Centre Court at Wimbledon is widely regarded as the most famous tennis court in the world. It has hosted every Wimbledon singles final since 1922, survived a World War II bombing, been rebuilt in stages across a century, and accumulated a weight of history that no other tennis venue can approach.

Here is the complete story of how it came to be, how it changed, and why it still matters.

Why It Is Called Centre Court

The name has a literal origin that most people never know. At the All England Croquet Club’s original site on Worple Road in Wimbledon, the courts were laid out in a grid. In 1881, the two middle courts of the middle row were combined to form a single, larger principal court. Because it sat at the centre of all the other courts, it was called Centre Court.

When the club relocated to Church Road in 1922, the name travelled with it — even though the new Centre Court was not, at first, geographically central to the other courts at the new site.

It was not until a further four courts were added in 1980 that Centre Court’s location in the grounds again matched its name. The name had outlasted its original meaning by nearly 60 years before reality caught up with it.

From Worple Road to Church Road: The 1922 Move

By the end of the First World War, tennis had grown far beyond what the Worple Road site could accommodate. Public appetite for the sport had expanded dramatically, crowds were exceeding the venue’s capacity, and the All England Club needed a larger, purpose-built home. In 1920, land at Church Road was purchased and construction began soon after.

It took thousands of tons of shingle, sand, and cement — and a little over nine months — to complete the court. The all-important turf was imported from Cumberland. The new Centre Court opened on 26 June 1922, with a combined seating and standing capacity in the region of 13,000.

The design by architect Captain Stanley Peach reflected the character of its era: reserved, intimate, structured, and unmistakably British. Wooden bench seating, an open-air bowl, and a partial roof over the stands that shielded some spectators from rain while leaving the court itself fully exposed to the English summer sky.

The first match played on the new Centre Court was an opening-round men’s singles tie between Algernon Kingscote and Leslie Godfree, won by Kingscote in straight sets after a rain-affected start. King George V and Queen Mary attended the opening day — beginning a relationship between Centre Court and the Crown that has continued without interruption ever since. Suzanne Lenglen went on to dominate the women’s singles that year, conceding only a handful of games on her way to the title.

A Bomb, Repairs, and Decades of Evolution

Centre Court survived the Second World War — but only just. In October 1940, five 500lb bombs struck the stadium during an air raid, destroying 1,200 seats. The Championships were suspended entirely from 1940 to 1945, and the grounds served as a working farm and as an ARP headquarters during the war years.

Although the Championships resumed in 1946, the court was not fully repaired until 1949. That the fabric of the building survived at all — let alone that it was restored and returned to competitive use — reflects the practical resilience that has characterized the All England Club throughout its history.

Post-war, the changes came steadily. The famous Clubhouse balcony was added in 1955. The East Building was constructed in 1967, followed by the North Building in 1975. Each addition increased capacity modestly while attempting to preserve the intimate character of the original bowl.

In 1979, the original roof was raised by one metre to allow capacity to be increased by 1,088. Further building work came in 1992 with a replacement of the roof and a modified support structure, which gave 3,601 seats a clearer view of the court that had previously been restricted by roof supports.

The Retractable Roof: An Engineering Solution to a Century-Old Problem

Rain has been disrupting play at Centre Court since 1877 — the very first Wimbledon final was postponed by rain. For most of the court’s history, this was simply accepted as part of the English summer experience. Players waited. Spectators sheltered. Play resumed when the weather allowed.

The tradition of the Wimbledon rain delay became so embedded in British culture that it generated its own rituals, including the occasions when Cliff Richard would spontaneously perform for restless crowds on Centre Court while waiting for the weather to pass.

The decision to build a retractable roof came after years of debate and was catalyzed most dramatically by the 2008 men’s final between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal — a match that lasted nearly seven hours, was interrupted twice by rain, and ended in near-darkness as officials debated whether to suspend play for the night.

The match is widely regarded as one of the greatest in tennis history; it also made the case for the roof more powerfully than any administrative argument could.

The engineering challenge was formidable. The primary design requirement was that the roof must not block the natural light that sustains the grass — the most important thing to determine was how not to block the sunlight that feeds the world’s most visible patch of turf.

The result is a hydraulically operated structure of translucent fabric supported by steel trusses, spanning roughly 5,200 square metres when fully deployed. The translucent PTFE fabric, supplied by W.L. Gore and Associates, transmits around 40 percent of natural light — enough to maintain the grass in playable condition when the roof is closed.

The roof’s ten trusses each weigh 100 tonnes, with total moving and fixed weight of around 3,000 tonnes. Each truss moves along a track at 214 millimetres per second, driven by hydraulic jacks, and the two sections meet in an overlapping seam above the middle of the court.

The roof takes around 10 minutes to close, during which time play is suspended. The full transition from outdoor to indoor play can take up to 45 minutes once the air-conditioning system acclimatizes the stadium for indoor grass competition.

That air-management system is as critical as the roof itself. A closed Centre Court with nearly 15,000 people generating body heat and breath moisture creates conditions that could, without intervention, produce condensation on the underside of the roof fabric or sweating on the grass surface — either of which would make the court slippery and unplayable.

The system maintains humidity and temperature within a narrow band that keeps both the grass and the playing conditions safe.

The retractable roof was unveiled in April 2009 and tested with a capacity audience during an exhibition match on 17 May 2009, featuring Andre Agassi, Steffi Graf, Tim Henman, and Kim Clijsters.

The first competitive use came on 29 June 2009, during a fourth-round women’s singles match. The first full match played under the closed roof was between Andy Murray and Stanislas Wawrinka, which ended at 10:38pm — later than any Centre Court match in history to that point.

The Kipling Inscription

Etched into the wall above the players’ entrance to Centre Court are two lines from Rudyard Kipling’s 1910 poem If: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same.”

The inscription was in place by the 2008 Championships — that year, Federer and Nadal each recorded a recitation of the passage for a feature aired during rain delays at the men’s final — and has greeted players walking onto the court ever since.

It is placed at eye level, in a simple elegant font, so that every player entering Centre Court passes it in the moments before they step onto the most famous court in the world. The quote symbolizes the mental resilience required in professional tennis, aligning with Wimbledon’s emphasis on graceful conduct under pressure.

