The four women standing in Wimbledon’s semi-finals this year have all spent the better part of their careers describing grass courts with the kind of contempt usually reserved for tax audits and airline food. Now, suddenly, they cannot stop gushing about the surface like it just invented oxygen.
This is not a natural evolution. This is a hostage situation where the hostages have Stockholm syndrome and have started endorsing their captors.
One semi-finalist spent three years calling grass “unpredictable” and “a coin flip masquerading as tennis.” This week she described sliding on it as “poetry in motion.” Another famously refused to practice on grass courts before Wimbledon, treating them like an optional elective. She now claims she has found “peace” with the surface. A third once said grass courts rewarded “luck over skill.” She is currently in the semi-finals, which apparently means she has become very lucky indeed.
What changed? Did the grass courts undergo a personality transplant? Did they attend therapy? No. What happened is that these players finally won enough matches to make the surface retroactively likeable. Success has a way of rebranding even your sworn enemies into “challenging opponents that brought out the best in me.”
This is sport’s most transparent con: lose on grass and it is a terrible surface; win on grass and suddenly you are “finally understanding the nuances.” The grass did not change. The players just found a way to benefit from it, which is the only endorsement that matters in professional tennis. Money talks. Trophies talk louder. Grass courts, apparently, have been waiting for their moment all along.