Once Sharapova’s feet had touched the turf, the uniformed guards disappeared, fading into the background. They were scheduled to return to pick her up an hour later. In the meantime, you might have expected that they would keep a watchful eye on the crowd, attempting to identify potential threats to their charge. Not likely; instead, they sloped off to watch the tennis, sleep off the heavy night before or go hunting for food in the hospitality tents. If they remembered to get in position when Sharapova was ready to leave, she could count herself lucky.

When the threat to the biggest tennis stars (particularly female) was never so great, the protection that they could expect at the sport’s premier tournament was provided by lazy, opportunistic and untrained students looking to earn some pocket money during the summer. I know, because for two years I was one of them.

While I worked at Wimbledon, a security company was contracted with ensuring the highlight of the tennis calendar passed off safely. Along with the more typical responsibilities associated with a sporting event, including ensuring spectators got in and out of the complex as quickly and safely as possible, the company was charged with providing security for the players on their journeys between changing room and court. That meant that the positions filled by the company ranged from bag searchers and security guards to the job that I did: player escort.

Efficient and intelligent application of human resources should have made the staffing of these diverse roles a fairly straightforward task. Anyone with a brain and bit of training can perform basic crowd control or keep an eye open for sharp objects in picnic hampers. However, when it came to the protection of the players as they made their way around the complex, you might have thought that more would have been asked of the guards, especially in a job that required ‘access all areas’ security clearance, and that security professionals with bodyguard training would have been brought in to manage the potentially dangerous interface between the stars and their fans. You would have been wrong.

The shocking truth was that the recruitment process for these highly sensitive positions was arbitrary, unvetted and completely open to abuse. Amid an unprecedented climate of fear of terrorist attack, coupled with the ever-present danger of stalkers, people wandered in off the street and were given jobs – jobs that granted unfettered access to some of the biggest names in sport. My story is neither exceptional nor exaggerated.

Having applied for the job of security guard through a website, I received a tip-off from a friend who had worked at The Championships before. He claimed that if I followed up my application with a phone call stating that I was taller than six foot, I would be considered to join the player escort team. I was dubious, but given the stories I had heard about guards spending two weeks minding fire extinguishers or endlessly burrowing through hampers I made the call. It worked like a charm. On the first of our two induction days, both my friend and I were immediately informed that we had been selected to be player escorts.

Although I was pleased, I was slightly apprehensive about the prospect of extra training and perhaps having to go through a short course in the technicalities of guarding. I needn’t have worried. The only consequence of my new status was to be in a group that undertook the same generic training as all the other guards – a tour of the grounds, a lecture in basic customer satisfaction, and a pep talk on discipline and presentation by the self-appointed ringmaster of this ‘circus’.

So, with my references unchecked, completely bereft of experience and having just set foot on the Wimbledon turf for the very first time, I landed one of the top guarding jobs in the business solely on my physical appearance: six feet four and sixteen stone. The way in which I had eased my way from student to sentry came as a rather worrying surprise.

Fortunately, on the first day on the job, my fears were put at ease. ‘Remember, you are only getting £7 an hour for this. If someone comes at you with something nasty, then get out of the fucking way!’ The instructions from one of our managers left no room for interpretation. Having reputedly come by the job (also with no experience) after meeting one of the senior managers in a notorious Sunday drinking hole, he was neither willing nor able to offer any further guidance. Although I could see his point, this advice to abandon ship at the first sight of trouble was yet another twist to an already bizarre story. It was becoming clear that the job we were being asked to perform was purely role play. It was an act. With an access-all-areas pass and a lot of time on our hands, it was not long before the actors turned to clowns.

During the two years I worked as a player escort, there were countless incidents of incompetence, negligence and wilful disregard for the risks to players that we were supposed to eliminate. Having been informed by managers that we were a sham, and in many cases proving to be nothing more than a hindrance to the minor players who could otherwise move around without attracting attention, it was inevitable that liberties would be taken. First, there was the almost constant attempt to forage for food. The media centre was usually the place to begin in the mornings. A plentiful supply of coffee and croissants on the roof terrace made it an excellent alternative to the staff canteen. Sue Barker, John Inverdale and Alistair McGowan would routinely share our choice of venue, once more highlighting the limitless possibilities for a huge security incident that our all-area passes had given us.

