No other game can quite compare with tennis when it comes to the constant bickering and strife, not to mention the exalted vendettas, that have marked its passage down through the decades. This being the case, it is most appropriate that 1973, the centennial of the invention of tennis, has been filled with some fine first-class rifts and rancor, such as Ilie Nastase’s feud with the United States Lawn Tennis Association, and Bobby Riggs feud with women tennis players in general. The most significant incident, of course, was the one that revolved around Nikki Pilic, the veteran Yugoslavian player, and resulted in, among other things, the second straight summer in which the major stars of men’s tennis did not appear in the Wimbledon Championships. (Last year, as you may remember, all players who were under contract to Lamar Hunt’s World Championship Tennis were barred from Wimbledon by order of the International Lawn Tennis Federation.)
L’Affaire Pilic, to simplify an exceedingly complicated business, was touched off by the decision of the Yugoslavian Tennis Association to suspend Pilic for nine months because of his failure to represent his country in a Davis Cup match with New Zealand in May, after he had earlier indicated that he would try to do so if certain things could be worked out. (New Zealand, by the way, won that match, 3–1.) The I.L.T.F., under the leadership of its frequently overzealous president, Allan Heyman, of Denmark, then got into the act: it suspended Pilic for one month—until the first of July, when Wimbledon would be entering its second, and climactic, week. In response to this move, the Association of Tennis Professionals, which was founded only last year and was facing its first serious test, voted to support Pilic, a member in good standing, by boycotting Wimbledon. Over seventy members of the A.T.P. carried through on this, and only three did not: Nastase, of Rumania; Ray Keldie, of Australia; and Roger Taylor, of England. According to the British tennis writers who were closest to this intricate case, Pilic, after first giving a qualified assent to the Yugoslavian Tennis Association’s request that he play against New Zealand, had informed the association belatedly that other things had come up (such as the rich Alan King Tennis Classic in Las Vegas) and that he would probably not be able to make it after all. While Pilic should have made his intentions clear beyond any misunderstanding, and done so a lot sooner, the whole altercation might have blown over if the president of the Yugoslavian Tennis Association had not happened to be one General Dusan Korač, an uncle of Pilic’s wife. The General took Pilic’s absence as a personal affront, banned him for the rest of the year, and, in doing so, gave the I.L.T.F. the excuse it needed to swing into action. My sympathies, I might add, have from the beginning been with the A.T.P., and its contention that a player has a perfect right to turn down an invitation to represent his country in Davis Cup competition—the same right that he has to turn down an invitation to a tournament in which he represents only himself.
Contretemps of this order, as I say, have plagued tennis since its earliest years—the mottled legacy of the game’s creator, Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, who must surely rank among the most colorful and controversial figures in the history of sport. A cavalry officer in Victorian England, Wingfield was a scion of an ancient and prominent family whose ancestral seat, a castle in Suffolk near the Norfolk border, is said to have been erected in 1362, though there are those who contend that it antedated the coming of William the Conqueror. A good many of the Major’s forebears had distinguished themselves as soldiers and diplomats. For example, Sir Richard Wingfield was Marshal of Calais in 1511, and later, as the Ambassador to the Court of France, was present at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Beginning in 1521, Sir Robert Wingfield served as Ambassador to the Court of Charles V. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Sir Humphrey Wingfield put in a stint as Speaker of the House of Commons, and Anthony Wingfield, a kind of maverick, was a reader in Greek to Queen Elizabeth I. However, by the early eighteen-sixties, when Major Wingfield returned home from China, where he had commanded a cavalry troop, the family had long since lost most of its eminence and wealth. Wingfield Castle, no longer inhabited, was fast becoming a ruin, the outline of its towers obliterated by a rank growth of vines, the drawbridge across its moat rusted and broken. Major Wingfield, who was assigned after his China command to the Montgomery Yeomanry, a Welsh outfit, had enough money to get by on, but a few extra pounds would not have hurt, and he began to ponder how he might go about acquiring them. A tall, athletic young-middle-aged man with a handsome face framed by a full beard, he got around a good deal socially, and one of the things he noticed about the Britain he had returned to was how mad everyone was for sport. Organized cricket, soccer, Rugby, and rowing had become enormously more popular, but the rise of team sports wasn’t the particular development that caught the Major’s shrewd eye. What did was a new facet of the cult of games—the games that ladies and gentlemen played together on weekends on the wide, well-kept lawns of the fashionable country houses. Croquet, the oldest of these games, remained the leader, but it was obvious that many of its practitioners, including the females, were finding it too tepid. A good many of them had already switched to badminton, an Indian game, originally called Poona, that was imported in the early eighteen-seventies by some British Army officers and renamed after the country seat of the Duke of Beaufort, where the first important demonstration of the game had taken place. The trouble with badminton was that it required an absolutely breezeless day; otherwise there was no controlling the shuttlecock. Wingfield was certain that the national passion for sport would keep on growing, and it struck him that a small fortune, along with a substantial renown any man would be pleased to have, awaited the person who could devise a really fascinating lawn game. He began to think along those lines himself.