Whether it helps, or whether players notice it at all when the adrenaline of a Wimbledon match is already rising, is impossible to know. But its placement is deliberately intentional: the All England Club chose to remind every player, at the most consequential moment of their working day, that the outcome — whatever it is — should be received with equanimity.

The choice of Kipling is itself characteristically Wimbledon. If is one of the most recognizable poems in the English language, taught in British schools for generations, and its values — stoicism, self-control, perseverance, dignity in both victory and defeat — are precisely the values the All England Club has always believed Wimbledon should embody.

What Centre Court Has Witnessed

The history of Centre Court is, in a very real sense, the history of tennis. Every Wimbledon singles final since 1922 has been played on this court. The list of champions who have won on it spans the entire story of the sport’s development: Suzanne Lenglen, Helen Wills Moody, Fred Perry, Don Budge, Maureen Connolly, Rod Laver, Billie Jean King, Björn Borg, Martina Navratilova, John McEnroe, Steffi Graf, Pete Sampras, Serena Williams, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic have all lifted the Wimbledon trophy here.

Martina Navratilova won nine Wimbledon singles titles on this court — more than any other player. Roger Federer won eight. Pete Sampras and Serena Williams each won seven. The combined weight of those records on a single court, across a century of competition, is without parallel in sport.

The court has also hosted moments that transcended tennis entirely. Billie Jean King’s victories here in the 1970s, delivered in the same years she was fighting for equal prize money and recognition for women’s tennis worldwide, gave Centre Court a cultural significance beyond sport.

Arthur Ashe’s 1975 victory — the first Black man to win Wimbledon singles — was achieved on this court, in front of a full house, in the same year he was publicly advocating for change in a sport whose traditions did not always welcome it.

Centre Court and the Olympics

Centre Court has been part of two Olympic Games. In 1908, the London Olympics included tennis at the original Worple Road site. More than a century later, Centre Court — along with No. 1 Court and No. 2 Court — hosted the tennis competition at the 2012 Summer Olympics.

Andy Murray won gold at the London Games on Centre Court, defeating Roger Federer in the final on the same court where Federer had beaten him in the Wimbledon final just four weeks earlier. Murray described winning in front of a home crowd on Centre Court as one of the most significant moments of his career — a turning point in what had been, until then, a complicated relationship with the court.

The Meaning of the Court

Centre Court means something beyond its function as a playing surface. It is the physical location where the sport’s longest continuous tradition has been enacted — where the same tournament has been held, on the same grass, by the same institution, for over a century. Other Grand Slam venues are larger, louder, more commercially powerful. None of them carries this particular weight.

The court’s meaning is inseparable from what it asks of the people who play on it. The Kipling inscription. The silence of 15,000 people between points. The knowledge that every player who has ever been great in this sport has stood on this exact rectangle of grass and been tested.

Players describe the experience, more often than not, in terms that go beyond the technical vocabulary of tennis. They say it is different. They say you feel it before the first ball is struck.

The Bottom Line

Centre Court at Wimbledon is a building that has been bombed, rebuilt, incrementally expanded, given a roof after decades of delay, and etched with poetry. It has hosted more than a century of finals, an Olympic gold medal match, and some of the most significant moments in the history of professional sport.

Its grass surface is maintained at 8 millimetres — a detail that requires year-round attention, specific seed varieties, and precise mowing schedules. Its name derives from a court layout that no longer exists. And it remains, by the consensus of players, officials, and observers across every era of the sport, the most important tennis court in the world.

Every Grand Slam has a personality, but only one of them feels like arriving somewhere that exists outside of ordinary time. The Australian Open is a festival. The French Open is an examination. The US Open is a spectacle.

Wimbledon is something else entirely — a fortnight in which a private club in southwest London imposes its values on the entire sport, and the sport accepts them without complaint. Here is why Wimbledon feels different, and why that difference is felt by everyone who enters the grounds.

The Location Does Something to You Before You Arrive

Getting to Wimbledon is not like getting to any other Grand Slam. You take the District Line on the London Underground — one of the oldest metro lines in the world — to Southfields or Wimbledon station, and then you walk. Past Victorian terraces. Through quiet residential streets. Past front gardens where homeowners rent their driveways as car parks and sell cups of tea from card tables.

The approach to the All England Club does not feel like arriving at one of the world’s great sporting venues. It feels like walking into a particularly well-attended village fete.

This is not an accident. Wimbledon sits in SW19, a leafy, well-heeled suburb of London where tennis has been played since the 1870s. The All England Club is not an arena dropped into an urban landscape, like Arthur Ashe Stadium rising from the Flushing Meadows park infrastructure of Queens.

It is a private members’ club with manicured grounds, a clubhouse, and a Members’ Enclosure from which spectators have watched The Championships since 1877. The neighborhood has shaped the tournament, and the tournament has shaped the neighborhood. You feel it on the approach in a way you simply cannot replicate at any of the other three Slams.

Centre Court Is Smaller Than You Expect

First-time visitors to Centre Court almost universally report the same surprise: it is more intimate than television suggests. The court holds just under 15,000 spectators — roughly 9,000 fewer than Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York, and the reason Centre Court feels so different from the US Open’s main arena.

The stands wrap tightly around the playing surface. The upper tier is close enough that you can read a player’s expression clearly. The grass is, from almost any seat in the house, strikingly present — a luminous rectangle of green that draws the eye in a way that blue hard courts and red clay simply do not.

The intimacy of the space produces a specific kind of quiet. When 15,000 people at Centre Court go silent — as they do between points, and as they are expected to do during play — the silence is full and complete in a way that a crowd of that size almost never achieves. It is a communal act of attention, and you feel its weight the moment you experience it.

Players notice it too. Many have described the sensation of walking onto Centre Court for the first time as unlike anything else in sport — the combination of the history, the silence, the grass, and the almost theatrical sense of occasion producing a physical response that no other venue replicates.

The Silence Is Enforced by Social Pressure, Not Rules

Wimbledon has no formal rule requiring crowd silence during points. There is no announcement, no sign, no instruction given to spectators when they take their seats.

The silence is maintained entirely through social convention — through the shared understanding, absorbed through decades of television coverage and cultural transmission, that at Wimbledon, you do not speak during a rally. You do not cheer mid-point. You certainly do not make noise that might disturb a player’s concentration.

The contrast with the US Open is total. At Arthur Ashe Stadium, the crowd cheers during points, reacts audibly to errors, and brings the habits of New York sports culture to the tennis. At Centre Court, the crowd waits.

