Not just name-dropping here. Trying to establish something vaguely resembling tennis credentials.

A lifetime ago, back when Gannett News Service, and its sports boss, Jerry Langdon, were ambitious and had money to spend … I got help with expenses for the 1985 tournament, and even more help in 1986.

I had a local-local reason for going, too. Stephanie Rehe, the best tennis player to come out of the Inland Empire, was an outside contender on the women’s side. And while there, I could write hometowners for all sorts of Yanks with connections to the various Gannett properties. And did.

Some of my basic Wimbledon memories:

1. It rains there. A lot. Those three rain delays in the Nadal-Federer final are no fluke. The two years I covered the event, it seemed as if every day had at least one rain delay. And the delays often were for hours. That made for very long, very tedious days. (I mean, you can tour the grounds and admire Fred Perry’s statue only so many times) This was pre-Internet. So to kill the time, you read all 10 of the London daily newspapers.

2. You have to love-love-love tennis — and I never have — to be eager to watch two weeks of best-of-five (on the men’s side) matches. Especially at Wimbledon, where so many points have the same dreary sameness. “Big serve, feeble return, kill.”

3. Delayed matches, late matches, long matches … can go until 10 p.m. It stays light that late in London (well, in the leafy suburb of Wimbledon, to the northeast of central London). Which means a guy writing for U.S. publications probably won’t be finished writing until something close to midnight. Which means you probably can’t catch the last tube going back to the city. Which means finding a cab in the suburbs at midnight. And the tube station is a long way from the All-England Club. At least a mile. That’s a walk, late at night, in the dark, with your equipment, hoping to catch the last tube.

4. Matches then resume at something like 11 a.m., particularly in the early days, so when you cover Wimbledon … that is all you do. You don’t go to pubs, you don’t eat restaurant meals. You just sleep, go to the club, watch tennis, write about it, go back to sleep.

Two years of it (and Boris Becker won both years; I think Martina Navratilova won both years on the women’s side) was enough for me. In 1987, we agreed to send colleague Mike Davis to cover Wimbledon, and he did that for something like 10 consecutive years, and did a really fine job of it. Mike knows tennis, enjoys it quite a bit, still may play it, and he was perfect for it.

It also enabled him to spend a big chunk of every summer in Europe — and out of the Inland Empire. Two weeks at Wimbledon, and then three weeks of vacation on the continent, especially in Gstaad.

Anyway, it’s hard to imagine, now, that we were allowed to go cover that, and that Gannett paid some of my expenses (and all of Davis’s) for more than a decade. With papers everywhere going almost nowhere … yes, we lived during the Golden Age. Gotta admit that.