Wingfield had the background for it. In his youth, he had played the various forms of handball and just about all the racket games. (According to Edward C. Potter, Jr., in his book “Kings of the Court,” there had been a court-tennis court in Wingfield Castle. Moreover, as Potter brought out, among the people who had supposedly made use of it was Charles d’Orléans, a grandson of the King of France, who had been captured at Agincourt by the English and consigned to Wingfield Castle during part of his long captivity.) In any event, in 1873, after considerable deliberation, the Major came up with a game that combined certain features of these earlier games—the net came from badminton, the ball from Eton fives (a form of handball), the method of scoring from hard rackets, and so on. (Until special rackets were manufactured, the player was free to use the racket from his favorite game.) Wingfield called his amalgam Sphairistiké, or Lawn Tennis—“Sphairistiké” because he had heard that there was an ancient Greek game of that name, and “Lawn Tennis” because it seemed a natural spinoff from “court tennis,” and thus suggested a game that was both old and aristocratic. (As Potter has pointed out, “Wingfield had little idea how Sphairistiké was played but . . . he could be sure that even antiquarians had forgotten its rules.”) Another advantage gained by calling his game Sphairistiké was that it emphasized its originality, and this, Wingfield felt, would greatly increase his chances of obtaining a patent for it. That was crucial—a patent. Once he had it, he would be able to manufacture and sell sets of his game and, he hoped, reap a small fortune. His concern about gaining a patent also prompted several of the new wrinkles he had introduced into his game, such as decreeing that the court not be rectangular but shaped somewhat like an hourglass—thirty feet wide across the baselines and only twenty-four feet wide at the net. In December, 1873, Wingfield tried out the game with a group of young people who were members of a houseparty at Nantclwyd Hall, the country estate, in Denbighshire, Wales, of the family of a good friend of his, Thomas Naylor-Leyland. Apparently, the game was a big success. There is no record of what the weather was like at Nantclwyd Hall during that stretch, but even if it had been freezing cold, the Major would have been undaunted, for he maintained that there was no reason Sphairistiké could not be played as pleasurably on ice as on grass.
