I got married in June of 2008, and as part of our honeymoon, my wife and I decided to make a stop at Wimbledon before driving around Ireland for a couple of weeks. I had attended the US Open, so I was familiar with the Grand Slam experience. However, I was amazed at how different Wimbledon was.

Firstly, in order to get tickets, we weren’t able to simply purchase them at a Ticketmaster or something similar. To get tickets we were going to have to stand in line at the Queue, which is this amazingly long line where people stand for hours in order to get daily tickets to the event. I think there’s an option to get tickets in some sort of marketplace, however it seemed expensive and complicated. We opted to stand in line instead. Here’s an interesting story about the Queue from CNN.

We were able to see a couple of great matches, one of which was a fourth-round encounter between Rainer Schuttler vs. Janko Tipsarevic, which went on for four tough sets with Schuttler closing it out with a fourth set tie breaker. One of the highlights of this match was the fact that it was in an outer court, with barely anyone in attendance, and the fact that a missed serve by Shuttler knocked my wife’s beer off her hand. Shuttler apologized, and went on to win, and go as far as the Semis of Wimbledon that year. I’d like to attribute it to the luck of knocking my wife’s beer out of her hand.

Every Wimbledon I’m reminded of not only my experience at Wimbledon, but also the Rainer Shuttler match. Shuttler was actually a pretty good German player, and aside from the 2008 Wimbledon final, he reached the 2003 Australian Open final, losing to Andre Agassi in three quick sets. Here’s some highlights from that final.