We are living in the age of the Fading Yank Athlete.

Suddenly, none of the world’s top golfers are Yanks. Men or women. No American got past the quarterfinals of Wimbledon or the French Open. Our women’s soccer team is a little shaky, remarkable when you think of how many American girls and women are out playing soccer. Our men are headed for hard times. The MVP of the NBA Finals was a German. We’ve never won a World Baseball Championship. No American has been heavyweight boxing champ in a decade.

But nobody knows jock trouble like the Brits know jock trouble, and I saw it up close today in televised images from Wimbledon.

Andy Murray in the semifinals … and no British male has made the Wimbledon final since … Bunny Austin in 1938. A huge opportunity to make history.

This is how it went down.

I was editing copy for the Saturday editions of The National, in sports, and three-fifths of the people in there with me are Britons. Two Englishmen and a Scot.

Wimbledon has been the background noise in the department for the past 12 days. Matches droning on on the big-screen. Andy Murray, Britain’s great hope, pushing deeper into the draw.

Wimbledon is a big deal. Even non-tennis fans realize that. Biggest tournament in the sport. French Open is cute, but it’s on clay … U.S. Open is late August/early September, and it may be a big deal in New York but not so much in the rest of the world, which is paying attention to the new soccer season or to baseball or college football or the NFL.

Wimbledon is the biggest and best, and the Brits have been putting it on forever, and doing a wonderful job, and all tennis fans would love to be there one mild, sunny day, wandering over the lush, green grounds then watching some Russian ingenue play, about 15 feet from your face, on Court 9, as you do the strawberries-and-cream thing … I covered the tournament twice, from start to finish, in another lifetime, and it’s a special event.

So, you would think that as the host of the world’s biggest tennis tournament, something that ought to inspire tens of thousands of potentially great players, the Brits would have had some championships to cheer in the “gentlemen’s singles” competition.

And you would be wrong.

No Brit has won the men’s title at Wimbledon since Fred Perry in 1936, 75 years ago. None have even played for it since the aforementioned Bunny Austin in 1938, or 73 years ago.

It gets worse. No British male has won any of the grand slams since … Fred Perry at the U.S. Open in 1936, You read that right. Not one slam winner in the (let’s see …) 298 major events played since the 1936 U.S. Open, when Fred Perry added that trophy to the Wimbledon championship he had won two months earlier.

The Brits haven’t even gotten close very often. John Lloyd, best known for being Chris Evert’s first husband, made the Australian Open final in 1977. Greg Rusedski made the U.S. Open final in 1997. And now this Andy Murray guy made the U.S. Open final in 2008, and the Australian final both this year and last. And lost all three times, but …

There is great hope for Murray. But, then, there isn’t.

Murray is something of an odd boy. He seems to spend almost as much energy fighting himself as competing against the guy on the other side of the net. He can be self-loathing, but he can turn around that nasty edge and be sarcastic and unpleasant. He also seems more than a bit mentally fragile, as in earlier in this tournament, in a moment only long-suffering British tennis fans would fully understand, when an early Murray match was serenaded with the chant, “Let’s go, Tim!”

“Tim” is Tim Henman, the previous Great British Hope who made four Wimbledon semifinals and was genuinely popular with British fans, who would chant … “Let’s go, Tim” even though they knew he was playing over his head and probably had little or no chance to reach a Wimbledon final … and he never did. So it’s a little bit of a hopeless thing, and to chant “Let’s go, Tim!” is to tell Murray that he’s someone Brit fans also believe doesn’t really have a chance to win. And Murray crabs about it, as he often does about whatever has his attention.

As the match approaches, I feel the tension in the room.  Jokes are made about “how British” Andy Murray is. Apparently some website follows his “Britishness,” and it climbs when he is advancing, perhaps as high as “90 percent British” … but it dives as soon as he loses a set. And by the time he has lost again, he is perhaps 40 percent British and 100 percent Scottish. (This is a Brit thing, the teasing of each other’s sub-groups — English on Welsh on Scottish on Irish. Andy is British till he loses, and then the English, Welsh and Irish will tell you that, no, Andy is thoroughly Scottish.)

So, Murray wins the first set from Rafael Nadal. OMG! If he wins two of the next four sets, he is in the final! Our first finalist since Bunny, 73 years ago!

But the hope is heavily colored with the knowledge that everyone in Britain has seen this movie before. Like, 73 times. And the British guy never actually makes the final. Something Will Happen. Usually, he’s just not good enough, and even if he might be, and on some days Andy Murray seems as if he might be,  something else will happen.

And it does. Nadal starts playing better, which the world’s No. 1 player is likely to do. Murray begins making mistakes, and berating himself, and shaking his fist at himself, and you can almost see him turning Scottish as we watch.

He drops the next two sets, and the doom sets in. Not moping. No. Brits have been through this before, remember?

We Yanks may get there someday. We may be starting out on the road to international sports irrelevance.  But all of us remember Serena winning Wimbledon last year and Tiger Woods tearing up world golf, and USA Basketball winning Olympic medals and the last world championship, etc., etc. And, heck, winning more medals than any other country at the 2008 Summer Olympics.

We don’t really know what it’s like to be a British sports fan, whose athletes haven’t been quite good enough for … well, a long time.

So, they begin to accept the inevitable; they’ve had plenty of practice. Andy Murray will not win. He probably will never win. He hasn’t got the right stuff. He is crushed under the hopes of Britain. He cannot bear the strain.

He is not attacked. No one violently criticizes him. The crowd at Centre Court doesn’t stream for the exits, like Americans might, to avoid the stench of defeat. They clap politely when Murray hits an increasingly rare winner, and they hold on till the end, and sigh, and wait for next year.

The British, remember, used to win lots and lots of things. They and the French pretty much codified most of the world’s leading sports more than a century ago, and the Brits invented soccer. But they have won the World Cup only once, in 1966,  and only in the past few years has their Olympic team been even vaguely competent again. (Been a long time since “Chariots of Fire.”)

If the U.S. was in the down cycle the Brits have been in since, basically, World War II … we would be whining like brats. We would be trashing our athletes. But we’re not there yet.

Andy Murray hits wide, and it’s over, and now he’s fully Scottish again, yet also still fully British because Wimbledon means British tennis failure, and my co-workers return to their tasks.