On February 23, 1874, Major Wingfield was awarded a preliminary patent for his game, and the patent was confirmed five months later. The moment he received word in February that the patent office had registered his application for “A New and Improved Portable Court for Playing the Ancient Game of Tennis” (in his presentation the Major had heavily emphasized that tennis in its earlier forms had always been an indoor amusement), he arranged for sets to be manufactured and for the Messrs. French & Company, of 46 Churton Street, Pimlico, to act as his exclusive sales agent. A set cost five guineas—a fairly substantial amount in those days. Encased in a wooden box thirty-six inches by twelve by six and bearing the label “Sphairistiké, or Lawn Tennis” on the cover, a set contained poles, pegs, a main net a little over four and a half feet high, two small side nets (they adjoined the main net like wings), a mallet, a brush, a bag of balls, and four tennis rackets, made by Jefferies & Mallings, which were a sort of cross between the conventional hard-rackets racket and the conventional court-tennis racket. Wingfield left it up to his clients to supply their own colored cord, tape, or paint for lining the court, but he did throw in a slim pamphlet called “The Book of the Game,” in which he set down the dimensions of the court and provided instructions for installing one in five minutes. The pamphlet also included a brief, if fuzzy, account of the game’s history, along with an explanation of its scoring system and the rules of play. On the page facing the title page (“The Major’s Game of Lawn Tennis, dedicated to the party assembled at Nantclwyd in December, 1873, by W.C.W.”) were two interesting paragraphs. The one at the top went as follows:
There then appeared a facsimile of the royal coat of arms and, beneath it, a paragraph headed “Useful Hints”:
The rest of the pamphlet similarly used the romantic, archaic “ſ” instead of the modern “s.” The Major, Madison Avenue incarnate, never could stop selling.
Lawn tennis caught on instantly. In a matter of months, with the Major pushing it vigorously and using his influential friends with characteristic chutzpah, it became the social game, driving croquet and badminton from the velvet lawns of the stately homes of England and the rest of Britain, and also establishing itself with the better military garrisons around the world. With the boxed sets selling so rapidly, the Major brought out a second edition of his game before the year was over, refining some of the rules, modifying some of the equipment (the side nets, for example, were dispensed with), and also raising the price of a set to six guineas. Before many more months had passed, a third edition became necessary. At this time, bowing to mounting pressure, he gave up the name Sphairistiké. Thenceforward, the game would be known simply as lawn tennis. To Wingfield’s deep gratification, the game had quickly gained many enthusiastic converts among the nobility. During the first year it was on the market, sets were bought by the Prince of Wales, the Crown Princess of Prussia, and Prince Louis of Hesse; by eight dukes, including the Duke of Edinburgh and the Duke of Devonshire; by fourteen marquises, including the Marquis of Lansdowne and the Marquis of Exeter; by forty-nine earls, including the Earl of Cadogan, the Earl of Leicester, and the Earl of Salisbury; and by eight viscounts, including Viscount Halifax and Viscount Bangor.
For all its dazzling success, however, Wingfield’s invention did not bring him the fortune he dreamed of, or anything like it. With the third edition, sales of the sets began to fall off drastically. One reason was that many of the people whom Wingfield had viewed as potential customers thought it foolish to lay out six guineas for the Major’s equipment when they could make—or had already assembled—their own. Indeed, as a large number of them pointed out in irate letters to The Field, the leading periodical dealing with outdoor life, hard-rackets or court-tennis devotees in various sections of Britain had thought up and had been playing games very similar to the Major’s long before he entered the picture. The dimensions of these other courts were somewhat different, of course, and so were many of the rules of play, but, essentially, these games were the same game as lawn tennis. Besides castigating Wingfield for his presumption in presenting his brainchild as a wholly original creation, the letter writers made it clear that they considered their own versions of tennis far superior to his. Other troubles lay ahead for Wingfield. For persons who did not have a spreading lawn of their own, an obvious site for a tennis court was the grounds of the local cricket club. By late 1874, the Marylebone Cricket Club, the governing body of the national game, was becoming a trifle worried over the inroads the fashionable new game was making. The fact that tennis players had