WIMBLEDON, England -- For John McEnroe and Wimbledon, it was mutual loathing at first sight.
He was New York. Wimbledon was England. He had a temper. Wimbledon had manners.
"I was a kid from Queens, a subway rider," McEnroe writes in his autobiography You Cannot Be Serious. "How could anybody expect me to take all this strawberries-and-cream malarkey seriously?"
Somebody -- or something -- would have to give.
Wimbledon won. It always does. That's the lure of the place, the charm, too.
It sneaks up on you, grabs you and doesn't let you go, even if you're a self-styled tennis rebel such as McEnroe, who ends up wallowing in Britain's great national passion and writing: "The English may be reserved, but not when it comes to their games!"
Wimbledon begins again tomorrow, adhering to all the old rituals when the international tennis circus sets down for two weeks in this leafy London suburb.
They'll dress in pure tennis whites because that's how you must dress at Wimbledon, and they'll bow before royalty that observes from on high in a box.
They'll wait until precisely 2 p.m. to start daily proceedings on the most revered patch of tennis lawn in the world, Centre Court.
They'll take off the middle Sunday, play until dark and endure the English summer weather that features rain followed by more rain followed by intermittent showers.
And yes, they'll also serve up at that "strawberries-and-cream marlarkey" to the thousands of fans allowed past the wrought iron gates of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club.
Maybe another angry young man, like the McEnroe of old, will appear and attempt to bring down the tennis establishment.
But you don't bring down the establishment any more than you bring down England.
Wimbledon is England, or at least the chocolate-box vision of England, where polite crowds queue, people take tea and royalty comes to watch. The first All England Lawn Tennis Championship was played in 1877 and has been played on Centre Court here since 1922.
Its very Englishness makes Wimbledon stand out in a sporting age as globalized, marketed and dulled as a McDonald's hamburger.
Not that Wimbledon avoids marketing. But it's done in a very English way, a sleight-of-hand maneuver that features shops and fast-food joints buried beneath stadiums, hospitality tents tucked out of the way and subtle, corporate signage instead of a splash of on-court billboards.
Wimbledon places its distinctive, fancy dark-green-and-purple logo on everything from tennis towels to T-shirts to tote bags. And it sells its gear worldwide, including in four recently opened Wimbledon shops in Shanghai.
To watch Wimbledon on television year after year, you wouldn't know that over the past decade the club has been transformed from a revered-though-antiquated complex to a state-of-the-art tennis hub with a new stadium, new locker rooms, new media facilities and new outer courts.
It manages to produce a large profit -- the club calls it a "surplus" -- that it hands over to England's Lawn Tennis Association. Last year's net was around $50 million.
"Englishness is our key advantage," says Robert McCowen, the All England Club's marketing director. "We're the only Grand Slam tennis event on grass. We try to keep commercialism to a minimum on the grounds. Our goal is to preserve the unique character and image of the championships."
Nobody messes with Centre Court, a magnificently old-fashioned 13,813-seat stadium. There are no lights and no dome. The scoreboard is simple. It's the barest stage in sports -- dramatically understated. "As soon as we move from there, we lose our unique advantage," McCowen said.
But Wimbledon isn't moving. It's sticking to its traditions and its Englishness.
"It's grass, first and foremost," said Honor Godfrey, the curator of the club's museum. "It's rain. The weather. The strawberries. It's part of the social scene. The whole idea is that it should be tennis in an English garden."
From her office overlooking the outer courts, Godfrey has a clear view of Wimbledon's lawns, the hydrangeas and the lavender.
Royalty also makes Wimbledon unique. The first British royal visit to the tournament was in 1907. Among the biggest royal boosters over the years were King George V and his wife, Queen Mary. The current queen, Elizabeth II, was last at Wimbledon in 1977. Horse-racing is her sporting passion.
The club is coy about the possibility of the queen attending this year's tournament, but it seems a logical stop during her Golden Jubilee year.
On a trip through the museum, Godfrey points to some items that speak to the Englishness of the place. There's a silver hairbrush-and-mirror set that Lilian Watson received after losing to her sister Maud in the 1884 women's final, a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake for today's players.
Godfrey is particularly proud of a display featuring a Victorian parlor dolled up with dishes, goblets, toast racks and ice moulds -- all with a tennis motif. Tennis became all the rage among the Victorians, the men playing in long pants and sweaters, the women in dresses that bustled.
The game has come a long way, since. In one display case, there's the outfit Venus Williams wore last year when she won. Her short dress adorned with pink and silver crystals would have scandalized the Victorians.
But Wimbledon and England have moved on.
Well, maybe not so much. A newsreel shows Wimbledon, the way it was, in 1947. They still had the same lines for tickets, the same glimpses of royalty, the teas and strawberries. The crowds were dressed much more formally than they are now, men in suits, women in dresses, gloves, hats, even a fur coat or two.
Yet the newsreels were filled with faces showing the same sense of anticipation and occasion that tugs annually at the crowds.
About the only thing missing in the museum is a modern triumph for an English man. The last British man to win Wimbledon was Fred Perry in 1936.
Yet hope abides. The other day, Godfrey was overjoyed when she received an empty tennis racket cover that was signed by Tim Henman, an English player brought up on Wimbledon's courts.
Henman is seeded No. 4 in this year's tournament, a contender for the crown.
"It would be wonderful to have another champion," Godfrey said, pausing at the thought of receiving a racket from an English winner.
Maybe this year.
Bill Glauber is The Sun's London correspondent. He has covered six Wimbledon tournaments.,