They applaud at the end of a rally. They hold their breath during a long exchange. And when something extraordinary happens — a between-the-legs winner, a match point saved, a great champion’s final bow — the release of that held breath into sudden, complete noise is one of the most powerful sounds in sport precisely because of the silence that preceded it.

This dynamic — silence as the baseline, noise as the exception — is specific to Wimbledon among the Grand Slams. The tennis feels more serious. The points feel more consequential. The players feel closer. The whole occasion feels, without any announcement or instruction, like something that matters.

There Is No Advertising on Centre Court

Sit in the stands of Arthur Ashe Stadium, Court Philippe-Chatrier, or Rod Laver Arena, and you are surrounded by sponsor branding. Boards around the court. Digital displays. Branded everything. This is the commercial reality of professional tennis in the 21st century, and it is entirely normal at three of the four Grand Slams.

Centre Court at Wimbledon has no advertising. The courtside boards are dark green. The background visible behind the players when a camera frames a shot from the baseline is the green of the stands, not a sponsor’s logo.

The visual cleanliness of the Wimbledon television picture — white players on green grass against green stands, with no branding competing for attention — is distinctive and deliberate, and it has been maintained in the face of commercial pressure that would have broken any less resolute institution.

Catherine, Princess of Wales has been Patron of the All England Club since 2016, taking over the role from Queen Elizabeth II. The relationship between the Club and the British royal family is one of the structural reasons the tournament has been able to resist certain commercial arrangements. It is not the only reason, but it is part of the picture.

The Walk Onto Centre Court Is a Ritual

At most Grand Slams, players walk onto the court. At Wimbledon, they are accompanied onto Centre Court through a specific ceremonial walk that has been part of the tournament’s identity for generations.

The last thing a player sees before stepping onto the court is a line from Rudyard Kipling’s 1910 poem If, etched into the wall of the players’ corridor: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same.”

Dan Bloxham, the All England Club’s Head Coach and Master of Ceremonies during The Championships, accompanies players on that walk. His job may be to ensure players arrive on time, but the role is far more personal — managing nerves, restoring calm, and upholding tradition in the most quietly pivotal moments of the tournament.

Players have described the walk as the moment Wimbledon becomes real — when the sounds of the club, the smell of the grass, and the rising murmur of an expectant crowd combine into something that no amount of preparation fully equips you for.

The walk is not unique to Wimbledon in the technical sense — players walk onto courts at every tournament. But the deliberateness of it, the poetry on the wall, the specific person whose job it is to guide you through it, and the weight of everything that has happened on that court before you — all of it makes the Centre Court walk-on one of the distinctive experiences in professional sport.

Henman Hill: The Grand Slam Without a Ticket

One of Wimbledon’s most beloved spaces is not a court at all. The grassy bank outside No. 1 Court — known for years as Henman Hill, and more recently as Murray Mound — is where fans without show-court tickets gather to watch matches on a large screen, picnic, drink Pimm’s, and experience the tournament from the outside in.

The collective reaction of thousands of people on that hill to a key moment on Centre Court — a gasp when a favorite is broken, a roar when a match point is saved — is one of the defining sounds of the British sporting summer.

No other Grand Slam has an equivalent. The Melbourne Park grounds pass allows fans to wander outer courts freely, but there is no single gathering point with the cultural resonance of the Hill. Roland Garros has terraces and promenades, but nothing that functions as a democratic, informal civic space in the same way.

The US Open has general admission areas, but Queens in late August is not a picnic-on-grass situation in the way that southwest London in early July can occasionally be. Henman Hill is Wimbledon in miniature — tradition, informality, community, and the specific quality of English summer light, all in one place.

The Queue Is Part of the Experience

The Wimbledon Queue — the line of fans camping outside the grounds to purchase day-of tickets — has been part of the tournament since 1927 and has developed into something that is, for many participants, as memorable as the tennis itself.

The Queue has its own published code of conduct, its own etiquette, and its own social world. Campers arrive with tents, folding chairs, and food. Communities form over days of waiting.

Several hundred of the very best Centre Court seats are released each day of the tournament for queue-goers — a number that, alongside No. 1 Court and No. 2 Court allocations, makes Wimbledon effectively the only Grand Slam where determination and a sleeping bag can put a true tennis fan on the most prestigious court in the sport.

That guarantee — that access to the world’s most famous tennis court is available to anyone with the patience to wait for it — is one of the quietly important things about Wimbledon’s identity.

It does not resolve the tournament’s broader issues with exclusivity and ticket access, but it is a genuine and maintained commitment to democratic access at the very top of the house.

The Weather Is a Participant

No other Grand Slam has the same relationship with the weather as Wimbledon. The tournament is held in late June and early July in England — a country whose summer climate is sufficiently unreliable that rain interruptions have been a feature of The Championships for as long as the tournament has existed.

The retractable roof on Centre Court, installed in 2009, and the roof on No. 1 Court, added in 2019, have reduced disruption on the main show courts — but the outer courts remain exposed, and English weather does not observe the tournament schedule.

Rain at Wimbledon is not an inconvenience. It is, in a deeply British way, part of the occasion. Spectators are experienced in the ritual of the rain delay — the sudden covering of the court, the retreat to hospitality areas, the patient waiting with a glass of Pimm’s until play resumes.

The uncertainty of whether a match will be completed in a day, or whether it will be interrupted three times before the light fades and the 11pm curfew intervenes, adds a specific unpredictability to the Wimbledon experience that no other Grand Slam — all held in climates considerably more reliable than southwest London’s — can produce.

The Bottom Line

Wimbledon feels different because everything about it — the location, the grass, the silence, the advertising-free Centre Court, the walk-on ceremony, the Queue, the Hill, the weather, and the unbroken continuity of an institution that has been doing this since 1877 — is the product of deliberate choices maintained over generations.

It is not trying to be the biggest, the loudest, or the most commercially successful Grand Slam. It is trying to be Wimbledon. And the consistency with which it achieves that, year after year, in the face of every pressure to be something else, is precisely what makes it feel unlike anything else in sport.

Of all the traditions that define Wimbledon, none is more immediately visible or more strictly enOf all the traditions that define Wimbledon, none is more immediately visible or more strictly enforced than the requirement that every player dress almost entirely in white.

