IT STARTED with a bang on the toe, and it has ended with him kicking out in another way. In between, Chris Wilkinson's feet have barely touched the ground.

This is a year in the life of a British tennis player, from one Wimbledon to the next, with all its trips to far-flung places only to lose in the first round, and the occasional joyous moment like the running-backwards, between-the-legs cross-court passing shot during a doubles match in Hambuhren in Germany last February that had everyone gasping in amazement.

Wilkinson remembers it well. "It was the semi-finals and I was playing with an Aussie guy called Brent Larkham. The ball was lobbed at an angle and I was in one tram-line and managed to hit a winner into the opposite tramline with both our opponents at the net. It was one of the best shots I hit all year."

If you look up Hambuhren on the map, you will find it is a small town just north of Han-over, a middle-of-nowhere place even by the standards of remoteness that normally apply in the world occupied by the lowlier players - the ones, like Wilkinson, who travel almost non-stop in search of the points that will help lift them up the rankings.

In the 12 months since last year's Wimbledon, Wilkinson has clocked up some 80,000 miles. He has played in 27 ATP tournaments, mostly Challengers, which are two levels down from Grand Slam events and one from the ATP Tour proper, or Satellites, which are another step down again. He has slipped to as low as 242 in the world, but is now up to 132, 18 off his best ever ranking - 114 in September 1993. He has played on the domestic Reebok tour, and in English club tournaments for both Winchester and Royal Berkshire.

He has hung around in a lot of airports, waited for a lot of courtesy cars, played a lot of cards, and seen a lot of hotel rooms. He has been guarded by mounted police in the Bronx, floated in the Dead Sea, played matches in Nottingham and Paris on the same day, fallen out with the British tennis establishment, and proposed (successfully) to his girlfriend. It's been a more eventful year than most.

British tennis players tend to be judged on their Wimbledon performances alone. Indeed, outside of those two weeks, it is as if they do not exist at all. Within them, there are not many more important people in Britain, their purpose, it seems, to provide a metaphor for the state of the nation, to be cast as heroes or villains of absurdly exaggerated significance - and then forgotten. To some of those in the queue that will start forming along Church Road a week tomorrow, it may come as a surprise to learn that there is more to their lives than that.

Wilkinson is 25 and from Hampshire. His father, Reg, who is his manager and the nearest thing he has to a coach, used to play football for Plymouth Argyle and Chris had trials with Southampton, Coventry and Aston Villa. But he was skilful rather than strong and didn't think he would prosper, so he concentrated on his tennis and became a professional in 1989. He now lives with his fiancee - they are getting married in October - in Southfields, in south-west London, a 15-minute walk from the All England Club.

Not many beyond the confines of British tennis had heard of Wilkinson until 1993, when he was one of a clutch of home players to have a good Wimbledon, reaching the third round where he played a bizarre match against Stefan Edberg on the Centre Court, breaking the former champion's serve six times but losing his own nine times before going down in three sets.

Last year he repeated the feat, reaching the third round and a match against Wayne Ferreira of South Africa. But there was something almost comically British about the way the seeds of his downfall were sown - by slipping as he got out of the bath the night before the match and bashing his big toe so badly that he had difficulty moving.

"I probably would have lost anyway," Wilkinson says. "But one thing I made sure was that I stopped and had a good look around the Centre Court. The previous year it had all just flashed by. I wanted to be able to remember it this time."

Wilkinson's Wimbledon was over. He wasn't flying the flag any more. Reality had set in, and it did so quickly: with first-round defeats in Bristol and Newcastle, where to be no longer rubbing shoulders with the stars takes some of the gloss off things.

Wilkinson slipped in a clay-court tournament in Prague (lost first round) and then the hard-court season began. He played in Istanbul ("very windy, not much atmosphere"), Segovia in Spain and in the Bronx in New York where the idea was to take tennis to the people.

Then, superficially, life became even more exotic: Pilzen in Czechoslovakia was followed by the Azores, Singapore (where Wilkinson reached the final) and Dublin. Two weeks' holiday on a Greek island broke into the schedule, which picked up with tournaments in Stockholm, Nantes, Ljubljana in Slovakia and Prostejov in Czechoslovakia, where a two-hour drive in a mini-bus through the December fog for the privilege of being knocked out of the first round in straight sets is about as far as you can get from Wimbledon on a summer's day.

But at Wilkinson's level, you have to put in the hours. With a place in the top 100 comes automatic qualification for main ATP Tour events, where there are more points, and money, on offer. "You can win one round at a bigger tournament and pick up 20 points," Wilkinson says. "For me to get 20 points I'd have to get to the quarter or semi-finals." As it is, three successive first-round defeats followed by a run to a quarter- final will, in ranking terms, still leave you just about in profit.

Doubles helps keep Wilkinson going. He plays a lot with his fellow Brit Danny Sapsford, but if he cannot fix up a partner in advance will submit his name and take whoever writes theirs down next to it. Wilkinson's prize money over the last 12 months - almost exactly $50,000, of which nearly half was the result of his 1994 Wimbledon showing - includes singles and doubles. He has a couple of sponsorships, and deals that supply him with free kit as well as a Mercedes. Accommodation is provided at most tournaments. But with the cost of the travelling, and, until the end of last year, of a coach, Wilkinson could hardly be numbered among tennis's super-rich.

This year he has steadily risen back up the rankings, not because of any conspicuous success but because of the system whereby points won count for a year before "coming off", and for the first few months of 1994 he was injured and not gaining any points at all. So at the equivalent stage this year he had none to lose. He played a lot in Germany (reaching the final in Hambuhren) and France, before, in March, being selected for the British Davis Cup squad to play Slovakia in Bratislava at the end of April.

This was when life turned sour for Wilkinson. In spite of being, at No 3, the highest-ranked British player, he was not chosen for the team itself, and felt let down. Then, at the end of May, a month when Wilkinson's travels took him to Malta, Jerusalem and Dresden, came the news of the arrival as a Briton of the Canadian-born Greg Rusedski. Wilkinson and Mark Petchey took this as a knock to their own standing in the domestic game and said so in trenchant terms.

Wilkinson has come in for criticism for his reaction. A whinger is how he is most commonly described, although it is fair to say there are more people in British tennis who have reservations about the Rusedski affair than are expressing them.

David Lloyd, the new Davis Cup captain, was particularly scathing last week of Wilkinson's announcement that he would not play for the team again. But Wilkinson's mind is made up. There was even the possibility that Wimbledon might not offer him a wild card because of the rumpus. In the end, he got one. "I'm delighted," Wilkinson says. "I love playing there. But if I hadn't got one, it wouldn't have been the end of the world." Thus speaks a man who knows the flight times to most eastern European destinations, and that there are more than two weeks in a year.