Simon O'Hagan studies the enduring appeal of a unique tennis tournament

Simon O'Hagan studies the enduring appeal of a unique

tennis tournament

TENNIS is coming home too. It does this every year, of course, but that does not make Wimbledon any less special, even when there are rival claims on the sporting public's time and imagination. From Jeff Tarango and Tim Henman to Boris Becker and the women's final between Steffi Graf and Arantxa Sanchez Vicario, last year's tournament was memorable in all sorts of unexpected ways. This year's will surely add to the legend that surrounds the most magical two weeks of the tennis year.

Ask anyone who has ever heard of Wimbledon what its defining characteristic is and they will usually answer, "Tradition", or words to that effect. The All England Club remains a bastion of old-fashioned Britishness that is too easily dismissed as merely elitist. Wimbledon's entitlement to depart from the official rankings in drawing up its list of seeds - which so irked Thomas Muster last week - is just one of the many ways in which it is different from other Grand Slam events. And the much more obvious presence of nature than you find in New York, Melbourne or Paris - the creeper-clad Centre Court, the green stuff that grows on the courts - deepens the sense of both permanence and renewal that accompanies any visit to Wimbledon.

Always the same, always changing. Emphasis on the latter may not have been very evident if one goes back a few years, but the message coming out of Wimbledon at the moment is unquestionably forward-looking. A long- term development plan was announced just over three years ago, at the heart of which was the construction of a new No1 Court. Anyone who attended Wimbledon in 1995 would have seen the building site - nicely tidied up, naturally - that marked the early stages of its development. This year the circular stadium, graceful and imposing, may look complete, but no grunt or thwack or bursts of applause will be heard on it until next year. By then the existing No1 Court will have gone for ever, which is why what happens in that unique arena will be savoured more than ever in 1996.

It will not be the only farewell at this year's Wimbledon. With the retirement, later this year, of Stefan Edberg, the tournament will be graced for the last time by one of the finest practitioners of grass-court tennis in the history of the game. From 1988 to 1990 Edberg and Becker turned the men's singles into a private battle, contesting three successive finals from which the impeccable Swede emerged with two titles. He has been a semi-finalist on two other occasions. And while he has reached only the second round in each of the last two years, a recent return to form suggests that he could just have a say in 1996. No player will be more warmly supported.

Meanwhile, let's hear it for the returning Monica Seles. The attack on her in Hamburg in 1993 cost her a place at three Wimbledons, which was the tournament's loss as much as hers. The prospect of her trying to seize the crown which has been Graf's every year bar one since 1991 gives the women's competition an edge which it has sometimes lacked.

The question looming over the men's event is, can Pete Sampras make it four wins in a row? If one is doubtful, it is less because of the difficulties he has experienced over the last 18 months than because of the toughness of his draw. Richey Reneberg, the fellow-American he meets in the first round, has played superbly in warm-up tournaments on grass. Mark Philippoussis, the Australian Sampras is scheduled to meet in the second round, beat him at the Australian Open at the start of the year and has a serve that leaves scorch-marks on the turf.

If Sampras were to falter, the main beneficiaries in his half of the draw ought to be Goran Ivanisevic, whose serve makes him a perennial danger, and Michael Stich, the German who was runner-up at the French Open two weeks ago and who as the champion in 1991 undoubtedly has the pedigree.

The man who beat Stich in Paris, Yevgeny Kafelnikov, must stand an excellent chance if he can ignore the lessons of history and keep going through another long Grand Slam campaign. The 22-year-old Russian is a player of wonderful elan with the skills to make him as much of a success on grass as he is on clay. For Henman, who meets Kafelnikov in the first round, the challenge is a huge one.

Which brings us to two former champions, Boris Becker and Andre Agassi. Becker felt like yesterday's man for much of last year's tournament, but he has an extraordinary sense of drama, and that perhaps as much as anything was responsible for the remarkable victories over Cedric Pioline and Agassi that took him, against all the odds, into the final. Since then, he has gone one better, winning the Australian Open earlier this year, and his victory in the Stella Artois a week ago puts him back among the serious contenders.

There are those who would not include Agassi in that category, and you cannot blame them. His second-round exit in the French Open was an example of Agassi at his feckless worst, and only he knows how much he is prepared to put in to get back to the exalted level he was at when he followed his US Open triumph in 1994 by winning the 1995 Australian Open. We all remember Agassi at Wimbledon in 1992, and hope, for the game's sake as much as his, that we have not seen the last of that little marvel.

In the year that Wimbledon introduces a new, luminous ball that in theory can be more easily seen by players and spectators alike, blurred vision is still a problem when it comes to predicting who will lift the champions' trophies in a fortnight's time. But I go, not very confidently, for Sampras and Graf.