Wimbledon's curfew rule explained: The tennis Grand Slam with an early bedtime

New York Times

a day ago

THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, LONDON — Wimbledon has a roster of annual staples. An overnight queue for tickets. An all-white clothing rule. Grass-court tennis. And baffling outsiders with one or many of its traditions.
At 10:18 p.m. Monday night, the latter two came together, as they so often do. American No. 1 Taylor Fritz and France's Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard finished the fourth set of what had become a five-set match, Fritz leveling the contest at 2-2. But instead of continuing, they met at the net with tournament officials. Words were exchanged. Arms were flung up. Then the players picked up their bags and walked off the court.
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Then at 9:30 p.m. Thursday night, Ben Shelton sat down to prepare to serve to win his match against Rinky Hijikata of Australia. Or so he thought. The chair umpire instead announced that the match had been suspended, leaving Shelton remonstrating with a tournament supervisor as darkness fell.
Shelton's match had a fairly pedestrian explanation: the darkness was about to prevent the electronic line calling (ELC) system, which this year replaced line judges after 147 years, from working properly. He came back the next day and took 70 seconds and four points to see off Hijikata.
Fritz and Mpetshi Perricard's match, by contrast, was at the mercy of the most sacred and strange tradition of them all: the 11 p.m. curfew imposed on a sporting event beamed across the globe. Wimbledon is the only Grand Slam with an early bedtime, and the lights go out on time, every time, with no exceptions — almost.
The curfew was introduced in 2009, when the All England Club installed a retractable roof on Centre Court. That meant that play could go on later at a tournament that previously ran to the sun's clock, but local residents — and their council — did not want fans streaming past their houses in the early hours.
'The 11pm curfew is a planning condition applied to balance the consideration of the local residents with the scale of an international tennis event that takes place in a residential area,' Merton Council said.
'The challenge of transport connectivity and getting visitors home safely is also a key consideration.'
Not annoying the residents is a particular concern this year. The All England Club will be in the High Court next week, for a judicial review of planning permission to build 39 new courts on the old golf course in Wimbledon Park. That would allow Wimbledon to bring qualifying on site, in line with the other four majors, but the curfew, which is also an outlier, is a frontier that it will not cross.
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The French Open's night session regularly goes beyond midnight, with play not starting until 8:15 p.m. local time because, the tournament organizers say, people will not leave work in time to begin earlier. The U.S. Open and Australian Open wear their late-night tennis as a kind of badge of honor, with two matches scheduled.
The Billie Jean King Tennis Center and Melbourne Park are more removed from metropolitan life than the All England Club, but their status as late-night events goes beyond geography.
The ubiquity of late-night tennis at the U.S. Open means some American fans were left baffled by Fritz's match being stopped prematurely. 'I had no idea about the curfew,' said Theo Moll, a 20-year-old student from Cleveland, Ohio who visited Wimbledon Friday with his dad, Rob.
'I remember seeing that on the first night and saying, 'What's going on, why do they stop?' And then looking into it. Fritz was behind and then he got close to winning and I was like, 'What's the score, how did it end? It didn't?''
Late finishes are almost integral to the culture of the tournaments, even if the impact on players and fans has recently been acknowledged to be more severe than the benefits of increased attention and excitement. Small concessions have been introduced about when matches can start to try and mitigate the situation, though there is still always the chance of a very late finish in New York and Melbourne if matches run long.
At Wimbledon, there are no concessions. At 11 p.m., play stops. Just once in recent history has the tournament made an exception, when Andy Murray beat Marcos Baghdatis in four sets at 11:02 p.m in 2012. The clock had struck 11 with Murray up 5-1 in the fourth set and about to serve for the match. 'Common sense,' tournament organizers said at the time, was the driver behind a two-minute extension on one of the strictest rules in sports.
Fritz himself also couldn't understand. Fans on No. 1 Court were generally furious and let their feelings be known, while broadcasters — including ones in America where it was around 5 p.m. ET were similarly perplexed. Foreign broadcasters are often one of the key stakeholders in scheduling decisions. Not so at Wimbledon, where the Centre Court 1:30 p.m. start time, by far the latest of all the majors, is not because of any televisual considerations but so that the spectators in hospitality can get lunch in before play starts.
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Going home at 11 p.m. is also ingrained in British culture. Pubs close at 11, and in general it's not a country where people eat late or stay out especially late. In the UK sitcom The Office, the character Tim articulates the difference between the UK and the U.S. by describing a nightclub called 'New York, New York.'
'They call it the nightclub that never sleeps. That closes at one.'
Wimbledon is the tennis manifestation of this attitude, the sensible friend who likes to call it a night early. Wimbledon has work to do in the morning. Wimbledon will absolutely not be doing shots at 2 a.m. As much as the Centre Court fans were upset by the Fritz vs. Mpetshi Perricard match finishing early, many are happy to leave when it gets dark.
As for the players, barely any want to be playing after midnight given how late that means they actually get to bed, and how that then affects them for a day or so after. When Djokovic beat Lorenzo Musetti at 3:07 a.m. at last year's French Open, sports medicine experts told The Athletic that doing so would increase his risk of injury going forward. In Djokovic's next match the following day, he tore his meniscus in his right knee.
The Wimbledon attitude to night-time tennis is not without issues. After beating Mpetshi Perricard the next day, Fritz said that he would prefer to have a late finish to coming back the next day.
Dusk stopping play has also been a feature of this year's tournament, with matches held over on all of the first four days, including on both main courts on Monday — despite no rain on three of the days. If matches are becoming so drawn out that it's a struggle to fit in a full day's play at Wimbledon before night falls with the current start times, then the structure of the tournament will start to creak.
Shelton and Hijikata's match Thursday did not start until around 7:15 p.m., giving them just two hours and 15 minutes to rattle through it. Matches in the men's singles draw last year averaged two hours and 43 minutes last year, according to data from Opta.
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They very nearly managed it, but were stopped with Shelton a game away and about to serve for the match. He and Hijikata had already discussed stopping at the end of the second set and then again a few games into the third, and so finishing with the end potentially 70 seconds away was deeply unsatisfying.
Unlike the curfew, there isn't a designated stop time for bad light. It's down to the discretion of tournament staff, who decided that it was too dark even though Shelton was told that there was five minutes before the ELC system would no longer be able to function. 'I was telling him, I only need 60 seconds,' a smiling Shelton said in a news conference Friday.
Adding floodlights on the outside courts would not solve the issue of grass courts becoming slippy once night falls and the temperature drops. The daylight rule, like the curfew, is more sensible than it perhaps first appears.
Shelton, who was sanguine about having to come back to beat Hijikata on Friday, said that adjusting to different conditions and regulations was all part of being a tennis player.
Nowhere is this truer than Wimbledon, which has always been a law unto itself.
— Caoimhe O'Neill contributed reporting.