‘Big dogs’ of SW19 have not had their fill just yet
All England Club expansion comes a step closer, but grand plan does not stop there in slam arms race, says Simon Briggs
Accounts have taken a hit, but capacity issues have been solved at a stroke
At some point in the Eighties, a tennis team from the All England Club played a social match at Dublin’s Fitzwilliam Club. At the bar afterwards, an Irish player was surprised to hear that the All England Club had only 375 full members to choose from. “Have you thought of advertising?” he replied.
At the risk of explaining the joke, the All England Club are actually one of the most elitist and inaccessible clubs in the world.
As Tim Henman has pointed out: “The easiest way to get in is to win Wimbledon.” If you include honorary and temporary members, the number rises, but only to 565. And those few, those happy few, are part of a true juggernaut: an organisation who keep upgrading themselves like some self-aware machine from a sciencefiction movie.
The latest development was confirmed on Thursday night. After much debate and discussion, the 758 members of Wimbledon Park Golf Club – whose number include the unlikely trio of Ant Mcpartlin, Declan Donnelly and Piers Morgan – finally voted to hand the 73-acre course back to their wealthier neighbours across Church Road.
Yes, the All England Club’s accounts might have taken a £65million hit, as a result of paying just under £86,000 to each and every golfer. But never mind: SW19’S capacity issues have just been solved at a stroke.
When the results came in, champagne corks must have popped in the offices alongside Centre Court. This is a moment that Philip Brook, the All England Club chairman, has been pursuing for a decade. In the ongoing arms race between the four slams, the world’s oldest tournament can now compete with its larger rivals.
The first intention is to build 25 new courts, thereby freeing up the practice site at Aorangi Park and easing the crush around the existing 43-acre grounds. A new arrangement for the famous Wimbledon queue is also on the cards.
Do not expect the expansion to stop there, however. Because there is still a square on the map that the All England Club does not control, and it belongs to the Wimbledon Club – yet another members’ organisation sitting in the prime spot opposite Gate 5, straight across the road from the tournament’s main entrance.
At the moment, the golf course folds around the Wimbledon Club’s facilities – which include a pavilion, a cricket field and 16 tennis courts – like some giant oxbow lake. But the theory around these leafy streets is that a deal could be struck in which they moved to a different, less prominent area within the bounds of the golf course.
It would not be easy and it would not be cheap. There are plenty of protected trees to avoid, and the rolling terrain would have to be flattened to make new sporting facilities. But the Wimbledon Club’s members could probably be convinced to move to a bigger site, if only because they would like to add a hockey pitch.
The next move in this process is probably a few months away. The golfers will keep swinging until January 2022 in any case, so there will be time for Brook and his successor (he is due to step down in a year) to formulate their latest master plan.
But it would be unlike the All England Club to accept a sub-optimal solution, with the Wimbledon Club sitting between the old site and the new like a gooseberry on a blind date.
The lesson of the golf club saga is that money talks, and the All England Club get what they want in the end. As one observer put it: “They are used to seeing themselves as the big dogs around here.”
Even if they do not like to advertise it.