WIMBLEDON, England — The first audible obscenity in tennis history surely went unpenalized.
In a sport where perfection is unattainable — eventually you will miss — the game’s earliest practitioners must have felt compelled to utter an oath or two, perhaps on Day 1. Fast forward more than a century to Wimbledon 2015, and tennis’s foul-mouthed tradition is firmly entrenched, with code violations and fines meted out to the offenders like Serena Williams, who was penalized in her first-round victory on Monday, and like Heather Watson, the British player who was given a point penalty in her victory on Tuesday.