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SI Flashback: Toffs and Yobs In one memorable week in London, Wimbledon swells and wembley proles inhabited the same universe
By Steve Rushin Issue date: July 8, 1996
Ticket touts and lager louts, tiebreakers and penalty kicks. Tennis and soccer went at it last week in two soundalike London precincts: Wimbledon and Wembley. In the end, all England, including members of the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club, was energized by the soccer. So blurred became the lines between leisure-class and working-class Londoners that footy-mad tennis umpires all but called out the scores in Cockneyspeak. Thirty-love, Guv. Wimbledon and Wembley. They were host to The Championships and the European Championship, respectively, and the winner of this turf war was decisive. "The soccer was so popular," Pete Sampras conceded last Saturday, "that it seems like Wimbledon has taken a backseat this year." In the front seat, fiddling with the radio, was England's soccer team, which steamed into week 1 of Wimbledon with a pack of fags and a pint of lager. By Sunday, Euro '96, which the host nation briefly dominated, had left its Doc Martens boot prints all over the upholstery of the All England Club's tournament. Tennis officials at first found this development to be "veddy fraffle," very frightful indeed. Luke Jensen of the U.S. rang a rep-tied Wimbledon don to inquire if he and his brother, Murphy, could wear short-sleeved England football jerseys during their doubles match on June 26, when England played Germany in the Euro '96 semifinals. "They are white," said Jensen of the jerseys. "But before I could finish the sentence, the guy cut me off and just said no. They nuked us as soon as we mentioned football." Nine miles and four letters separate Wimbledon from Wembley, but the demographic distance has always been infinite. Elegant placards on the wrought-iron gates of the All England Club purr babes in arms are free; tattered posters at the Wembley turnstiles bark no knives. Tennis fans literally don't say boo; footy fans (at least the German ones) chanted "Moo," the better to wind up their mad-cow-diseased host nation. "Wimbledon," said Tony Gale, a professional footballer taking in some of the action at Wembley. "Bit stuffy, izzit?" Well … no. That's the thing: As the week wore on, not only did declasse soccer invade the All England Club but an unprecedented number of commoners hung about. For starters, the field got commoner by the day. Third seed Andre Agassi, fifth seed Yevgeny Kafelnikov, sixth seed Michael Chang and eighth seed Jim Courier all crashed in the first round. Women's second seed Monica Seles was bounced in the second round, while men's No. 2 Boris Becker defaulted in the third after he mis-hit a forehand and partly tore a tendon in his right wrist. He sought treatment -- including a plaster cast that will keep him out of tennis for at least six weeks -- from the physician for the German fussball team, of which Becker is all but an honorary member. "No, it is fine," Becker said when his white-haired Wimbledon minder tried to steer press questions away from soccer. "I am a much bigger football fan than I am a tennis fan." Anyway, Becker's exit put his opponent, 223rd-ranked Neville Godwin of South Africa, in the round of 16 following a first week in which a record 10 seeded players were eliminated. If you'd told Godwin before the tournament that he would be on the brink of the quarterfinals alongside such luminaries as T. Johansson, P. Rafter and A. Radulescu, he would have said, "You are going crazy." And you are. All of England was barmy all June, with football on the brain. Even Sampras was watching England on the telly when he wasn't blowing through the top half of the draw. "It's growing on me," the archetypal Yank sports fan said of the soccer. "England-Holland, every five minutes there was a score." Indeed, England hammered the Dutch 4-1 on June 18. Becker, for his part, looked forward to seeing England-Germany but only on TV, for the world's most recognizable German sussed out that he shouldn't appear in person at Wembley. "Especially," said Becker, "if Germany wins." The London tabloids had been given to fits of LET'S BLITZ FRITZ and ACHTUNG! SURRENDER. British novelist David Lodge last year published Therapy, about a depressed 58-year-old Englishman who fears that his life and the life of his nation have been in decline since the summer of 1966, when England beat West Germany 4-2 to win the World Cup at Wembley. Queen Elizabeth II handed the Jules Rimet trophy to England's golden-locked captain, Bobby Moore, who is forever young in the famous photographs from that day, three lions on the crest of his strawberry-red shirt. "When it was all over," recalls Lodge's protagonist of that Sunday 30 years ago, "people went into their back gardens, or out into the street, grinning all over their faces, to babble about it to other people they'd never said more than 'Good morning' to in their lives before. It was a time of hope … We were beating the world in the things that really mattered to ordinary people, sport and pop music and fashion and television. Britain was the Beatles and mini-skirts and That Was the Week That Was and the victorious England team." Once again last week in London, that was the week that was. Britain was The Who and Eric Clapton playing live for 150,000 -- and football god Pele -- in Hyde Park last Saturday. Six days earlier the Sex Pistols had performed for 30,000 in Finsbury Park, introduced onstage to their safety-pinned admirers by aptly named England defender Stuart Pearce and his backfield mate Gareth Southgate. The pair had helped to beat Spain in a penalty shoot-out in the Euro '96 quarterfinals on June 22. Pearce took and made England's third penalty shot, redeeming himself for having missed in the shoot-out against Germany in the semis of the '90 World Cup. After their victory over Spain, Pearce and teammates stayed on the pitch at Wembley and joined the crowd in singing Three Lions, the current No. 2 song on Britain's Top of the Pops. It goes: I remember three lions on a shirt
