Andy Murray needed to grow up and Sharapova is stuck up!
VIRGINIA WADE IS IN WASPISH MOOD AS SPORTSMAIL VISITS HER MANHATTAN HOME...
“Andy used to make excuses... just like I did”
As VIRGINIA WADE settles into her local coffee bar on Manhattan’s Upper East side, around the corner from where she has effectively called home since the midseventies, she says: ‘The thing is, I still feel incredibly British.’
It will come as a surprise to many that the woman who delivered one of our most iconic post-war sporting triumphs has long since been the Englishwoman in New York.
While Wade has always maintained a base in London, she is a long-time American resident, having fled the punishing tax regime and suffocating attention that accompanied the height of her fame.
This summer is the 40th anniversary of her winning Wimbledon. 1977 was the year of the silver Jubilee and punk rock, and in the middle of it is the image of Wade in her pink cardigan, receiving the trophy from the Queen after finally triumphing at her 16th attempt.
People of a certain age will recall Her Majesty, famously uninterested in tennis, making a very rare visit to sW19 and handing over the Venus Rosewater dish while the crowd sang, incongruously: ‘For she’s a jolly good fellow’. Only at Wimbledon.
Wade is now 71 but retains those vivid eyes and a line in conversation that is always illuminating, perceptive and occasionally waspish.
You would expect nothing less from someone of her pedigree: a champion, daughter of an archdeacon, partly raised in south Africa who, barely two years before she won the 1968 Us Open, gained a mathematics degree from sussex University.
In between divulging the inside story on her remarkable Wimbledon victory, she visits more contemporary topics. There is the return of Maria sharapova, the parlous state of women’s tennis and her relationship with Andy Murray, which is complex and distant at the same time.
There is some mild irritation that the world No 1 almost commandeered the number 77 after his 2013 win, representing the length of time since another British male, Fred Perry, had lifted the men’s title.
It was widely noted when Murray won, although not by Wade, that many commentators omitted to mention that the ending of the title drought ignored female successes.
‘What Andy did after 77 years was fantastic,’ she says. ‘The only thing that upset me a little bit was he took 77 as his number and my most memorable year was ’77, and he named his management company after it. I sort of feel 77 was my number as well. so there was a bit of plagiarism there, but he has done so well.’
Wade remains a regular visitor to London but is likely to miss the start of her 40th anniversary tournament this summer because she is in the process of moving out to a new place on Long Island.
By the time she approached her 16th Wimbledon, having already won the Australian and Us Opens, she was based in America.
‘I had moved to New York, partly because I played Team Tennis (a mixed-gender professional league) here and I could do my own thing and felt very comfortable. Taxation was 83 per cent in the UK at the time as well,’ she says.
she was just shy of her 32nd birthday as Wimbledon loomed in 1977. ‘In the two years before that my whole playing level went up,’ she says. ‘When I won the Us Open in ’68 it was just one of those tournaments when I couldn’t do anything wrong, but I didn’t know why I had won it.
‘I really felt the pressure after that. It took me quite a while to get consistent again but I started to play well again in ’71. By 1975 I was much more professional, and found I could stay calm and not panic when things went wrong. I’d had a bad reputation for being temperamental and making excuses but I managed to find a way to cope with everything. In ’75 I was ready to win Wimbledon but played Evonne (Goolagong). I always found her a particularly difficult opponent and lost 9-7 in the third on the Centre Court.’
But she felt something was right two years later, especially after a chance encounter with Brazilian legend Maria Bueno at the start of the tournament.
‘On the opening day Wimbledon had a parade of past champions which Maria had featured in. I saw her afterwards and she told me that I would be up there the next time they did one.
‘she won Wimbledon when I was growing up in south Africa (Wade lived there from aged 2 to 15 when her father was appointed Archdeacon of Durban) and used to listen to Wimbledon on the radio as we didn’t have TV. she was