Wimbledon Tickets / Stalinism
21 Jun 2005
[405w]
A version of this article appeared in
the Times of 21 June 2005
............
Fred Perry won Wimbledon in 1936. It was a good year for Soviet economic policy too: half way through the Second Five Year Plan, output three times what it was before the Revolution. The All England Club does its best to keep this Golden Age alive. True, we have not seen another British men's singles winner. But Wimbledon has resisted the free market better than the communists ever did.
Raging against touts yesterday, a spokesman told the Times that tickets should "go to the people who genuinely wish to attend". Great idea. Easyjet want the seats on their planes filled with bottoms that "genuinely wish" to visit Rome Ciampino. Sotheby's only want you to have Old Masters and Art Deco jewellery you "genuinely wish" to own. And how do they find out who has a genuine wish? By asking to see the colour of our money.
Not so at Wimbledon. Of course, you can buy a debenture: £23,150, if you know how to get a prospectus. Debentures are like those special lanes for Politburo limousines they used to have in Moscow. But for the proletariat it's a lottery (not a ballot, please; balloting is about exercising choice in a system everyone understands). Either that, or you can fall back on that other Soviet standby for deciding who gets what, the Very Long Queue.
If the All England Club wants spectators who truly love tennis, it needs less Stalin and more Stelios. The 21st century solution is plain: put all tickets on Ebay. Then the touts are out of business at a stroke. There's a wad of extra cash for coaching proto-Henmen. And the tickets go to exactly the people who want them most: those willing to fork over their hard-earned rubles.
Granted, this means fewer poor people watching the finals. But the ones there are those who love tennis most, not just the lucky and the loud. And a family that want to give their tennis-mad granny an eightieth birthday present can do it before she's eighty-five. Anyway, we're not talking about auctioning kidneys. It's a game; and avaricious to boot. If players just got bus fare and strawberries, raffling the tickets would be less absurd. But they sell their endorsements to the highest bidder. History has spoken. The Command Economy was a failure. The best way to decide who gets into Centre Court is the democracy of the marketplace.
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Fred Perry won Wimbledon in 1936. It was a good year for Soviet economic policy too: half way through the Second Five Year Plan, output three times what it was before the Revolution. The All England Club does its best to keep this Golden Age alive. True, we have not seen another British men's singles winner. But Wimbledon has resisted the free market better than the communists ever did.
Raging against touts yesterday, a spokesman told the Times that tickets should "go to the people who genuinely wish to attend". Great idea. Easyjet want the seats on their planes filled with bottoms that "genuinely wish" to visit Rome Ciampino. Sotheby's only want you to have Old Masters and Art Deco jewellery you "genuinely wish" to own. And how do they find out who has a genuine wish? By asking to see the colour of our money.
Not so at Wimbledon. Of course, you can buy a debenture: £23,150, if you know how to get a prospectus. Debentures are like those special lanes for Politburo limousines they used to have in Moscow. But for the proletariat it's a lottery (not a ballot, please; balloting is about exercising choice in a system everyone understands). Either that, or you can fall back on that other Soviet standby for deciding who gets what, the Very Long Queue.
If the All England Club wants spectators who truly love tennis, it needs less Stalin and more Stelios. The 21st century solution is plain: put all tickets on Ebay. Then the touts are out of business at a stroke. There's a wad of extra cash for coaching proto-Henmen. And the tickets go to exactly the people who want them most: those willing to fork over their hard-earned rubles.
Granted, this means fewer poor people watching the finals. But the ones there are those who love tennis most, not just the lucky and the loud. And a family that want to give their tennis-mad granny an eightieth birthday present can do it before she's eighty-five. Anyway, we're not talking about auctioning kidneys. It's a game; and avaricious to boot. If players just got bus fare and strawberries, raffling the tickets would be less absurd. But they sell their endorsements to the highest bidder. History has spoken. The Command Economy was a failure. The best way to decide who gets into Centre Court is the democracy of the marketplace.
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