Romance lost in humiliation
When Tim Henman said, after his defeat on Friday, that he would not be watching the final, it sounded like the instinctive reaction of a man whose pride had been wounded. Now we know that he had a shrewd idea of what was to come. And so, perhaps, did David Nalbandian, once he had qualified to meet Lleyton Hewitt to decide the men's championship.
Nalbandian opened the match by serving a double fault, and it didn't get any better. In his first senior grass-court tournament, and on his first ever visit to centre court, the fact that he had won the Wimbledon junior doubles in 1999 and reached the singles semi-final of the same tournament, only to be defaulted for mistaking the starting time, counted for nothing.
No surprise there. This is the biggest tennis match in the world and more experienced players than the 20-year-old Nalbandian have been undone by the experience. Preparatory sessions on a court specially cut on the cricket pitch at the Hurlingham Club in Buenos Aires proved adequate to get him to the final but were not enough to enable him to pose a genuine challenge to Hewitt.
"It was a big day for me," he said with some sense of understatement. "This was my first grass-court tournament and I hope that next year when I come back for the second time I can win the final."
The second prize of £262,500 was, as someone pointed out to him, as much as he has made in the rest of the season put together. What would he be doing with it, and would it change anything in his life?
"No, no, no," he said. "I don't like to change. I don't want to change it. I hope no change it."
Would he be putting the money into an Argentinian bank?
"No."
His dignity and quiet humour took a lot of the sting out of what must have been a painful defeat, in which he managed to win only six games in three sets - the same number that Neale Fraser took off Ashley Cooper in 1958 and Ken Rosewall coaxed from Jimmy Connors' grasp in 1974.
"From one to 10, I tell you five, maybe," he said, assessing his performance. "Not much. I think I not play really good."
His most memorable moment came at 1-5 and 0-40 on his own serve in the first set, when he launched himself successfully into a flying stop-volley reminiscent of the heroics of his childhood idol, Boris Becker, on the same patch of grass. He enjoyed being reminded of that afterwards. Twice he managed to break Hewitt's serve, in the third game of the second set and the fourth game of the final set, but on both occasions he was already playing catch-up.
He made 41 unforced errors, to Hewitt's 25, and it was impossible to escape the conviction that the poor quality of his play dragged that of his opponent down by several notches. Hewitt would surely have been more ruthless and efficient against a more formidable challenger.
So a story that had seemed to hold out the prospect of romance instead turned into the sort of humiliation that no one enjoys. Least of all the spectators, who showed from the beginning an understanding that, while Hewitt needed no encouragement from a bunch of Poms, Nalbandian could use every bit of support that might be going.
Given the presence of surprisingly few Australians in centre court (most of them were camped out on Henman Hill, which they occupied and renamed Hewitt Hill for the day), almost all the vocal expressions of support went to the underdog.
Hewitt's mistakes were cheered almost from the start, and no one of Nalbandian's nationality has been so generously applauded in an English sporting arena since Ricardo Villa dribbled through the Manchester City defence to score for Tottenham Hotspur in the 1982 FA Cup final replay.
"I want to thank the people very much," he said. "I think maybe they thought I could do much more on the court. But I didn't. So I'm a little sorry for the people, for all the people." And the people were a little sorry for him.