The rule has survived for nearly 150 years, been tested by some of the greatest players in tennis history, and sparked genuine controversy over its effect on female athletes. Here is the complete story of where the rule came from, exactly what it requires, and why it endures.

Where the Rule Came From

The origins of the all-white rule lie in Victorian attitudes toward the human body — specifically toward perspiration.

When lawn tennis was first played in the 1870s and 1880s, the sport was a social activity enjoyed by the British upper class on private lawns, at garden parties, and in settings where standards of propriety governed everything, including what one wore and how one appeared while physically exerting oneself.

Sweat stains were considered improper and unseemly, particularly for women, for whom any public display of physical exertion was laden with social judgement.

White clothing concealed perspiration better than coloured fabrics, and it was considered both more breathable and more modest — two qualities Victorian sport highly valued.

In its first 85 years, Wimbledon did not actually have a formal rule requiring white. White was a fashion and a tradition — the overwhelming preference of players and spectators alike — but it was not codified.

Players were technically permitted to wear other colours from 1877 right through to 1962, when the All England Club’s management committee decided that the rule needed to be formal. It came into force at the 1963 Championships and has been with the tournament ever since.

What followed is one of sport’s more unusual regulatory histories: while every other Grand Slam has relaxed its dress requirements over the decades, Wimbledon’s rules have, with one specific exception, become stricter over time.

Exactly What the Rules Require

The current Wimbledon dress code is detailed, precise, and leaves very little to interpretation. The key requirements are:

• All clothing must be “almost entirely white.” White does not include off-white or cream.
• A single trim of colour is permitted — but it must be no wider than one centimetre at the collar or cuff. If officials question whether a trim is within specification, they will produce a tape measure.
• The rule applies the moment a player steps onto any court at the All England Club — for practice sessions and warm-ups as well as matches.
• Undergarments that are visible, or that may become visible during play due to perspiration, must also be completely white, except for a single trim no wider than one centimetre.
• Shoes must be almost entirely white, including the soles.
• Caps, headbands, wristbands, and socks must all be white.
• Equipment and medical supports should be white, though colour is permitted if medically necessary.
• Small sponsor logos on clothing may contain colour.

If a player is found to be in violation, tournament officials will request an outfit change. This applies before the match, during the match, and at any point the player is on court.

The Rule’s Key Revisions

Since its formal introduction for the 1963 Championships, the all-white rule has been revised on a handful of occasions — and the direction of those revisions tells its own story.

1963: The “predominantly white” rule, with a one-centimetre colour trim restriction, takes effect at the Championships for the first time. The change had been agreed by the management committee in late 1962.

1995: The language is tightened to specify that white “does not include off-white or cream” — a clarification prompted by players testing the boundaries of what counted as white.

2014: The rules are significantly extended following a series of high-profile incidents. Shoes are formally brought within the code — soles included — and the undergarment rule is tightened to cover any item visible due to perspiration. The wording shifts from “predominantly white” to “almost entirely white.” It is the most comprehensive tightening since the rule’s original introduction.

2023: In the only genuine loosening of the rules since 1962, Wimbledon — having announced the change in late 2022 — permits female players to wear dark-coloured undershorts beneath their white skirts or shorts.

The change followed years of criticism from players and former players about the physical and psychological burden the all-white rule placed on women competing during their menstrual cycles.

The Incidents That Forced Changes

Several players are widely credited with triggering each of the rule’s significant revisions. The first was Brazilian player Maria Bueno, whose 1962 outfit — a white dress designed by Ted Tinling, with shocking pink lining visible during play — was the immediate prompt for the management committee’s decision to make the all-white rule formal for the first time. The other names are familiar to any tennis fan.

Andre Agassi did not merely break the rules — he boycotted the tournament entirely because of them. Between 1988 and 1990, Agassi refused to play at Wimbledon, citing the all-white dress code as incompatible with his personal style.

At a time when the long hair, the denim shorts, and the bold colours were as much a part of his public profile as his tennis, the requirement to play in all white was, in his view, archaic.

He returned in 1991, wore white without complaint, and won the title in 1992. He remains the most prominent player in history to have openly boycotted a Grand Slam over its dress requirements.

Roger Federer — eight-time Wimbledon champion and the most decorated grass-court player in history — ran afoul of the rules in 2013 when he arrived for his first-round match wearing white shoes with orange soles.

The shoes were predominantly white. The soles were bright orange. Officials reviewed the situation and asked Federer not to wear them again. He complied and switched to white-soled shoes for his second match. The incident directly prompted the 2014 rule update extending the dress code to shoes and their soles.

Venus Williams provided the third significant catalyst. In her 2017 first-round match against Elise Mertens, the pink straps of her sports bra became visible during play, and officials asked her to change at the next change of ends.

She did, returning to court in regulation white. The incident, alongside several other women’s-tour grievances about the impractical application of the undergarment rule, contributed to the broader pressure that eventually produced the 2023 concession.

The Controversies the Rule Has Generated

Beyond those pivotal players, the dress code has generated a long catalogue of incidents across its history that range from the absurd to the genuinely troubling.

In 1949, American player Gertrude “Gussie” Moran requested permission to wear a colourful outfit, was denied, and instead appeared in a white dress with lace-trimmed white undershorts that were occasionally visible during play.

The visibility of the lace was deemed scandalous enough to generate newspaper headlines across Britain and the United States. The chair umpire was reportedly distracted. Moran herself was bemused by the reaction.

In 1985, American player Anne White arrived on court wearing a full-length white catsuit. It was entirely white. It met every specification of the dress code as it stood at the time. The chair umpire suspended her match at the end of the first set due to fading light and asked her to wear something more appropriate the following day.

She did. She lost. The incident has since become one of the most frequently cited examples of Wimbledon’s instinct to enforce not just the letter of the rules but the spirit of a particular idea of what players should look like.

In 2014 — the year after Federer’s orange soles prompted a rewrite — tournament officials were reported to have asked several female players to remove or replace bras whose straps showed a colour that violated the code.

Pat Cash, the 1987 Wimbledon champion, criticised the enforcement on BBC Radio 5 Live, describing it as having gone ridiculous. Martina Navratilova, nine-time Wimbledon champion, said officials had gone too far when they told her that a blue-striped skirt she was wearing as a guest was not up to code.

Nick Kyrgios has collided with the rules on multiple occasions. At the 2022 Championships he was fined for wearing a red cap and red Air Jordans during a match and trophy presentation — a deliberate provocation that he has been open about.

