They say everyone remembers their first Wimbledon, but mine was so far back that it’s a bit of a blur. It was 1982, the year that Jimmy Connors beat John McEnroe, and I had tickets to Centre Court. But what made it special for me was the opening week: it was my first Wimbledon as a line judge, and since then I’ve officiated there in all but two of the tournaments. So when I heard on Wednesday that the tournament is replacing us line judges with electronic line calling, I was gutted. It hurt even more because I only found out when it was announced in the news and my phone started pinging with people asking me how I felt.
I used to play a lot of tennis when I was younger, and when you play junior tournaments you end up umpiring each other’s games. It was at a tournament at Wembley, sponsored by Benson & Hedges, where I saw an advert from the Professional Tennis Umpires Federation (PTUF) calling for new members, and I thought I’d give it a go. I had about 30 minutes’ training at the Queen’s Club in west London and I was in. The PTUF was run by ex-military types then and they were very particular about how you stood, sat and walked on to court. They wouldn’t put up with any slouching.
Until recently we were only paid expenses for travelling to and officiating at games, so line judges did our jobs purely for the love of tennis. You’d work your way up through the different local events and get graded by the chair umpire until eventually you were considered good enough for Wimbledon – the dream. A few colleagues have told me this week that they’re not going to bother renewing their licences now that they can’t aim towards officiating at Wimbledon any more, so I worry that smaller tournaments will struggle to find line judges soon.
I imagine the All England Club has made this decision because the players want the consistency of computerised decisions – though several of them didn’t like Hawk-Eye at all when it came in. But there’s so much that a human line judge does that a computer just can’t offer. We certainly keep up tennis’s traditions – I think we make the court look fully dressed. And spectators can learn a lot about the game when they can see the discussions between a line judge and the chair umpire. All of that will be lost.
I’m not saying we never make mistakes – we’re human, after all. But we hold ourselves to a very high standard. You have to be utterly impartial – even when Andy Murray is about to win his first Wimbledon and you’re willing him to succeed, and nobody wants to be the one to have to call his match point shot out. (We were lucky that Novak Djokovic hit the ball into the net so we didn’t have to.) Or the year that Andre Agassi was playing Pat Rafter and I was under the royal box on the centre line. Agassi swore, and I had to go and report it to the chair, which I suddenly realised was a long way to walk with the whole crowd watching me.
It’s sad to think that I won’t have a moment like that again. I won’t get to stand on Centre Court. And I wish they could have told us before this year’s tournament so that we’d have a chance to say goodbye. I’ll always love tennis, but I don’t think I could bear to go to Wimbledon now as a spectator. It just wouldn’t have the same atmosphere.
As told to Katy Guest
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Wendy Smith has been a tennis line judge since 1979. She runs a florist supplies business in Suffolk
Source: theguardian.com
