I ended up watching quite a lot of Wimbledon this year.  Now, I am no great tennis fan.  I mean, I’d never consider watching Roland Garros or Flushing Meadows, but Wimbledon… well, Wimbledon’s different.

Admittedly, I mainly watched Wimbledon this year because the weather was so hot.  I was feeling listless, and I couldn’t be bothered to do anything else.  But that doesn’t take away from the fact that I quite enjoyed it.  I mean, what’s not to like?  Middle of the afternoon, sitting on the sofa in my lounge, cup of Earl Grey in place of a glass of Pimm’s, three chocolate Digestives instead of a punnet of strawberries, TV on, set after set, game after game, point after point.

15-love.  30-love.  30-15.  40-15.  40-30.  Deuce.

Another set, another game, another point.  Feeling hot, feeling humid, beginning to feel sleepy.  Love-15-30-40-deuce.  What a strange scoring system.  Why had I never questioned it before?  It doesn’t seem to follow any kind of natural, logical, mathematical or linguistic progression.  Who invented it?  I didn’t know the answer to my own question, so I looked it up.  Weirdly, no one seems to know.  Not really know.  There are plenty of ideas––medieval French terms; a development from Real Tennis; clocks for recording the scores; a Sexagesimal counting system dating back to the Sumerians––but no one has a definitive answer.  No original rule-book, just a rolling process of evolution.

Love-15-30-40-deuce.  Suddenly, it all seems a bit… arbitrary.  The entire game a bit of a free-for-all, subject to the whims of passing fancy.  An origin story, which is not entirely corroborated; a degree of faith required to maintain the status quo: we are entering the realms of religion, not sport.

Match point.

Match point?  How did we get here?  Sultry afternoon; cup of Earl Grey; three chocolate Digestives; I think I must have nodded off somewhere.

Simon Turner-Tree

Simon Turner-Tree attention tends to wander from the tennis.