For Wimbledon, practice is on grass at an English garden party

Even for the best tennis players in the world, the days leading up to a Grand Slam can be filled with nerves and stress, especially the time leading up to Wimbledon, the biggest Grand Slam of them all.

Days can become a blur of chasing partner hits and time on the limited practice fields a tournament has available, or a last-ditch effort to win tour-level matches at leagues in Eastbourne or Majorca.

A handful of pros, including several clients of long-time cop Patricio Apey, end up at a classic English garden party called the Boodles that is unlike almost anything else on the tennis calendar – a Gatsby-esque few days at an estate outside London that makes supposedly the apotheosis of tennis elegance, Wimbledon’s All England Club feels like a gathering of the masses in the local park.

“When I drove in this morning, I was kind of shocked,” Lorenzo Musetti, the rising star from Italy, said of the 300-acre property that the Ambani family of India bought in 2021 for about $70 million. “It’s not every day you see a property like this.”

Or a high-end jewelry show masquerading as a tennis event in a sprawling former country club called Stoke Park, which is now one of the private residences of one of the world’s richest families.

“The best event we do all year round,” says Michael Wainwright, the managing director of Boodles, the Liverpool- and London-based jewelery company his family has owned since 1880.

When he started with the Boodles two decades ago, Apey had no thought of hosting a tennis event that would be more like a polo match. He just knew that players who won Wimbledon made more money than players who won the other big tournaments. (Wimbledon’s men’s and women’s singles champions will earn nearly $3 million each this year.)

He represented a number of players who excelled on clay, but not on grass. They struggled to acclimate during the few weeks between the French Open and Wimbledon, often losing early in the few available tournaments during the short grass-court season.

“I had to give them more matches,” Apey said.

The only way he could do that, he reasoned, was to organize a lawn exhibition near London ahead of Wimbledon. Stoke Park, with its two-dozen bedroom mansion, sloping golf course – tennis players love to relax with a round of golf – and immaculate grass tennis courts made the perfect location.

Through an acquaintance, he met Wainwright and his older brother, Nicholas, who warmed to the idea. It was a soft sell opportunity: Showcasing their jewelry to hundreds of their best clients and thousands more in the upper echelon of the tennis demographic (think pocket squares and long, flowery summer dresses) as they spent a summer afternoon sipping champagne and Pimm’s, eating from groomed multi-course lunches, enjoy high tea, browse a tented pavilion full of sparkling baubles and perhaps play tennis in a small stadium under tall trees surrounded by immaculately manicured gardens.

Boodles sponsors another high-profile sporting event, the Cheltenham Gold Cup, an equestrian race for the well-to-do, but women are more into tennis, Wainwright said, and horse racing doesn’t offer the same “dwell time” as tennis.

In other words, with all the tennis changes and the breaks between sets and matches, and the fact that the matches really don’t matter, the 10,000 customers who come to the five days of the Boodles tennis event have plenty of time to go through that. $2.9 million diamond ring, or the more affordable $80,000 necklace. Several cabinets of Patek Philippe watches were also on display.

Boodles also hosted an evening gala on the Stoke Park grounds for around 40 of its top clients on Wednesday night. Wine and champagne flowed freely and jewelry was sold into the small hours.

For players, the Boodles can offer an appearance fee and – just as valuable – a chance to chill. Sebastian Korda and his coach, Radek Stepanek, joined Wainwright for a round of golf earlier this week.

There is an extensive gym for the tour’s growing cohort of obsessive lifters. Perhaps most important are the moments of calm training on the Stoke Park grass before the chaos of Wimbledon.

“It’s an opportunity to work on a few things,” said Korda, who played in Eastbourne the week before Wimbledon last year and lost his first match.

Croatia’s Borna Coric, who went winless in two grass-court tournaments this year, said he had arrived at Stoke Park this week in a hurry and worried about his form. He had then climbed into bed in a luxurious room.

“I had the best night’s sleep I’ve had in weeks,” Coric said.