WIMBLEDON, England -- The day began under a sky as black as the taxi I took from Knightsbridge to Church Road. This was the way to travel, tennis ambassador Ted Tinling always insisted, by honest English cab and preceded by the three most delicious words in any language, "To Wimbledon, then."

I spun the instructions out in my best American accent.

"What's that, guv?" the cabbie asked.

I said it again, flat, confident, clear.

"Wimple-ton? Where's that, Coffee-fornia?" He laughed, loud, nasal, long, but nevertheless swung the taxi into the general danger and clutter of London.

I guess I could have used Bud Collins' favorite description for Wimbledon, "The Big Dubya," but who knows where I would have ended up. And if I have cheered an Englishman, I consider it a job worth doing, what with the old Empire full of summer vacancies because of hoof and mouth disease, boring royals and inevitable weather.

My dinner menu was without one offering of beef, not that the English know what to do with meat anyhow, except bake it in a pie. The best chef in the land is Mr. Goodwrench. I point out the omission to my waiter.

"Oh, beef is there," he said. "We just use the French."

Great. Now I have to travel and eat in two entirely new languages. And I have yet to sort out exactly what a fortnight is, except, as an American friend explained, "Think of three starts by Mike Hampton."

The 12-sided roof of Wimbledon's Centre Court slants inward, giving the most honored house in tennis the appearance not of a cathedral but of a dark, green dungeon.

At the bottom, on an immaculate lawn, athletic young men and women dressed pristinely in white whack tennis balls at one another for honor, celebrity and significant wealth, while privileged witnesses applaud, but only at the proper moment and with only the appropriate amount of force.

Players wait to be summoned, hit only the prescribed number of practice balls, let their muscles dance until one wins, bow or curtsy to the Royal Box and leave together.

Two will be singles champions, one male, one female. The majesty of their accomplishments will last as long as civilization honors the ability to hit a small, fuzzy ball with a racket strung from the sacrifices of seven adult sheep.

Until then, Wimbledon is about almost anything but tennis, including mostly gossip, serious stuffiness and, most prominently, strawberries.

Let's take the most important of these first. Strawberries. It seems the weather has been so cold and dank the little English beauties have not blossomed on time for the big carnival. John Lennon was, apparently, wrong. There are not strawberry fields forever.

This has caused a crisis among the guardians of the tradition of moistening a matched set of strawberries with the barest hint of cream and selling them to foreigners for the price of an honest pair of shoes. These foreigners would be mostly Americans, those of us who say "Wimple-ton" as, of course, it should be.

A suggestion that Spanish or South American strawberries be considered as stand-ins brought howls of protest and a vow to eat cherries first, they being properly red and in abundance throughout this sunless kingdom.

The British hosts seem annoyed with the whole thing. "Precisely the right sport for the new Euro- and Ameri-trash, the culturally unencumbered barbarians of the beaches," sniffed one Englishman.

Tennis is not one of the things Britons do well, tennis and skiing, but no one thinks of holding the World Cup downhill in a London suburb. The fact is, although it is played on grass, a surface nobody else uses, in a country where few can or will bother to play the game, and flatters a very limited kind of player (big serve, quick volley), Wimbledon tennis defines the sport.

The English endure Wimbledon and gripe about it and do not refuse the profit. As one of them put it, "It is like sumo wrestling. All quite fun, if a touch disgusting, but we certainly don't want to have a go."

The proper name for Wimbledon is the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. It has only 375 members who pay 10 pounds a year to belong. Money is not the price of admission. Birthright is. Those 10 pounds wouldn't buy a Centre Court seat, if one could be had, or they knew how to spell "Center."

Wimbledon's instinctive stuffiness has nothing to do with the weather, seldom out of the 70s. On the rare occasion that summer overloads the swells who visit Centre Court, they are reminded of admittance instructions that say "male spectators are requested not to remove their shirts at any time."

There are no rules for females.

Visiting correspondents are expected to know everything without question. I arrived as promised and asked if someone might show me around. I was told to stick with the other Yanks.

The Yanks, I discovered, were the ones in jackets and neckties. The rest of the press corps seemed to all wear jeans and T-shirts that said either "Michigan State" or "Tufts."

And we don't eat with our knives.

Contact Bernie Lincicome of the Rocky Mountain News at http://www.rockymountainnews.com.