TV View/Johnny Watterson: Tennis on BBC trades on memories. It does it well. The BBC takes you through the summer years of childhood and adolescence with faded iconic pictures of Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe and Rod Laver.
Maybe it's the green grass and the net, the rows of well-behaved fans all clapping at the right time, newspapers shading their eyes. Perhaps it is a reflex action for anyone who on school holidays drew the curtains on hot summers days to prevent another Wimbledon television classic from being bleached out by the sun's glare.
You look at your greying bits of hair and dream of your old 70s mop and say to yourself, "What the hell, I'll go there with them."
The BBC work hard on nostalgia and more often than not at this time of year when the Queen's tournament in London attracts most of the leading male players in the world, the BBC revs up.
They want to hook you well. The cameras steal into the Queen's clubhouse and pan down along the well-polished wooden hangings with their lists of former champions. You can almost see the grain on the plaque while Sue Barker whispers in a hushed voice the names of the aristocrats.
It helps the BBC are just about the only channel showing tennis but their crown jewel of Wimbledon deserves an appetiser before it begins next week. Grandstand whetted the appetite. On Saturday former champion Boris Becker shared the commentary position with John Lloyd. Becker with his yellow-white hair spiked upwards was still looking the warrior, this time resembling the bleached genetic mutant from Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner. Boris was watching the match termed the "Dawn against the Twilight", or 20-year-old Andy Roddick against 33-year-old Andre Agassi in the semi-final.
"I'm trying to work out which side he prefers," says Becker in the first game, telling us what goes on in the head of any tennis player facing the bullets of Roddick.
Technology also crept in to help the two analysts and Andrew Castle's computer graphic showed where Agassi hits his returns and at what height he smacks the ball back to his opponents.
Against Richard Krajicek, Agassi was returning serves from outside the baseline. The point was well made - the American has the best return of serve in the business.
Castle returned in the second set with his coloured arrows to show the direction Roddick was hitting his serves, one of them swinging out towards the middle row of the bleachers, the other into Agassi's body and all at over 140 m.p.h. It was at this point John Lloyd saw the radar gun tumbling up farther than it had done in any other match, ever.
"You have just seen Andy Roddick equal the world record for fastest serve set by Greg Rusedski in Indian Wells in 1998. He hit that one at 149 m.p.h. How long would Agassi have to react to that one Andrew ?" asked Lloyd.
".503 seconds to react. The amazing thing is that Agassi actually got it back," replied Castle.
"I don't think I've ever seen a better display of serving - 78 per cent of first serves in," said Lloyd in disbelief.
"This is a wild-west shootout here," agreed Becker. "I've never seen such a service performance."
The subtext to the match, as explained by Lloyd, was that coach Brad Gilbert, who had been fired by Agassi, was coaching Roddick and Agassi was being coached by Darren Cahill, who had recently been fired by Lleyton Hewitt.
Roddick won but the message from the Beeb for Wimbledon was to expect more computer graphics and more discussion about players' backgrounds and private lives. Immediately after the match Roddick was interviewed courtside.
"Girlfriend, Andy?" "Yep." "Name?" "Mandy." The slippery slope.
Another sport the BBC has appropriated is athletics. In its globetrotting build-up to the World Athletic Championships in Paris this year, Grandstand tracked down Olympic and world 100-metre champion Maurice Greene. Greene, a shameless self-publicist, had a bad year last year that saw his 100-metre world record fall to Tim Montgomery. Having little to talk about from the immediate past, Greene resorted to talking about the future.
"By the time I get to Paris, I will win the 100 metres for the fourth time, the 200 metres and the relay. I'll be taking home three gold medals," he predicted. On his claim in the 100 metres, that's sorted too.
"I already got the medal. All I gotta do is pick it up. I don't think I'm arrogant. I just think I'm confident."
Girlfriend, Mo-Reece?
