Thirty years ago next month, a 17-year-old German named Boris Becker defeated Kevin Curren to lift the Wimbledon title. We all know what happened to Becker – the Teutonic superman who, like Wagner’s Siegfried, was apparently immune to fear. But few realise what a significant moment this was for the tournament. When Becker hit that last brutal serve, he set Wimbledon on its path to becoming one of the most valuable brands in sport.
Wimbledon has always been a huge deal for the tennis cognoscenti, and a fixture of long summer afternoons on the TV. We assume, as we switch on the nightly BBC highlights, that it was destined to become the success story it is today: a behemoth with 500,000 visitors per year and annual revenues in excess of £40 million.
Such assumptions are misleading, because sporting empires can fall as well as rise. While a long and vivid history may supply a certain cachet, that has not prevented golf’s Open Championship from being overtaken by the US Masters in both audience and prestige. Familiarity and personality are assets for any annual event, which is where the Masters – run, like Wimbledon, by a private club – scores over the travelling circus of the Open.
The roots of Wimbledon’s success lie in the 375 full members of the All England Club. Apart from being fiercely private, these wealthy businessmen, military types and retired tennis professionals offer a serendipitous blend of traditionalism and vision. One of the tournament’s early coups was to invite professionals through the gates in 1967, and thus usher in the beginning of the Open era. The chairman then was Herman David, a former diamond merchant, who accurately described the last days of the amateur/professional divide as “shamateurism, a living lie”.
But the foundation stones for the modern Wimbledon were really laid in the 1970s. This was the decade when hospitality tents first arrived, and when the first merchandising deals were struck. Crucially, the AELTC has always refused to accept advertising hoardings, so that the only logos within the grounds are working logos: Rolex clocks, bottles of Robinsons Barley Water, cans of Slazenger balls. Not only does Wimbledon derive a sense of dignity from its cleanskin policy, but marketing research suggests that the brands – described as “partners” – gain a higher recall factor this way.
Between the 1970s and his premature death in 2003, the great sports agent Mark McCormack negotiated the club’s contracts. His approach was not so much “show me the money” as “feel the loyalty”, because Wimbledon’s relationship with its partners has been compared to the Japanese keiretsu system of interlocking long-term interests. McCormack was more interested in squeezing the broadcasters. From 1982, he brought in an extra £400,000 of TV revenue by persuading the committee to play the finals on Saturday and Sunday, rather than doing so a day earlier.
At this time, however, the All England Club was still turning down commercial revenues at a time when they were climbing quickly around the sporting world. Wimbledon risked becoming a very classy but increasingly underpowered event, a heritage exercise with dated facilities. This is where Becker came in. “If you track the Wimbledon surplus, it climbed from £400,000 at the start of the 1980s to close on £10 million at the end,” John Curry, who served as the All England Club’s chairman from 1989 to 1999, says.
“A lot of that was down to the TV revenues we were able to make from Europe, and especially from Germany. There was intense competition for the rights in this period [when Boris Becker was said to be more famous than the German chancellor Helmut Kohl, and Steffi Graf then started winning titles of her own in 1988]. In life, you need to be lucky, and we were lucky that the money arrived when we needed it.”
But then there is a lot of chance in Wimbledon’s success; its continuing status as the world’s greatest tennis tournament was no historical inevitability. The critical decision to resist the temptations of advertising was one part farsightedness to two parts fogeyishness. Not that Curry sees anything wrong in that. “A lot of the companies I dealt with thought we were old farts,” he said. “But I never had any problem with being perceived as old-fashioned. That is our greatest strength.”