Tennis: For the stoic who prefers the quiet life but has been asked by an entire nation to shoulder the conquering of Everest every summer, Tim Henman is a real party animal.

Give him a tennis fundamentalist, a dedicated claycourt player who has missed four of the previous five Wimbledons, and the grasscourt maestro Henman turns it into a swinging marathon.

Give him six match points and he'll want seven over the four hours and 11 minutes. Give him one day on Centre Court and he takes two. Give him Carlos Moya, who has not played on grass anywhere since Wimbledon 2004, and the four-time semi-finalist shapes it into the mother of all made-for-television battles in a two-part series.

"You still want me to retire?" he asked rhetorically afterwards.

You have to wonder where all the emotion of Centre Court and Henman Hill will be directed when Henman departs the stage - well, to Andy Murray probably - and where middle England will get its annual emotional fix.

But what a stage choreographer he has been, or rather, still is. He took one hour and four minutes yesterday to win a carry-over match that precariously hung 5-5 in the fifth set when darkness stopped play on Monday. And he did it the hard way.

He teased and tormented the crowd, fluffing returns one moment and sweetly playing the net the next. He gave Moya the opportunity to break his serve twice and snatched it back twice.

Finally, as the whole thing threatened to spiral into one of those interminable final sets that would force people to their 2007 Wimbledon compendium of facts and records, Heman made his move at 12-11 as Moya served to stay in the match.

Arguably, it should never have reached that point; the Spanish 25th seed had let slip a serious advantage in the fifth set.

Moya led 4-2 and, poised at 40-15, was in a strong position to stake a 5-2 claim on the match. But Henman held serve for 4-3, then broke Moya in the eighth game.

"You know, I stuck to my guns and I played some great points to not only win that game but to break back and get on level terms," said Henman.

Overall, the 32-year-old English hope had earned 21 break points but could convert only five. He will have been grateful Moya did not ask him to convert the final one for the match; the Spaniard double faulted on match point.

"I mean you'd like to finish on a running forehand pass to win it," said Henman.

"At that stage you are open to any gifts. There's not much disappointment it ended on a double fault, because the way he had played some of the other match points, it had been fantastic for him. I was pretty happy to see it (the Moya serve) go long."

Henman's dilemma is that this encounter arrived in the first round, not the quarter-final or semi-final.

When he was in his pomp the reward would have been greater, the ending more epic or tragic depending on the outcome.

For now at least he has propelled himself into the tournament and played his way into a confident position in what is his 14th consecutive appearance here.

Fittingly too, his first Grand Slam win of the year came on his favourite surface and in front of those who most wanted to see it.

"A lot of great memories and great thoughts going into the next match," he said.

"If I'd lost that match, which I easily could have done, I would have been very disappointed. To actually reflect now, having won the match, having played at that level, it's a fantastic start for me."

The 2006 runner-up, Rafael Nadal, got off to a much quicker start than Henman.

Nadal, like the defending champion, Roger Federer, has his own little historical thing going with Bjorn Borg. The Spaniard seeks to become the first player since the Swede to win on the clay at Roland Garros and the grass at Wimbledon in the same season. He faced down the American Mardy Fish, who came here with a six-match losing streak as well as having lost in their three previous meetings.

The straight-set win initially looked as though it was to be a reasonable warm-up for the French Open champion but was slowed down somewhat in the middle.

A 6-3 start was followed by a drawn-out second set, decided by a tiebreak, before the world number two put an end to the contest 6-3 in the third.

"I played very, very, very good today. But it is just the first round," said Nadal.

"The grass don't change. Always it is the grass. I prefer the sun.

"But . . . right now we have cold, wind and rain. We have to adapt."

Next up for the left-hander is a meeting with Austria's Werner Eschauer.