appropriated the white shirt and white flannels of the cricketer as their own outfit was of no great importance, but lawn tennis had the look about it of a game that could cut deeply into cricket’s vast popularity, and that was serious. The prudent course, the M.C.C. decided, was to step in and take over lawn tennis before the game became too big. The top men at the M.C.C. also had a few suggestions that they thought would make lawn tennis a much better game, such as lowering the net and adopting the method of scoring used in court tennis. On several occasions in 1875, a committee from the M.C.C. met with Wingfield to talk things over, but in the stormy sessions that inevitably resulted Wingfield stubbornly held his ground. Shortly after this, heavy pressure was exerted on him by another sports organization—the All England Croquet Club, which had been founded in 1868 in Wimbledon, on the southwestern edge of London. Commercially, croquet had fallen far short of the club’s hopes for it, so in the mid-seventies the A.E.C.C. had, as an experiment, laid out a tennis court in one corner of the club property. As it turned out, the court was filled with players from morning to night. Obviously, the way to make money was to plunge into lawn tennis in a big way. Very much in the manner of the M.C.C., the A.E.C.C. was soon challenging Wingfield’s right, patent or no patent, to run lawn tennis single-handed, particularly since the game had already developed an alarming number of variations and seemed to be developing more. At length, late in 1875, his obstinacy worn down by months of slow sales and fast talk, Wingfield suddenly agreed to accept all the changes proposed by an M.C.C. committee, insisting only that the game be played on a court shaped like an hourglass. This peace treaty, however, turned out to be next to meaningless, because in 1877 control of the game was captured by the All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club—note the change of name—which, under the leadership of three members who were both veteran administrators and ambitious ballgame intellectuals, announced not only that it would be holding a national lawn tennis championship in July but that the event would be played on a rectangular court, under a new set of rules worked out by the club’s high-powered troika. The M.C.C., after a session with the A.E.C. & L.T.C., gave in on every point.
Twenty-two men entered the first Wimbledon—the first lawn-tennis championship put on by the All England Club, in its bailiwick in that suburb. The winner was Spencer Gore, an old rackets player from Harrow, who was the one entrant who had the gumption and sense to come to net and volley his opponents’ baseline drives. It is amazing how quickly the basic strokes and strategies of the modern game emerged. The second Wimbledon was won by another old Harrovian rackets star, P. F. Hadow, who was on holiday from Ceylon, where he was a coffee planter, and, happening to hear of the championship, thought he might give it a go. Hadow had the perfect answer to Gore’s proclivity for rushing the net: every time Gore came racing in, Hadow lobbed the ball over his head. Hadow didn’t defend his title, and in 1879 it went to the Reverend J. T. Hartley, of Yorkshire, who had been a court-tennis champion at Oxford. To Hartley’s surprise, he had not been eliminated from the championship by the semifinal round on Saturday, so he caught the first train for Yorkshire, arrived home in time to deliver his Sunday sermon, caught a Sunday-afternoon train for London, and got back to Wimbledon in time to win the final on Monday. In 1880, with the appearance of its first great tennis heroes—the Renshaw twins, Willie and Ernest—Wimbledon became firmly established as a national institution. Ernest, who was born fifteen minutes after Willie, always deferred to his older (and slightly more talented) brother, a phenomenal player who won seven Wimbledon singles titles between 1881 and 1889, despite the first recorded case of “tennis elbow” and an assortment of other ailments. Ernest won one Wimbledon singles title, and together the Renshaws carried off the doubles seven times, the last time in 1889. Then bad health overtook them both and forced their retirement from competition. Ernest died in 1899, Willie a few years later.
As for Major Wingfield, he lived on until 1912, the last thirty-five years in almost total oblivion as far as tennis was concerned. (Wimbledon, after appropriating control of the game, had simply shunted the Major to one side.) When he finally died, at the age of seventy-eight, the obituary in the London Times dwelt on his military career, his ties with the famous old Suffolk family, some pamphlets he wrote late in life (“Bicycle Gymkhana” and “Musical Rides”), and a term he served as justice of the peace in Montgomeryshire. There was not a word about his being the inventor of the thriving international game of lawn tennis.
