Anyone for tennis? If you can get in, that is
Telford Vice queues for more than three hours to watch a few minutes of play at Wimbledon
COME in No 11 850 — your time is up. So it was, but not before I had queued for more than three hours waiting to spend the equivalent of R224 on a second-hand ticket to watch the last gasp of a day’s play at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. That is Wimbledon to you and me.
Were there really 11 849 people ahead of me in the queue? Yes. Having taken five minutes to walk from the front of the phalanx to its rear, I was handed a ticket proclaiming me as No 11 850. My partner was No 11 851.
Not that our queue tickets guaranteed that, by the time we reached the gate, tickets to actually see some tennis would still be available.
That would depend on how many of the spectators had had their fill — having endured the previous night in a tent adjacent to the queue and lined up in the dense darkness before dawn. However many relinquished their tickets would be replaced by the likes of us — Nos 11 850 and 11 851.
What if the tickets ran out at No 11 849? Worse yet, at 11 850? Would I wave my love a sweet goodbye and promise to take lots of pictures? Would I swap queue tickets with her? Like bloody hell.
You need thoughts like these to get you through three hours in a queue. And others: after 10 minutes at least another 200 souls had joined the purgatory. Besides, things could have been worse — we could have been doing this in miserable drizzle.
Instead, the dirty grey duvet of cloud that covers the sky for much of the “Great British Summer” kept us cool and comfortable.
An hour in and a great leap forward of about 200m shattered the boredom of listening to the man behind us interrogating his son about his girlfriend — “But is she interesting?” — and watching the chubby daughter of the family in front of us scoff all her strawberries.
Why the lurch? We did not know and we did not care. Sud- denly the world was a better place.
But not for long. Soon we were looking for mental fodder to fill the time. Attention turned to how heart-broken the kid was who dropped what was now a slowly melting scoop of ice-cream on the path and when the mother, who was try- ing in vain to make her runaround son do his homework, would lose it and deliver a self-satisfying smack upside the head.
We had arrived to join the queue at 4pm. At 7.03pm we saw our first shot played in anger in the match between Karolina Pliskova and Nadia Petrova, the 13th seed, on court 12. At 7.09pm Pliskova completed a 6-3 6-2 victory. So, 183 minutes of waiting had earned us six minutes of tennis.
But wait. There was more in the shape of a taut, tense clash between 32nd seed Klara Zakopalova and Daniela Hantuchova. It was studded with deuces, ripped through with fierce ground strokes, sprinkled with net cords and curdled with shrieking.
“Can you tell them to keep quiet,” Zakopalova had the arrogance to ask the umpire when the burble of passing spectators — relieved to be done with that damned queue — rose too high for her liking.
Keep quiet? After all the effort made and money spent by people like us to watch people like her not do a real job? Keep quiet? Go to hell.
She did. She lost her footing, her temper, the big points and the match. No 11 850 was not unhappy.