Wimbledon, this year and all the others.

THE ANCIENTS included athletic games as integral parts of their epic poems for a number of excellent reasons, the chief of which is that the classical epic was supposed to represent the entire range of human experience. As Homer and Vergil and Dante and the rest knew, athletics are cognitive, a way of knowing that is different from other ways of knowing, and thus our universities have athletic teams, for good reasons perceived only dimly, and for corrupt reasons only too obvious.

During the current Wimbledom tennis tournament, a reporter asked Chris Evert Lloyd whether she was thinking about retiring, and she replied that she would think about it at the end of the season. The point was that Mrs. Lloyd had lost the last 11 matches she had played against Martina Navratilova and is now starting to have trouble beating teenagers.

Yet only moments ago, Chris Evert, then a teenager herself with a yellow bow on her pigtail, was upsetting Francoise Durr, the French champion, in the stadium at Forest Hills, where Tilden had played, and was going on to one of the great athletic careers of all time.

A. E. Housman wrote a poem entitled "To an Athlete, Dying Young," but one of the things we understand from athletics is that all athletes die young, enacting in larger-than-ordinary-life terms the destiny to which we are all subject. The athlete, as Jeffrey Hart wrote in his book When the Going Was Good, undergoes an early death, usually around age thirty. He still looks as trim as ever, but he is a step slower, his eye is less keen, and he knows that the hungry generations are preparing to tread him down.

The last competitive days of Joe Louis and Joe DiMaggio were almost unendurable to those who had glimpsed perfection through them, and Muhammad Ali ran into the cement fists of Joe Frazier in Manila and aged rapidly even though he won the fight. Ali no longer floats like a butterfly or stings like a bee.

There is much that never changes at Wimbledon and the other great tournaments, and presumably the strawberries and cream will always be there, and the exquisitely manicured grass courts, and the awnings and blazers, but everything is also changing, and no one will ever hit Don Budge's backhand again, or Jack Kramer's forehand, those are gone forever, and Chris Evert Lloyd is going too, though she stands in a long line of champions as Wimbledon celebrates the one-hundredth anniversary of women's tennis. Borg is gone, and Connors is going, even as he now has won more Wimbledon singles matches than any other man in history.

Both John McEnroe and Martina Navratilova seem invincible when they are playing at their best, but they too will meet an adversary more formidable than any nosy reporter or less-than-perfect line judge. They will meet time itself in the form of a ferocious and probably still unknown teenager, and that is why athletics is a cognitive and in some way a religious experience.