. With his full beard and purple bandanna, Ivanesevic looked more than ever like a member of some obscure, Balkan guerrilla group that survives in the woods by skinning rabbits and holding up travelers at gunpoint. His tennis looked very sharp. Ace after ace came blistering over the grass, to land with a thud against the tarpaulins at the back of the court or be swatted away, like wasps at a picnic, by the stout-calved lady line judges who stared down the chalk, their leaf-patterned, shirtwaist dresses -- "English boarding-school, circa 1933" is how a colleague from The Daily Mail described the style -- billowing in the breeze. I had watched only three games when a chill wind began to blow, and the first raindrops began to fall. Moments later, play was suspended and that familiar Wimbledon ritual, the rolling out of the tarpaulins, began. Slinging his bags over his shoulder, Ivanesevic sprinted off the court, presumably to go and skin a few more rabbits. I headed out onto the South Concourse, which had already turned into a sea of umbrellas that jostled and snagged against each other. Among the waterlogged crowd, I spotted the mother of Venus and Serena Williams. The week before, she had accidentally fallen down the stairs at her rented Wimbledon house and broken her ankle, so she was being propelled around the courts in a wheelchair. Though she had the hood of her anorak up, it could not hide the fact that she was completely miserable and hating every minute of her time in damp, chilly England. By Wednesday, her daughters would be even more miserable, Serena going out to Virginia Ruano Pascual, of Spain; and Venus dissolving into a cauldron of boiling teenage emotions as she was bumped off Centre Court by Jana Novotna -- thus robbing an eager London crowd of the chance of hearing not one, but two sets of beads rattling simultaneously. Coping with rain delays is one of the toughest challenges that Wimbledon poses for the players. Bjorn Borg used to play cards and backgammon in the locker room. Pete Sampras, whose second-round match against Thomas Enquist this year turned into a three-day roller-coaster ride, whiled away the time watching golf on TV. Players have even been known to read a book, though the locker rooms are not exactly famous for their literary conversations. An exception to the general philistinism was Boris Becker. During a rain delay one year, he sat in the stands on the Centre Court reading a novel by Camus. The ground staff evidently has its own strategies for passing the time. One year, when the tent was removed from Centre Court, officials found an empty bottle of champagne and a used condom. The greatest challenge Wimbledon poses, however, is the grass itself. Most players, particularly at the beginning of their careers, hate it. But as Andre Agassi learned many years ago, you either humble yourself to the grass, or the grass will humble you. For prima donnas like Marcello Rios, the idea of humbling yourself to anything is, of course, anathema. So, like many underachievers before him, he blamed his failure at Wimbledon this year on the green stuff. "Grass is for cows," he said, as he was bounced out of the tournament in 1997. This year, he declared that grass produces "boring" tennis. In so doing, Rios not only confirmed his reputation as the most arrogant player on the tour, he also showed himself to be dumb. Because if there is one thing that the grass of Wimbledon does not produce, it is boring tennis. That distinction goes to red clay, where the balls swell, and become heavy, and where the tennis becomes a war of attrition with two players pounding the ball from the back of the court with heavy topspin, back and forth, back and forth, until one of them makes a mistake. Grass, by contrast, is the fastest, most mercurial and most challenging surface there is. The ball does not so much bounce as it shoots, rarely rising much above the knee (clay courters are used to hitting the ball at shoulder height) and losing little of its speed. Many players simply cannot cope with the pace (not to mention the occasional uneven bounce) or the particular exigencies that it requires. Even the way one's foot lands on grass -- a light dab, rather than the full-weight landing and sliding as one does on clay -- is different. Above all, the grass forces players off the baseline and to the net. The back of the court, particularly in the second week, when the grass starts to get cut up, spells death. Consequently, serve and volley is the name of the game here: getting to the ball before it bounces, not afterward. This is why all the great Wimbledon champions of the past, such as McEnroe, Navratilova and Laver (Borg being the sole exception) have been natural serve and volleyers. Baseline sluggers like Agassi or Courier -- or Rios -- generally fare badly. Wimbledon has seen and heard it all: the racket throwers and spoilsports, the bad losers and crybabies. But deep in his heart, every player knows that this is The Big One; that if he wants to be considered one of the greats, he will have to have his name etched onto the silver Challenge Cup, which, since 1877, has borne the name of every men's champion, or the Ladies' Singles Plate, also known as The Venus Rosewater Dish, which, since 1886, has been awarded to the women's champion. Wimbledon is the crucible of tennis, the place where the game was born and where the cumulative weight of its history and traditions are that much more imposing than anywhere else. Ultimately, there are only two tennis tournaments in the world: Wimbledon, and the rest. N E X T+P A G E | Sir Cliff Richard keeps the soggy fans happy