Thirty years of hurt: When Wimbledon opened, Britain's prime minister was in Italy, demanding that Europe lift its ban on British beef, and English novelist Martin Amis was bravely seated at Centre Court, having just penned a short story for The New Yorker called State of England and subtitled: Bad food, bad breath, bad sex, bad health, and really bad politics. It's England, innit? "The country seems to be going through some huge crisis of confidence," Lodge wrote in Therapy. "More than forty percent of young people think that Britain will become a worse country to live in over the next decade. I wasn't the only one, it seems, to feel that the death of Bobby Moore [in 1993, of cancer, at 51] measured the extent of our decline." The English team's manager, Terry Venables, acknowledged as much the day before the semifinal match with Germany. "We can give a lot to people who are English," he said, "and who haven't felt too good about things for quite a few years." At Wimbledon, a roar went up on Court 1 shortly after 7:30 p.m. on June 26. It was during a men's singles match between two Brits, Tim Henman and Danny Sapsford, and both players knew immediately what had happened. "We had gone one-nil up," Henman said later. Indeed, three minutes into England-Germany, English striker Alan Shearer had scored on a header, and Wembley levitated with Rule Britannia! When Germany equalized in the 15th minute, "there was a lot of screaming in our house," said Steffi Graf. "We were pretty exhausted after the match." Which is more than she would say of her own matches on what seems to be an inexorable march to her seventh Wimbledon title. As for England-Germany, the rest of the match was simply matchless. A scoreless second half gave way to 30 minutes of sudden-death extra time, in which, every minute, one side appeared suddenly dead. England hit an upright with one shot and missed another game-winner by the length of a stud on the shoe of the player sliding in to meet a crossing pass. Germany did put a ball in England's net, silencing the 75,862 in attendance, but an unheard whistle disallowed the goal. So they went to penalty kicks, and both teams scored on their first five attempts. Finally Sex Pistols presenter Southgate kicked a weak ball on the ground that German keeper Andreas Kopke saved. The Germans made their next penalty -- they haven't lost a shoot-out in 20 years -- and so won the match. Southgate's mum asked her son afterward, "Why didn't you belt it?" The 7,000 Germans in the crowd detonated with delirium, surrounded in their end-zone section by Day-Glo-clad cops, as if circled by a yellow highlighter. The scoreboard instructed them to stay in their seats until the rest of the stadium emptied. England's and Germany's players linked arms and bowed. "I just hope there's no trouble," said Gale repeatedly. Gale's 10 years at left-back for West Ham United, the team of London's rough-and-tumble East End, had taught him to be cautious. And sure enough, by 1 a.m. in Trafalgar Square there had been 200 arrests and numerous injuries, German-made cars set alight, policemen charged by rioting hooligans. "The thing is," said Alan Hudson, a Chelsea star of the '70s who was also in the stands at Wembley, "it just grips the whole country, doesn't it?" It does. England-Germany was the highest-rated sports program on English television since … England-West Germany in 1966. The legacy of Euro '96, which Germany won on Sunday with a 2-1 victory over the Czech Republic, is likely to be not those acts of violence away from the stadium but renewed self-esteem in Blighty. Or is it self-delusion? When England was eliminated, the Brits immediately threw the weight of their hopes behind the 21-year-old Henman, 62nd in the world tennis rankings but still alive at the beginning of the second week of Wimbledon. "For Tim's sake," said Todd Martin of the U.S., the only seeded player left in the bottom half of the draw--and a possible opponent of Henman's in the quarterfinals--"I hope you [Britons] don't put the kind of pressure on him that you have on others in the past. Or that you do on your football team." But the English likely weren't listening, their judgment having gone all tennis-ball-fuzzy with tennis and footy. "Football's coming home," goes the refrain of Three Lions. Last Saturday, with Sampras leading 5-4 in the first set of his match against Karol Kucera, an ovation rolled like thunder through the Centre Court seats. It was for England goalie David Seaman, keeper of the six-yard box, now taking his seat in the … Royal Box? Yes. Football had come home, sized up the leather seats and settled in. Wimbledon officials may never get it to leave. Issue date: July 8, 1996
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