The Championships, Wimbledon is the oldest tennis tournament in the world and the only Grand Slam still played on grass. Since the first event at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in 1877, it has grown from a garden-party curiosity into the most prestigious fortnight in the sport — a place where tradition, white clothing and ruthless competition meet on impossibly green lawns.
Grass is the fastest of the traditional surfaces. The ball skids low and quick, points are short, and the bounce can be unpredictable, especially in the early rounds before the courts wear in. For most of the twentieth century this rewarded a very specific style: the serve-and-volley, where a player follows a big serve to the net to finish points before a rally can develop. Touch, reflexes and footwork around the net mattered more than heavy topspin from the baseline.
From the early 2000s the grass was changed to a more durable rye and the conditions slowed slightly, which — along with modern racquet and string technology — allowed powerful baseliners to dominate where volleyers once ruled. Understanding that shift is part of the fun of THE SLAM: a serve-and-volley legend and a modern baseliner are both elite, but in very different ways.
Few athletes in any sport have dominated a venue like Martina Navratilova dominated Wimbledon, winning a record nine singles titles with a serve-and-volley game tailor-made for grass. Her rivalry with Chris Evert — the cool baseline counter to Navratilova’s aggression — defined an era. Steffi Graf followed with seven titles and one of the greatest forehands the game has seen, her 1988 season completing the calendar-year Golden Slam. Later, the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, brought a new level of power and athleticism, meeting in multiple finals, while champions such as Conchita Martínez, Jana Novotná and a long line of modern winners added their own chapters.
The men’s grass-court story runs through Björn Borg’s icy dominance, John McEnroe’s genius hands, and the power of Boris Becker and Stefan Edberg, whose serve-and-volley duels lit up the late 1980s. Pete Sampras then made Centre Court his own with one of the most complete grass games ever, before Roger Federer arrived and went on to a record haul of men’s singles titles. Federer’s rivalries with Rafael Nadal — including the 2008 final, widely called the greatest match of all time — and with Novak Djokovic carried the tournament into the modern “Big Three” era, while a new generation now pushes to take their place.
Wimbledon endures because it blends the old and the new: strawberries and cream, an ivy-clad clubhouse and a strict dress code on one hand, a retractable roof and electronic line-calling on the other. For two weeks every summer the best players in the world chase the one title that, more than any other, defines a tennis career. THE SLAM is our love letter to that history — a way to borrow a little of every champion and find out whether your version could have lifted the trophy.
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