He wears what he wants, accepts any consequences, and does not consider himself bound by rules he disagrees with. In 2015 he turned an official purple-and-green Wimbledon headband inside out so that only the white lining was visible, and wore it that way through a match.

The 2023 Concession and What It Meant

The 2023 change permitting dark undershorts was the first meaningful relaxation of the rules in the code’s 61-year formal history, and its significance went beyond the specific garment it covered.

Players had been speaking publicly about the issue for years before Wimbledon acted. British player Heather Watson said she had gone on the contraceptive pill in a previous year to stop herself from menstruating during the tournament, specifically to avoid the anxiety of playing in all-white during her period. F

ormer Olympic champion Monica Puig and Australian player Daria Saville both spoke publicly about the mental stress the rule created. Judy Murray described the prospect of a visible leak under TV cameras as a traumatic experience and called publicly for a change in late 2022.

Coco Gauff, speaking after the rule change was announced, said it would relieve a lot of stress for her and other women in the locker room. The testimony of players across multiple generations made clear that the rule’s psychological impact on female competitors was real, practical, and had been acknowledged privately within the sport for far longer than it had been discussed publicly.

The concession was narrow — dark undershorts only, with everything visible from the outside still required to be white — but it represented an acknowledgement by the All England Club that maintaining tradition and protecting player welfare are not always compatible, and that when they conflict, some adjustment is possible.

Why the Rule Endures

The All England Club has been consistent in explaining why the rule remains in place. The all-white requirement is part of Wimbledon’s DNA — as emblematic and individual as the grass courts and the strawberries and cream.

Together with the all-green backdrop and the absence of advertising on Centre Court, the all-white attire brings focus to the tennis itself. Unlike at other Grand Slams, where blinking billboards, loud music, and sponsor branding are constant sensory presences, Wimbledon’s aesthetic brings a calm and focus that is deliberate and defended.

There is also an egalitarian argument that is rarely made but carries some weight: having all competitors wear the same colour makes the tournament visually neutral in a way that serves the event’s identity. Roger Federer in white and an unseeded qualifier in white look, from the stands, like they are playing the same game under the same conditions.

The visual hierarchy that clothing brands create at other Grand Slams — where a Nike athlete and an Adidas athlete are immediately identifiable by their kit’s colour scheme — is erased at Wimbledon. Whether that matters to anyone beyond the All England Club itself is debatable, but the argument is genuinely made.

The US Open maintained its own all-white rule until 1972, when it became the first international event to permit coloured tennis clothing. The Australian Open and French Open have always been comparatively relaxed. Wimbledon is the last Grand Slam standing, defending a rule that every other major tournament has long since abandoned — and, in its own assessment, the better for it.

The Bottom Line

The all-white dress code is not a marketing exercise or a public relations strategy. It is the most visible expression of a philosophy that the All England Club has held since 1877: that Wimbledon is not merely a tennis tournament, but a specific kind of occasion with specific standards, and that those standards apply to everyone who steps onto its courts regardless of ranking, reputation, or personal preference.

It has been tested by Agassi’s boycott, Federer’s orange soles, Venus Williams’s pink bra, Kyrgios’s red Jordans, and the quiet testimony of dozens of female players for whom the rule created practical difficulties that went unaddressed for decades. The rule has bent — slightly, in 2023 — but it has not broken. In all likelihood, it will not.

Grass is the surface on which tennis was invented, and Wimbledon is the only Grand Slam still played on it. But what exactly does grass do to the game?

The answer goes deeper than “the ball bounces low” — it reaches into physics, physiology, tactics, and a deliberately engineered change to the surface itself that transformed the kind of tennis Wimbledon produces. Here is a complete guide to what grass does to tennis, and why Wimbledon rewards the players it does.

The Physics of Grass

Every surface in tennis is defined by two fundamental properties: how fast the ball travels through the air after bouncing, and how high it bounces. Grass sits at one extreme of both scales simultaneously — it is both the fastest surface and the one that produces the lowest bounce of any Grand Slam.

The reason is friction. Grass courts have lower friction and absorb more energy during the bounce. As a result, the ball bounces low due to loss of vertical speed, but bounces fast due to lower friction and smaller loss of horizontal speed.

In practical terms: when a ball lands on grass, the blades and the soil beneath absorb some of the energy that would otherwise push the ball upward, while simultaneously offering very little horizontal resistance.

The ball stays low and keeps moving fast — the opposite of what happens on clay, where high friction grips the ball and redirects energy upward into a high, slow bounce.

The coefficient of restitution — the measure of how much vertical energy the ball retains after bouncing — is lower on grass than on any other Grand Slam surface. The soft soil absorbs much of the impact’s energy.

The ball skids rather than bounces. A player who grew up on clay or hard courts, arriving at Wimbledon for the first time, often describes the ball as feeling like it barely comes up at all — like trying to return a shot that has already gone past before they had time to set up.

The Serve Becomes a Weapon Unlike Anywhere Else

No surface amplifies the serve more powerfully than grass, and no tournament demonstrates this more clearly than Wimbledon. The combination of the fast, low surface means that a powerful serve skids through the court at an angle and height that gives the receiver almost no time to react.

On clay, a 220 km/h serve bounces high and slow enough for even a world-class receiver to set up and drive a return. On grass, the same serve barely clears knee height off the bounce and arrives at the receiver in a fraction of the time.

The effective difficulty of returning a serve on grass is categorically different from returning the same serve on any other surface — which is why aces and unreturned serves constitute a substantially higher proportion of points at Wimbledon than at Roland Garros or even the hard-court Slams.

Flat serves down the T and wide slice serves that curve off the court are particularly punishing on grass. A slice serve hit wide in the deuce court can skid off the surface at an angle that pulls the receiver entirely off the court, leaving the entire court open for a first-volley winner. This shot, barely threatening on clay, can be a point-ender on grass virtually every time it is executed well.

Why Serve-and-Volley Was Born on Grass

Traditionally, serve-and-volley tennis has been the route to success on grass, with returners having less time to react to the serve and good volleyers able to dominate the forecourt. The logic is straightforward.

If a serve forces a weak, defensive return, and the surface keeps the ball low and fast, the optimal strategy is to follow the serve to the net and put the weak return away with a volley before the rally can develop. On clay, the same strategy fails because the return sits up high enough to be driven aggressively past the incoming player. On grass, it works because everything happens faster and lower.

