Wimbledon is on, and this year the tournament is celebrating the centenary of its renowned and prestigious tennis stage known as Centre Court. During coverage of the special ceremony held last Sunday, cameras followed commentators Sue Barker and John McEnroe as they passed through the Centre Court entrance area, where top-seeded players wait to battle for the most valued trophy and title in the sport.

Inscribed on the wall above the doorway to Centre Court are these famous lines from the poem ‘If–’ (1910) by English writer Rudyard Kipling: ‘If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same’. Where Kipling’s poem presents a father’s advice to his son, on how to develop a stoic character and win at life, the choice to put these words above that famed entrance suggests the ideal mindset of a champion: one who can face the prospect of glory or tragedy with the same level head.

While the phrase ‘meet with’ offers the prospect of experiencing victory or failure, the ‘and’ proposes instead that one is looking at both possibilities, as you would be in waiting to compete. Most interesting is how those chances are personified as ‘imposters’, as if to suggest neither one of them are genuinely what they appear to be. Kipling would seem to be suggesting that winning and losing are both illusions, and that one’s character is not determined the outcome, but by one’s attitude in daring to contend in the first place.

If–
by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
   Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
   Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
   And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
   If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
   And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
   Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
   And stoop and build ’em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
   And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
   And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
   To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
   Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!