“She struck a ball down the court, as it went down it just missed someone in the VIP box"

Ellen Branagh

Around 50 tennis balls go missing from Wimbledon each day during the tournament — many taken by fans keen for a memento, the man in charge said yesterday.

Brian Mardling has been involved in the Grand Slam for more than 20 years, working as a linesman and umpire, and even once having to reprimand Martina Navratilova.

Now the tournament’s ball distribution manager, he is in charge of all 54,000 balls at the two-week event.

Mr Mardling, who turns 65 next month, has been helping look after the balls for seven years, but this is his first year in charge.

“We order 54,000 balls from Slazenger. That’s the initial order that comes in three deliveries, we take that in three stages. The last delivery was last Friday.

“We will use them for the whole tournament, including practice and qualifying. We’ll use between 49,000 and 50,000 balls. We have somewhere around a 10% safety net.”

Around 1,800 balls are used each day in a full programme of tennis, he said, but of those, around 50 disappear.

“There’s probably about 50 balls go missing on average in a day,” he said.

“People are supposed to give them back and generally it seems to be part of the British tennis scene that we do ask for the ball back.

“It’s a ball in play, it’s part of the six balls, and if it doesn’t get passed back it means the umpire has to introduce another ball.

“It’s more on the outside courts because the outside perimeters are quite low so the balls bounce into the audience.”

But he said many of the balls, which are stamped with the year of the tournament, do not get returned and are probably kept as mementoes.

“At Wimbledon we run our spare ball system, so we know that spectators do keep them as souvenirs.

“Because you only see the cameras on the main show courts, that’s why we get your ‘can we have our ball back please?’ – you tend to know who’s got it.”

Used championship balls are resold at the club the following day for £3 for a can of three, or £10 for four cans, to raise money for charity.

 

“We don’t separate the balls from specific matches, that’s impossible for us to do, so anybody could pick up their can of balls and it could be a match off Centre Court with a big player.”

Mr Mardling, who works in tax and accountancy when not on tennis duties, umpired for 20 years and has met some of the sport’s biggest names.

“I umpired Steffi Graf on Centre Court once and outside Wimbledon I umpired John McEnroe once in a doubles match — he was quite well-behaved actually. I also umpired Boris Becker when he was an unknown.

“In about 1985 I had to give Martina Navratilova a warning for ball abuse when I was umpiring her at Eastbourne.

“She struck a ball down the court, as it went down it just missed someone in the VIP box.

“We’re okay now though, we’re on speaking terms,” he added.

“I said ‘hello’ to her on the practice court when she was hitting a few balls the other day.”

Mr Mardling, who was once a world-ranking player himself, still plays and competes in what is known as the “super seniors”, he said.

He has his own theories on top players’ habits — including taking two balls before a serve, then throwing one away.

“Generally they will be looking for the ball with the least wear when they want to hit a first serve.

“But I think some of the time it gets habitual, it becomes part of the habit and part of the routine, plus it buys them a few extra seconds of time purely by asking for the other ball.”

Of Andy Murray’s ball difficulties in his Saturday night game against Marcos Baghdatis, he said: “I find that incredible, I’ve never known anything like it.”

The British number one lost two points when balls fell out of his bespoke Adidas shorts. The company has since said there was an error with the handmade pockets and the Scot has changed to different ones.

“I’ve never seen it to that extent,” said Mr Mardling. “It does happen but not to the extent of that happening to a top class player.

“I think I would have been changing my shorts an awful lot earlier than waiting until the end.”

Source: http://feeds.examiner.ie/~r/iesportsblog/~3/LrnTs4ZnKiA/post.aspx

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