The great Wimbledon champions of the pre-2001 era were almost exclusively serve-and-volley players. John McEnroe, Boris Becker, Stefan Edberg, and Pete Sampras — four of the most decorated grass-court champions in history — all built their Wimbledon games around the serve-and-volley, each in their own technical variation.

In the 2001 Wimbledon final, Goran Ivanisevic and Pat Rafter served and volleyed on every first and second serve. Not most serves. Every serve. The tactical choice was total.

The worn path that developed along the middle of the service box toward the net at Wimbledon — visible in photographs from the McEnroe and Sampras eras — was literally the footprint of the serve-and-volley game inscribed into the turf.

Players made that run so many times across a fortnight that the grass was stripped bare and the soil exposed. The court was recording the dominant tactical choice of the era in its own surface.

The 2001 Surface Change That Transformed the Tournament

One of the least-discussed but most consequential decisions in modern tennis history occurred at Wimbledon at the turn of the millennium. Stung by criticism that the men’s game had become too predictable because of the domination of big servers, the All England Club worked with the Sports Turf Research Institute on a change to the composition of its lawns.

After the 2000 Championships, the courts were re-seeded. From 2001 onward, the surface was no longer 70 percent ryegrass and 30 percent creeping red fescue — it became 100 percent perennial ryegrass.

The change was agronomic on the surface — perennial ryegrass is more durable and wears more consistently across a two-week tournament — but its tactical consequences were profound. A harder, more compact soil significantly increases the coefficient of restitution, generating a higher bounce.

The most lethal change for the classic attacking game was not the modest reduction in horizontal speed, but the drastic increase in the height of the bounce. A higher bounce is the antithesis of an effective approach volley.

The new surface was in place for the 2001 Championships, but its effect was masked that year by two things: heavy rain that softened the courts, and a men’s final between two players — Ivanisevic and Rafter — whose games were so firmly committed to serve-and-volley that no surface change was going to stop them charging the net. The 2001 final remains one of the great serve-and-volley exhibitions in Wimbledon history. It is also the last one.

By the following year, when the courts had dried out and a different kind of player reached the final, the change was unmistakable. Lleyton Hewitt and David Nalbandian, two baseliners, contested the 2002 final almost entirely from behind the baseline. Net approaches were rare. The grass that had hosted serve-and-volley specialists for a hundred years was now hosting a baseline match.

The numbers from the years that followed sharpened the picture. When Roger Federer won his first Wimbledon title in 2003, he served and volleyed on 48 percent of his service points.

Nine years later, when he won his seventh title, that figure was under 10 percent. Tour-wide, serve-and-volley use at Wimbledon dropped from nearly one-third of all points in 2002 to under seven percent by 2018.

Modern Wimbledon grass is still faster than hard courts but significantly slower than the pre-2001 surface. It still rewards serving and net play. But it no longer makes baseline tennis impossible, as it functionally did throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The modern Wimbledon is a contested territory between serve-first and baseline-first players, rather than a surface where only one approach is viable.

Topspin: Why It Works Less Well on Grass

The dominant weapon of clay-court tennis — heavy topspin — loses a significant portion of its effectiveness on grass, and the physics explain why. On clay, topspin interacts with the high-friction surface to produce a bounce that kicks upward above shoulder height.

On grass, the low friction means the surface cannot amplify the topspin rotation the same way. The ball still carries its topspin forward, but it stays lower than on any other surface, diminishing the high-bouncing kick effect that makes topspin so useful on clay.

This is why players who rely almost exclusively on heavy topspin groundstrokes — a style the clay-court season actively rewards and reinforces — often find Wimbledon the most technically disorienting adjustment of the year. Their primary weapon has been partially disarmed.

The practical response is to flatten shots out. Flat, penetrating shots that stay low are far more effective at rushing an opponent. This requires a different swing path and a different contact point than heavy topspin, and players who have not practiced flat driving groundstrokes regularly throughout the year must recalibrate quickly in the few weeks between Roland Garros and Wimbledon.

Movement: No Sliding, More Stability

Clay-court movement and grass-court movement are almost opposites. On clay, sliding into groundstrokes is not just permitted but necessary — the loose surface encourages and enables it. On grass, sliding is dangerous.

Players wear special grass-court shoes with a completely flat sole, partly for traction and partly because grippy soles damage the turf. Moving on grass is about balance and precision, not sliding. Players need small, controlled steps to stay stable on a surface that can be slippery, particularly in the first week when the turf is still lush.

The footwork adjustment required for grass is one of the most physically demanding aspects of the transition from the clay season. The surface is unforgiving of mistimed steps — slips and falls are more common at Wimbledon than at any other Grand Slam.

The requirement to stay low — bending the knees deeply to get down to the level of a skidding ball — is physically taxing in a different way from clay. On clay, the muscular challenge is endurance across long rallies.

On grass, it is the constant low-posture demand of reaching balls that barely rise off the surface, combined with the need to change direction quickly on a surface that offers less traction than clay or hard courts.

How the Courts Change Through the Tournament

Wimbledon’s grass is not the same surface in the first round as it is in the final. The courts are mowed daily to a height of 8 millimetres, but as the tournament progresses and the turf is worn down, the courts become less treacherous and potentially more unpredictable on the bounce as players have to navigate areas — usually near the baseline — where the grass is worn bare. After a week or so of competition, the courts develop a large patch of exposed dirt that can generate awkward bounces.

This is a unique feature of grass that has no parallel at the other Grand Slams. A clay court at Roland Garros plays more slowly as the tournament progresses, because the surface compacts and moisture builds up, but it remains essentially consistent in its bounce behaviour.

Wimbledon’s Centre Court in the second week, with a bare dirt patch near both baselines, is a materially different playing environment from Centre Court in the first round. Players who survive to the second week must adjust to a surface that has been partially transformed by the matches played on it before them.

The Players Grass Creates

The list of Wimbledon’s greatest champions reflects the specific technical demands the surface imposes — and how those demands have shifted across eras.

Martina Navratilova has been the most successful singles player at Wimbledon, winning nine titles between 1978 and 1990. Her serve-and-volley game and aggressive net presence were essentially unstoppable on the pre-2001 surface across a decade.

