For these next two weeks, the best tennis players in the world will enter Wimbledon’s fabled Center Court under two lines of poetry inscribed in capital letters above the tunnel that leads from the locker room:
AND TREAT THOSE TWO IMPOSTORS JUST THE SAME
The passage is from Rudyard Kipling’s “If—,” once voted Britain’s most popular poem.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too…
If you can do all these things, Kipling concludes, “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, / And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!” For a tennis player, the stoic lines swearing off triumph and disaster suggest that winning—even winning a major tournament like Wimbledon—must be kept in perspective. And a loss? Learn from it and move on.
Before the men’s championship match in 2008, the two finalists, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal (still seeded second and third this year, more than a decade later), each recorded a recitation of a passage from the poem for a feature to be aired during rain delays. On International Women’s Day, in 2017, seven-time Wimbledon singles champion Serena Williams made a video in which she read the second half of the poem, substituting for Kipling’s final, patriarchal words an updated message for her daughter, “You will be a Woman, sister!”
It might surprise the poem’s many enthusiasts to learn that Kipling, who lived for several years in Vermont and built himself a tennis court there (reputedly the first in the state), originally used “If—” as the epilogue to a story about George Washington and his resistance to public opinion. Today, it is Kipling himself who often faces the public’s wrath.