WIMBLEDON, England – The English have waited a long time for a grass court champion to call their own – 69 years to be exact, since Fred Perry won the last of his three Wimbledon championships.

So when Tim Henman, a man who is grass all over and this country’s chief hope over the last decade, recently declared his preference for clay courts, England took notice.

What’s that? “Our Tim,” as he is known, would rather smack the ball around Roland Garros or Rome than the All England Club? Utter nonsense, or sacrilege.

“Yeah,” Henman said plainly after his second-round loss at the French Open, confirming his remark from a few weeks earlier.

“I think it was a reflection on certainly the way that I played on grass over

the last couple years,” he said. “But I think it is also a reflection on the conditions. It’s kind of ironic that, you know, I always felt like it was getting slower and slower at Wimbledon. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.”

Until, that is, he made a call to Slazenger, the maker of Henman’s rackets and the balls used at Wimbledon.

Slazenger delivers its ball in pressurized cans, but the custom at Wimbledon has been to open them before the tournament begins. Henman said he was told the cans were cracked as early as two weeks before the first Monday, though Wimbledon has since said the lag was not quite that long.

“It’s obviously one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever heard of,” Henman said. “After a while, a couple of games, they come out of the can, they look nice and new, and then they’re basically flat.”

Henman’s sensitivity to the balls is hardly a surprise, as tennis players are a notoriously finicky lot. Pete Sampras obsessively attended to his strings, wedging tiny pieces of plastic between them to reduce friction and prevent them from breaking. Bjorn Borg strung his rackets so tightly that his former coach, Lennart Bergelin, would sometimes hear strings popping in the middle of the night. Ivan Lendl used to roam the baseline with a pocketful of sawdust to dry his racket handle. Even Rafael Nadal, the care-free Spaniard who bedazzled fans at this year’s French Open, has his ticks – just watch as he adjusts his socks ever so slightly, game after game.

Now, after three trips to the Wimbledon semifinals and several heartbreaking losses, Henman has found his bogeyman. Of no consequence is the fact that Slazenger said that Wimbledon’s routine – which, it turns out, goes back 10 years – would not affect the balls. What does matter is that Wimbledon has decided to break with tradition and open cans on court, as the other Grand Slams do.

“Fingers crossed,” Henman said.

The great ball debate is the latest chapter in an annual story at Wimbledon, the most precious and finely manicured playing surface in the sport. To a man, the best grass-court players in the men’s game agree that the lawns here play slower than they once did.

Perennial ryegrass had been the chief culprit before Henman’s recent discovery. The All England Club switched to the grass in 2000 for its durability. Many players, however, saw an attempt to create more consistent bounces and slow the game. Wimbledon, it seemed, had decided that the world had seen enough of Sampras and Goran Ivanisevic firing aces back and forth.

If indeed the new grass was introduced to restore some drama to matches increasingly bereft of rallies, it has succeeded in part by making grass more attractive to the game’s ever-increasing number of baseliners. Yet Patrick McEnroe, the U.S. Davis Cup captain, said it has set off some unintended consequences as well.

“Believe it or not, they’ve actually hurt guys who have medium-range serves,” he said in an interview last week, using Henman as an example. “If you serve like Sampras or Ivanisevic, you are not that affected. Even Roger Federer serves and stays back on his second serves now.”

Henman agrees that those players who like to play on grass, rather than serve on it, have fewer advantages today than they once did. While serve-and-volley was once the preferred way to play at Wimbledon – even Lendl, the consummate baseliner, turned to it year after year – this is no longer the case.

“It’s not as clear-cut,” Henman said. “Before there was really only one way to play on grass, and now it’s obviously very different.”

Tim Mayotte, a former Wimbledon quarterfinalist and now an instructor at Manhattan Plaza Racquet Club on West 43rd Street, said when he played at Wimbledon in the 1980s, the courts were fast, much more so than those at the Kooyong Lawn Tennis Club in Melbourne, where the Australian Open was played on grass until 1987.

“It was so different from Wimbledon, and it definitely favored the baseliners,” Mayotte said in an interview. “The court was also crowned; the highest point was at the net. I used to double-fault a lot there. At Wimbledon, the ball would really move.”

To some, all this talk of deflated balls and durable grass is claptrap.

“You can only make grass so slow,” Mary Carillo said in a recent press conference. “Some of that stuff is nutty. Tim is making it sound as though there is some kind of conspiracy.”

There are other reasons why serve-and-volley players like Henman are having a more difficult time plying their grade on grass. One of the more interesting theories was offered recently by Patrick Rafter, a two-time Wimbledon finalist who came within two points of winning the title in 2001 against Ivanisevic.

“I think the string is the dominating factor now,” he said in an interview.

Rafter identified “Big Banger” strings as the primary offender. The synthetic strings, manufactured by Luxilon, are popular among many top players, who often weave them, half-and-half, with natural gut strings of old, which are made from the byproducts of the meat industry, including sheep and cattle intestines. Andre Agassi has used Luxilon for years now, and most players say the strings allow them to generate more spin.

“I found it very hard to volley with the ball dipping like it did,” Rafter said of the end of his career.

For Federer, at least, the changed conditions are real, but he said a player’s perception of them – and of grass in general – is perhaps more important.

“The ones who don’t really like it, well, the chances are slimmer for them,” he said. “I just have the feeling it’s a lot to do with if you believe you can do well, because for everybody the season is short.”

If Henman needs to hear the crackle of the can to regain his grass-court confidence, then so be it. Maybe this time he will convince the English that is it worth believing, too.