On the men’s side, Roger Federer won eight titles — the most in the Open Era — and did so almost entirely after the surface had been slowed. His combination of a flat, penetrating serve, exceptional volleying instincts, and footwork efficiency on the slick surface is the clearest demonstration of what modern grass-court excellence looks like: a player as comfortable trading groundstrokes from the baseline as he was coming to the net, but who used the surface’s still-considerable serve reward to dictate terms from the first ball.

Novak Djokovic is the third figure who belongs in the conversation. His seven Wimbledon titles, accumulated almost entirely from the baseline, are the single most compelling piece of evidence for how completely the surface has changed.

A player whose game is built around return depth, defensive court coverage, and groundstroke consistency — none of which were viable Wimbledon strategies in the Sampras era — has won the tournament more times than any active player.

The grass that once made baseline tennis impossible is now a surface on which the greatest baseliner of the modern era is, by some measures, the greatest grass-court player of his generation.

The Bottom Line

Wimbledon’s grass is not simply a surface. It is a set of physical conditions that systematically favours certain players, rewards certain technical choices, and punishes others — and it changed significantly in 2001 in ways that reshaped the entire tactical landscape of the tournament without most spectators ever knowing.

The ball bounces low and fast. The serve dominates. Topspin is partially disarmed. Movement requires caution and balance rather than the sliding abandon of clay. The courts deteriorate through the fortnight. And all of it combines to produce a two-week tournament that plays unlike anything else in tennis — as it has, in one form or another, since 1877.

Every sport has a cathedral. Tennis has Wimbledon. Since its first championship in 1877, the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club has maintained a set of customs, rituals, and standards that have no equivalent in professional sport — a living, functioning insistence that some things do not need to change simply because the world around them has.

Here is a complete guide to the traditions that make Wimbledon unlike anything else in tennis, and why they still matter.

The Oldest Grand Slam in the World

Wimbledon has been contested since 1877 — 12 years before the Eiffel Tower was built, 19 years before the modern Olympic Games began, and 91 years before the Open Era brought professional players into Grand Slam competition.

The first champion was Spencer Gore, who won a 22-player tournament on the croquet lawns of a private club in southwest London, watched by a small crowd and attended by no international press whatsoever. The prize was a silver cup.

That same club — the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club — still organises The Championships today. No other Grand Slam is run by an institution with such an unbroken line of continuity. The Australian Open moved venues, changed surfaces, and relocated between cities for decades before settling in Melbourne.

The French Open was built in eight months for a 1928 Davis Cup final. The US Open changed surfaces twice and moved across Queens. Wimbledon has been held at Church Road since 1922, when it moved to its current location to accommodate demand. Everything else — the grass, the rituals, the rules, the food — has remained in place with extraordinary consistency.

The All-White Dress Code

No tradition at Wimbledon is more immediately recognisable — or more strictly enforced — than the requirement that all players wear white. From the moment competitors step onto any court at the All England Club, for practice or for matches, they must be dressed in white. Not off-white. Not cream. The rulebook is explicit: white does not include off-white or cream.

The rule traces its origins to the Victorian era, when perspiration was considered socially unseemly. White clothing was believed to make sweat less visible — a practical solution to an etiquette concern that feels, from a modern vantage point, almost comically distant.

The formal dress code was introduced for the 1963 Championships and tightened in 2014, when Roger Federer’s appearance in orange-soled shoes the previous year prompted the rule’s extension to cover shoe soles. Accent colors are now permitted only if the trim is no wider than one centimeter at the collar or cuff. Anything beyond that, and players are asked to change.

The rule has been challenged by some of the sport’s biggest names and has never yielded. Venus Williams was asked to change in 2017 after pink bra straps became visible during her match. Andre Agassi boycotted the tournament from 1988 to 1990 in protest at the code.

The one significant concession came in late 2022, when the All England Club announced that female players would be permitted to wear dark-coloured undershorts beneath their skirts — a change that took effect at the 2023 Championships and followed years of public testimony from players about the anxiety of playing in all-white during their menstrual cycles. The exemption applies only to undershorts. Everything visible from the outside remains white.

The Grass Courts and the 8mm Rule

Wimbledon is the only Grand Slam still played on grass — the surface on which lawn tennis was invented and on which the tournament has been played without interruption since 1877. It is also the only Grand Slam whose playing surface is genuinely irreplaceable. You cannot build a grass court in a few weeks.

You cannot simply switch to an alternative in a warm-weather period. Wimbledon’s courts are tended year-round by a groundskeeping team that has spent decades perfecting the science of maintaining a surface that is, by its nature, both beautiful and fragile.

The grass is cut to exactly 8 millimetres — a standard maintained across all courts throughout The Championships. The seed mix has been 100 percent perennial ryegrass since 2001, when the All England Club switched from the previous 70/30 ryegrass and fescue combination in order to make the courts more durable and consistent across a two-week tournament.

The tournament begins a few weeks after the French Open ends — a gap chosen partly to allow the courts maximum recovery time from the previous year’s use, partly to give the grass-court swing in the UK and continental Europe a meaningful runway. When play concludes, the courts are immediately rested and the preparation cycle begins again.

The grass produces a playing style unique among the Grand Slams: low, fast, skidding bounces that reward serving, net play, and flat, aggressive groundstrokes. It is the surface on which the serve-and-volley game reached its zenith, where players like John McEnroe, Stefan Edberg, and Pete Sampras dominated with serve-first tennis that was essentially impossible to replicate on clay or hard courts.

The grass is not merely the surface the tournament is played on. It is the reason Wimbledon produces the kind of tennis it does.

Strawberries and Cream: A Tudor Origin Story

The most iconic food in sport may be the bowl of strawberries and cream served at Wimbledon — and its origin story predates the tournament itself by more than 350 years. Historians believe that Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s almoner, was the first person to serve the combination at a banquet. Henry was a tennis fan, and he continued to serve strawberries and cream at matches on his royal tennis courts at Hampton Court Palace.

When the first Wimbledon Championship was held in 1877, the early summer timing of the tournament coincided perfectly with the brief British strawberry harvest — in an era before refrigerated transportation, fresh strawberries were a genuine seasonal luxury available only for a few weeks each year.

The combination of the timing, the Tudor precedent, and the upper-class social character of the event embedded the dish into Wimbledon’s identity from its earliest editions.

