When people in tennis talk of 'channelling John McEnroe' it usually relates to umpires and anger issues.
On the Roehampton grass, it means something different - it's the big, green-and-purple dream of coming through Qualifying and then going deep into the main draw, just as McEnroe did as a teenager in the summer of 1977 when he progressed as far as the semi-finals. Only Jimmy Connors could stop the New Yorker from going any further.
Some of the most compelling Wimbledon stories start in Roehampton, with the pleasure of watching momentum and the narrative build in Qualifying and then accelerate inside the iron gates of the All England Club as an upwardly mobile outsider disturbs the grass court establishment. And if you can do that with a little of McEnroe's rebellious energy, some would say that's all the better.
While others this week will be hoping to emulate McEnroe, Bernard Tomic, who starts against Slovenia's Blaz Kavcic, might be looking to himself for inspiration - it's 10 years now since the Australian, who was then just 18, qualified for The Championships and became the youngest quarter-finalist since Boris Becker in 1986. Even that far into the tournament, Tomic played with poise and purpose, taking a set off Novak Djokovic in the last eight. That remains his best result at a Grand Slam. While he is ranked outside the top 200, and he didn't have the happiest trip to Paris last month, where he lost to a 16-year-old in the opening round of Roland-Garros qualifying, Tomic has first-hand experience of what's possible: that a qualifier can have some impact. No qualifier has gone deeper since at Wimbledon.
Others at Roehampton might take inspiration from America's Alexandra Stevenson, a semi-finalist in the ladies' singles at The Championships 1999, which is the furthest that any female qualifier has ever gone. Remarkably, Stevenson's quarter-final opponent that summer was another qualifier, Australia's Jelena Dokic, whose run had started by beating Martina Hingis, then the best player in the world, for the loss of just two games in the first round. Dokic also beat France's Mary Pierce along the way before running into Stevenson, who in turn would lose to Lindsay Davenport in the last four. The last qualifier to make the quarter-finals of the ladies' singles was Estonia's Kaia Kanepi in 2010.
If they're not inspired by McEnroe, this summer's competitors at Roehampton might look to the story of Vladimir Voltchkov, a qualifier from Belarus, who went so far into the draw in 2000 that he ran out of clothes - he ended up borrowing some shorts from Marat Safin. Voltchkov's run was itself inspired by Russell Crowe, with the tennis player watching Gladiator at least four times to get him in the mood for Centre Court. Away from Wimbledon, there's the more recent example of Russia's Aslan Karatsev, who qualified for this year's Australian Open and ended up playing Djokovic for a place in the final.
Maybe someone at Roehampton this week is dreaming just as big, channelling McEnroe, Stevenson or even Tomic.
