Wimbledon
July 1982
I was starting my doctoral program at Penn State. My kick-off course was entitled Cross Cultural Analysis of Educational Systems. I was spending the summer in England, visiting a variety of schools in London and Durham. There were 20 of us on this cross-cultural analysis and it was great fun.
Each day, we went to a different school in the morning and then we wandered around the city in the afternoon. In the evening, we went to the theatre or a pub. I really enjoyed this summer.
One day someone mentioned that Wimbledon was taking place so we hopped a few subway trains and made our way to the venue. It was a gorgeous, gorgeous day. The sun was out. It wasn't too hot. Everyone was well dressed for the occasion (except for us).
We walked right through the entrance gate and no one was collecting tickets which really surprised me because I would have never thought that this event was free. We walked up the midway and made our way to some seats. A match was just beginning. We sat for about 1/2 hour but then lost interest as it was too hard for any of us to figure out who was winner. None of us were tennis players. I took a few photos and we left.
Several years later, I showed my photos to my tennis friends. Their jaws dropped. "Do you know what match you attended," one of them asked.
"Nope", I responded nonchalantly.
"Do you realize you watched Chris Everett play Martina Navratilova?" She was incredulous. "I've wanted to see those two compete against each other my whole life. Did you know that?"
"Um, no, not really," I responded.
"And you didn't have a ticket? You just walked in? You didn't buy tickets. You just walked in? No one stopped you? It was that simple. You just found an empty seat at the most coveted match of the entire competition?"
"Yea, we just sat down. We had good seats," I added just to be annoying. She was so miffed by the injustice that I thought I should quickly move on and show her my photos of 30 different school in England.