This spring, when I was in England during the second week of Wimbledon, I took a couple of days off from the tournament—since the men’s field had been depleted of most of its stars by L’Affaire Pilic, one could do this with no fear of missing “the match of the century”—in order to visit two locales that had played a vital part in the fascinating saga of Walter Clopton Wingfield: Wingfield Castle and Nantclwyd Hall. Through the assistance of Ann Allison, of the British Information Services in New York City, I had learned that Wingfield Castle was still in existence. Just what condition it was in, Miss Allison had not been able to tell me, and her information about the village of Wingfield was limited, too. All things considered, she felt that perhaps the best procedure for me, if I was serious about visiting the castle and the village in this the centennial year of lawn tennis, was to get in touch with the Reverend W. G. Muir, of Wingfield. I wrote to him immediately. Through Miss Allison’s good services, I also got in touch with Nantclwyd Hall. At her suggestion, I wrote to the clerk of the Rural District Council in Ruthin, which is the village nearest to Nantclwyd. The clerk of the council passed my letter on to Major B. G. Rhodes, the representative of the trustees of the Nantclwyd Settlement, which administers the Nantclwyd estate, and Major Rhodes sent me a long, friendly letter in which he said that he had cleared the matter with the trustees of the Nantclwyd Settlement, and that it would be a pleasure to welcome a lawn-tennis pilgrim to the grounds on which Major Wingfield introduced his game to the world in 1873. “Although the original lawn-tennis court is not still in use, it is clearly identifiable,” Major Rhodes wrote. He also explained that “Nantclwyd Hall . . . has been and remains the home of the Naylor-Leyland family since 1840,” and that Major Wingfield’s friend Thomas Naylor-Leyland was “the great-great-grandfather of the present baronet, Sir Vivyan Naylor-Leyland, who now lives in Nassau.”
I decided to undertake the expedition to Wingfield first, because it was the more chancy of the two: I had received no answer from the Reverend Mr. Muir, and I would be descending on the village cold. To get to Wingfield, I took a train from London to Colchester, in Essex, and there hired a taxi to take me the remaining forty-odd miles. As we began our drive northeast across the deep green dales of Essex and Suffolk on a typical English summer’s day, the dark-gray clouds in the wide sky occasionally pierced by bolts of brilliant sunshine, I noticed in talking with my driver, a cheerful middle-aged man, that he spoke with a slight European accent, and I asked him about it. He told me that his name was Tony, and that he was born in Italy and had been living in England since the war. “I was captured by the British at Benghazi,” he added, breaking into a radiant smile. “Happiest day of my life!” It took us about an hour to get to Wingfield, which lies in an out-of-the-way part of East Anglia, about thirty miles by road from Bury St. Edmunds, about twenty-five from Lowestoft, and about twenty-five also from the local metropolis, Norwich. The area around Wingfield grows good wheat, oats, and barley, and also has a reputation for raising good pigs. The village now has a population of two hundred and twenty-nine, and just about all the farmhouses and other buildings are set along a narrow, winding paved road, which another narrow, winding paved road meets at a right angle. Wingfield’s handsome old stone church lies two hundred yards down the second road. The side door to the church was open, and, entering, I asked the only person in sight, a well-dressed elderly lady, where I might find the Reverend Mr. Muir. I learned that he had left the village almost two years before and that his successor was currently on holiday. I then asked her about Wingfield Castle, fearful that I would learn that it had slipped into the moat and disappeared from sight. Here the news seemed definitely better. Not only was the castle standing but it had been meticulously restored by its present owner and resident, Baron Ash. That put a whole new complexion on things. The next step, obviously, was to speak with Baron Ash, if this was possible, and, at the lady’s suggestion, I went into a small, bleak pub almost directly across the street from the church to see if I could reach him by telephone. I learned from the barmaid, who bore little resemblance in looks or manner to the enchanting breed that has been a staple of English films since the first camera handle was turned, that the pub had no phone but that I would find a phone box at the corner. “You won’t get to see the Baron, I can promise you that,” she added, with a rough little laugh. “I don’t care what your business is. The Baron’s not seeing anyone these days.” And with this she broke into that unpleasant laugh again.
