From Malaga, I flew into London to fly home, but I made sure I timed it so that I would be able to go see at least one day of Wimbledon. I went on the first day of the 2-week tournament and even then it was crazy! How it works is that after they have the general lottery for tickets, they have a certain number of tickets available to buy the day of. I think there was somewhere around 6,000 grounds passes available, which give you access to courts 3 through 18 or however many courts there are. Then there’s about 200 each for Center Court, Court 1, & Court 2. So I got up really early (probably the earliest of my whole trip) and caught the tube down to Wimbledon! The trains were packed as expected, and I got talking to an old man who had been to every Wimbledon for the past 60 years and used to be a chair umpire for the tournament.
They even had the tube stop decorated like a tennis court!
Just to show how crazy it was there, I arrived a little after 8am and this is what it looked like already…
To get tickets for the 3 main courts, you pretty much have to camp out overnight. It’s a good thing is was the end of June and it was nice out. I did meet some cool people in line, though. I finally got in around 1:00 in the afternoon right around when they were kicking off for the day.
How it works with the grounds pass is that you can just walk up to any court (minus the 3 main ones) and wait for a seat to open up or just stand and watch. I saw a lot of good tennis on the first day even though I really didn’t get to see any of the top players, but I did get some good action shots of the players I did watch. I can’t remember who these players were, though.
More from the same match…
The most famous players I saw were Tommy Haas playing Alexander Peya and Tommy Robredo playing Luka Gregorc. This was a hell of a match, and Robredo ended up winning it. Here’s a couple pics from this match.
After getting my fill of tennis for about 7 hours, I headed back to my hostel and went out with my friends on my last night in Europe. Then I flew home the next afternoon, connecting in Chicago, and finally landing home in Detroit.
A GREAT END TO AN AMAZING TRIP!!!
