ABSTRACT
The Wimbledon Master Plan describes the ethos of Wimbledon as "Tennis in an English Garden" – evoking the mannered, upper middle-class Victorian origins of the lawn tennis championships. This chapter considers the mediatization of Wimbledon from the perspective of the spectator, analysing both media content and the live/mediated audience experience, as well as considering the institutional logic manifested in the particularity of this sporting mega-event. It examines television, Internet, social media, digital and material advertising and promotional artefacts. At Southfields, the closest tube station to Wimbledon, a carpet of artificial grass covered the normally grey concrete floor, and the now seemingly ubiquitous "Wimbledon Awaits" signage adorned the walls and seats. Hawk-Eye, "a multifarious computer system used in cricket, tennis and other sports to visually track the path of the ball and display a record of its most statistically likely path as a moving image", was initially developed as a television replay tool for cricket broadcasting.