To my surprise and relief, there was a Norwich Area directory in the phone box. Not only that, but a number was listed for G. Baron Ash. (I should interject before proceeding any further that although everyone in Wingfield spoke of G. Baron Ash as either Baron Ash or the Baron, as if he were a nobleman, the way his name was listed in the phone book stirred some doubt in my mind on this point. Weeks later, on my return to New York, I learned that my doubt was warranted. Ash, evidently an extremely rich man, was considered important enough to be included in the British Who’s Who, but he was by no means a peer of the realm. His first name was Graham, and Baron was simply his middle name. It could as easily have been Earl.) Be that as it may, Tony dialled the number for Wingfield Castle, and as he did, I studied the signpost at the intersection: Syleham 1½, Eye 7, Diss 9—to the west; Weybread 3½, Harleston 5¼—to the northeast; Stradbroke 2¾, Laxfield 7¾—to the southeast. We really were out in the middle of nowhere! Then the number Tony had dialled began ringing, and he handed me the phone. A deep-pitched, edgy voice at the other end said, “Yes?”
I asked to speak to Baron Ash.
“This is Baron Ash,” came the reply. “Who are you and what do you want?” All this in a most peremptory tone.
I explained that 1973 marked the hundredth anniversary of the invention of lawn tennis by Major Wingfield, and asked if it might be possible to visit Wingfield Castle.
“No, you can’t,” Baron Ash answered, his voice rising to a roar. “That’s absolutely out of the question. I have a right to my privacy. I’m eighty-three years old. Don’t you think that at that age I have a right to my privacy?”
I said I certainly did.
“The last thing I want is publicity,” he went on, dropping his voice to a more conversational pitch and speaking with less petulance. “Nevertheless, people are always bothering me. They drive right into the driveway, as if the castle were their home and not mine. It’s a constant annoyance. It’s twenty-five years since I bought the castle. I’ve loved rebuilding it. It’s been my baby. But I’m not going to stand quietly by and let people I don’t know invite themselves into my private grounds. This year, it’s been far worse than ever before. People every day.”
I said I wouldn’t have guessed that the centenary of the birth of lawn tennis would lead so many people to seek out Wingfield Castle.
“Good heavens, man, tennis has nothing to do with it!” the Baron roared. “It’s those blasted Wingfields. They’re a very prolific family, spread all over, and they keep coming round to inspect the ancestral castle. Constant interruptions. This morning, there were five automobiles filled with people parked in front of my breakfast room while I was eating my breakfast.”
I was properly sympathetic. I went on to say that I had heard that the Baron had done a superb job of restoring the castle. Then I said, “All I want to do is to take a very quick look around.”
“Don’t you understand me?” Baron Ash boomed out. “I don’t want to be disturbed by you or anyone!” And with that he crashed the phone down into its cradle.
Wingfield Castle, I had learned from the lady in the church, lies only a short distance past the intersection, on the road to Syleham, and is fairly visible from the road, even though it is set back a couple of hundred yards and is partly hidden by a screen of tall trees planted along the front of the estate and along most of the rest of its perimeter. As Tony and I were driving over to get the catch-as-catch-can glimpse we would now have to settle for, we passed the village post office, and I decided to drop in for a moment. It took up less than half of a rather slapdash, faded white wooden structure, in which the postmaster, a man named Matthias, also ran a jumbled odds-and-ends shop. A tall, thin middle-aged fellow, Matthias proved to be outgoing and highly articulate, and he seemed to enjoy filling me in on Baron Ash. (It was always Baron Ash or the Baron.) To the best of Matthias’s recollection, when the Baron came to Wingfield it was from Buckinghamshire or some place in that general vicinity, where he had a palatial country home. The Baron, he had heard, was related to the Marlborough family. The trouble was that, being a real showplace, his home attracted tourists by the busload, and one day, his patience exhausted, he decided to get away from it all. He turned that estate over to the National Trust and bought Wingfield Castle, which had the advantage of being well off the usual tourist routes. The castle was then in terrible shape, but the Baron calmly went about fixing it up, from its drawbridge to its twin towers, pouring a small fortune into the project until, in the postmaster’s phrase, “the edifice was as neat as a pin.” Matthias went on, “When he came here to Wingfield, the Baron had a staff of twenty-seven people looking after him—valets, maids, cooks, gardeners, and all the rest, you know. Now he’s down to a staff of three. Most people of his class have had to do that in recent years. When he arrived here, he drove a Rolls-Royce. Now he’s down to a Rover and an Austin. He pays the man from the local garage five pounds when he wants them washed. That’s a generous sum, but the Baron is a very generous man. I remember how a couple of years ago I mentioned to him one day when we were having a bit of a chat that a woman who had taught in the village school was retiring after many years of faithful service. The Baron didn’t know her, but he sent her a check for a hundred and fifty pounds.”