Once play began, we would return to the escorts’ base, conveniently situated next to the female seeds’ changing room, to receive our list of jobs for the day. For me and my star-struck colleagues, the most important issue to be resolved at this stage was who would get the big-ticket escorts. Who would be accompanying the matches most likely to get us on TV or our face in the paper? Offers such as ‘I’ll swap you a Davenport for an Agassi’ could regularly be heard deep in the bowels of the players’ area. Occasionally, our boss would have an input, insisting on the ‘big meat’ being used to escort Anna Kournikova, who caused our only problems when she began to progress in both doubles competitions. This success resulted in regular visits to the outer courts through large excitable crowds. Unsurprisingly, there were no shortage of takers for this assignment, resulting in a chaotic scene of six or seven burly students trying to march a rather frightened young woman through throngs of people whilst paying most attention to trying to get noticed by nearby TV cameras. Jonas Björkman, her partner, would trot unaccompanied behind in tranquil amusement.

The other most interesting escorts were those of the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena. Serena was the only player to have her own permanent bodyguard, Darios, and it did not take a genius to work out what this ex-boxer from Brooklyn made of the spotty students charged with assisting him. ‘Amateurs!’ he raged after one escort back from a practice session had taken the Wimbledon champion on a five-minute detour of the hospitality tents. ‘Anything could have happened out there! If you guys don’t get the next one straight, then I might have to give you some training of my own!’ No one was under any illusions that this would be an hour’s study of the map of the complex.

Venus, on the other hand, was more than happy to let the escorts take care of her safety, and on one occasion she appeared in our waiting room and said, ‘So, which one of y’all is going to take me and my mom shopping?’ I was lucky enough to be conscious and uniformed at the right time and took on the task with another couple of eager opportunists. Sadly, the expedition was not as glamorous as we first imagined. In fact, the former champion just wanted to make an unscheduled visit to the Wimbledon shop, a ridiculous idea in itself, but made all the more farcical by three uniformed bumblers trying to force a path through what is one of the busiest spots on site at the best of times. Whilst Venus and her mum shopped for videos of herself (I kid you not), the shop eventually had to be shut to prevent a crush incident that a riot squad of fully trained personnel would have failed to control. The whole episode could so easily have ended in disaster.

It was not only the players who suffered as a result of our play-acting. All-areas pass aside, it is surprising what an unsuspecting public will let you get away with if you are wearing a uniform, walkie-talkie and earpiece. In teams of two, we would frequently amuse ourselves by heading down to the morning queue to pull people out and ‘scan’ them with our walkie-talkies. (We’d remove the aerial to make the device look more like a magnetic scanner.) Pushing the button to make the handset beep at unlikely places around the body, the challenge was to see what state of undress or distress you could get the unfortunate punter into before they cried foul.

Another classic ruse was to play out the Trigger Happy TV sketch by sending one guard over towards a distinctively dressed member of the public with his radio on full volume. The second guard would then put out a call over the escort signal to apprehend someone for beating up old ladies on the North Concourse, for example, describing the offender standing next to the first guard. Meanwhile, the poor victim would be listening in on the transmission in confused horror. In one case, an escort who was not in on the joke replied with a transmission saying that he had the described felon in his view. A cruel but inevitable reply to ‘take him down and ask questions later’ resulted in an ill-fated attempt at a citizen’s arrest and the end of one escort’s summer of fun.

These moments of crisis and amusement, along with witnessing such things as Richard Krajicek smashing up three rackets in succession in the tunnel and Elena Dementieva in a towel, helped hold off the urge to simply sleep off the night before. When play was suspended, there was time to gloat at the court coverers, whom we often competed with for the title of easiest job in Wimbledon. Meanwhile, the real scandals took place in the little nooks and crannies around the complex. I knew of at least one incident of escorts having sex in the No. 1 Court players’ waiting room, and it became standard practice for escorts to use their all-areas privileges to dupe guards into letting mates in for free through the less well signposted gates. I could go on.

For any security professional, there is nothing worse than seeing your work undertaken by amateurs. Not only does the employment of underqualified people reduce the number of positions available for those fit for the job, but when those without adequate training or experience take up roles they are unprepared for there will inevitably be a devaluation of the profession as a whole. This is what made the situation at Wimbledon even more tragic.

Despite all of the above being revealed to managers over a pint every evening, I was offered the job of escort team manager a year later. This fact alone suggested that policies and practices were unlikely to change any time soon, making the All England Championship a high-profile accident waiting to happen. However, the introduction of SIA licensing meant that within a couple of years the approach to security at Wimbledon was completely revamped and thoroughly professionalised. Just as well, really.