The strawberries are sourced from Kent and gathered fresh each morning. In a typical fortnight, more than 30 tonnes of strawberries and thousands of litres of cream are served across the grounds — close to 200,000 portions a year. The price has risen over time, but the dish itself has not changed. It remains two ingredients: strawberries and cream.

Pimm’s: The Drink of the Fortnight

Alongside the strawberries and cream, the Pimm’s Cup has become the defining drink of The Championships. Pimm’s has been served at Wimbledon for decades, with dedicated Pimm’s bars on the grounds since the early 1970s.

A gin-based fruit cup served with lemonade and garnished with mint, cucumber, orange slices, and strawberries, it is quintessentially British in character — gently alcoholic, visually elaborate, and deeply associated with summer garden parties and outdoor sporting events of the kind that Britain’s climate allows only intermittently.

Hundreds of thousands of glasses are consumed across the fortnight, and the drink has become as synonymous with the tournament’s identity as the white dress code or the grass courts.

It is worth noting that the Pimm’s at Wimbledon is served in plastic cups — glass vessels are not permitted on the show courts for safety reasons — which means that the tournament’s most refined tradition is regularly consumed from the same kind of vessel used at stadium concerts. This detail has somehow never undermined the Pimm’s mystique whatsoever.

The Queue

No tradition at Wimbledon is more democratic, more British, or more genuinely peculiar to a sports event of this stature than the Queue. Every day of The Championships, a number of show-court tickets — for Centre Court, Court 1, and Court 2 — are made available for purchase on the day, allocated on a first-come, first-served basis to those who line up outside the grounds.

The Queue has existed in some form since 1927. It has its own code of conduct, published annually by the All England Club, which governs behavior, reserved spaces, and the etiquette of temporary absence. Stewards manage the Queue throughout the night. Campers arrive with tents, sleeping bags, folding chairs, and in recent years have organised informal social communities that last for days.

The Queue exists for a reason that is almost entirely contrary to the commercial logic of modern sport: it gives ordinary people access to the world’s most prestigious tennis tournament without requiring them to secure tickets months in advance through a ballot, a debenture arrangement, or a corporate hospitality package.

The fact that you can get into Wimbledon for a modest amount of money if you are willing to sleep outside in a queue in southwest London, maintained year after year by the All England Club, is one of the least discussed but most important expressions of what Wimbledon believes itself to be.

The Royal Box

Royal patronage at Wimbledon dates to the early twentieth century, when King George V began attending the Championships at the old Worple Road site. The Royal Box on Centre Court was created when the club moved to Church Road in 1922 and holds 74 seats, offering the best sightlines of any position in the stadium.

Guests are invited personally by the Chairman of the All England Club and are received for lunch, tea, and drinks — making a Royal Box invitation one of the more formal sporting hospitality occasions in the British social calendar.

The dress code for the Royal Box is strict: smart attire including a jacket and tie for men, and elegant daywear for women. Women are specifically asked not to wear hats, as they obstruct the view of other guests — a detail that captures the very particular character of Wimbledon’s approach to etiquette: even in the Royal Box, practicality and consideration for others take precedence over personal display.

Lewis Hamilton was turned away from the Box in 2015 after arriving in a tie-less floral shirt, chinos, and a fedora, declining the offer of a tie and blazer.

Until 2003, players were required to bow or curtsy toward the Royal Box upon entering and leaving Centre Court. The tradition was quietly ended by Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, then president of the All England Club, who described it as an anachronism.

Exceptions were maintained for the late Queen Elizabeth II and, at the time, the then-Prince of Wales — meaning that players entering Centre Court during the 2010 Championships, when the Queen attended for the first time in 33 years, observed the bow.

Catherine, Princess of Wales has been Wimbledon’s Patron since 2016 and is a regular presence at The Championships, typically in the tournament’s official colors of deep green and purple. She presents the singles trophies to the men’s and women’s champions on finals weekend.

Rufus the Hawk

Among Wimbledon’s less solemn traditions, few are more beloved than Rufus — the Harris hawk employed by the All England Club as official bird deterrent. In addition to boasting a social media following that many professional tennis players might envy, Rufus plays a pivotal role in keeping the skies clear during the tournament.

His role includes patrolling the grounds each morning before play begins, frightening away the pigeons and other birds whose presence on the meticulously maintained courts would be both a practical and a ceremonial problem.

Rufus has, over the years, become something of a minor celebrity in his own right — recognized internationally, the subject of news coverage when he has occasionally gone missing, and possessed of an official All England Club security pass with the title “bird scarer.” His daily pre-match patrol is as much a part of the rhythm of Wimbledon as the first serve on Centre Court.

The Curfew

In an era when Australian Open matches sometimes finish at 4am and the US Open night session regularly runs past midnight, Wimbledon maintains a strict 11pm curfew on all play.

The rule exists not because of sentiment, but because the All England Club sits in a residential suburb of London and has long-standing obligations to its neighbors that predate floodlighting, televised night sessions, and the commercial pressures that have pushed other Grand Slams to schedule ever later into the night.

The curfew applies regardless of lighting — even on Centre Court and No. 1 Court, where retractable roofs and floodlights allow play to continue after sunset. When 11pm arrives, play stops.

Matches left unfinished are resumed the following morning, which means that a player who has built a lead late at night must come back the next day and potentially face a different set of nerves, recovery, and tactical challenges.

The curfew has produced its share of memorable interventions. In the 2018 men’s semi-final between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal, play was suspended at 11pm with the match tied at two sets all, the roof closed, and the players in mid-rally form. They returned the next afternoon and Djokovic eventually won in five.

Andy Murray’s matches across his Wimbledon career repeatedly bumped up against the curfew, with several being suspended or rescheduled to avoid breaching it. The rule is non-negotiable: not even a Grand Slam semi-final between two of the greatest players in history is permitted to disturb the neighbours after 11pm.

The Bottom Line

Wimbledon’s traditions are not affectations. They are the accumulated evidence of an institution that has, for nearly 150 years, chosen to do things a particular way and defended that choice against every commercial, competitive, and cultural pressure to do otherwise.

The grass courts, the white clothing, the strawberries, the Queue, the Royal Box, the hawk, the curfew — none of these exist for their own sake. They exist because the All England Club believes, and has always believed, that The Championships are not just a tennis tournament.

They are the tennis tournament. And that distinction, maintained with extraordinary consistency across nearly 150 years, is precisely what makes Wimbledon the most traditional event in sport.