The Baron Ash he was describing, I interposed, certainly didn’t resemble the crusty character I had talked to on the telephone.
“Yes, he has changed,” Matthias agreed. “When he first came to Wingfield, he was friendly with the people in the village. He attended the village functions, like the church fairs, quite regularly. When he went out for a stroll in the evening—he’s an old bachelor—he had a cordial word for all of us. Then, I’m afraid, the local hooligans began to act up. Once, I remember, when he was away on a trip, they mucked up the cherry trees he had planted on his lawn. Baron Ash had been very proud of those trees. There were other incidents like that, and he gradually withdrew from the life of the village. I can picture him saying to himself, ‘Well, if that’s the way they want it!’ or, you know, words to that effect. At heart, I think, he’s a kind and friendly man. When the dustmen come round, he often has them in for a whiskey or two. Another example comes to my mind. A couple of years ago, I sold the last of a batch of postal cards of the castle which I stocked here at the store, so I asked the Baron for permission to take another photo and have another batch of cards printed up. The Baron explained as how he wanted no more cards of the castle to be distributed, but then, after turning me down, he sent me, through his butler, a five-pound note to make up for the money I would have made through the sale of the cards. He’s a good chap, the Baron. I think him being a bachelor and in his eighties is what makes him grumpy, you know. You would never guess his age by looking at him. He’s a tall, slim, straight-backed chap who still rides a bicycle. He loves the castle. I hear that in one of the banqueting halls in the towers there’s an oak table large enough for forty people to eat at! Then, there’s a saloon in one of the towers where three or four hundred people can dance! That’s what I hear.”
In spite of his evident affection for Baron Ash, Matthias was exceedingly helpful when I asked him the best way I could get a good look at Wingfield Castle. His instructions were to continue along the road, past the driveway to the castle and the protective screen of trees, until I reached an open field. That was common land, and if I walked in a ways from the road a close, unobstructed view of the castle would present itself. I followed his instructions to the letter, tiptoeing warily past a couple of Holsteins grazing in the open field, and, when I had walked in about a hundred yards, suddenly there were no more trees on the right to block my view, and, seventy-five yards away, there was the castle, looming up as clear as a postcard. The water in the wide moat sparkled, as did the refurbished bridge leading over the moat to the front entrance and the massive twin towers framing it. (The drawbridge, at the rear of the castle, was out of my line of sight.) It was as magnificent a castle as I have ever seen. Near the base, the walls were of old gray, white, and black stone, but as they rose the stone gradually gave way to brownish brick, then to dull-red brick, and, finally, to a dark-red brick that reminded me of the brick in some of the older colleges at Cambridge University, like Jesus. The crenellated central towers were of this deep-red brick. From where I stood, I could see only a small piece of the castle grounds. Not a soul was in view, but I could hear the clatter of a couple of power motors, which were probably trimming the lawns along the driveway.
As I stood gazing at Wingfield Castle, an odd mélange of thoughts surged through my mind. If the Baron was so continually pestered by unwanted visitors, why didn’t he simply shut the gates to the driveway? That would have solved his problem neatly and completely. For another thing, I really wished I had been able to visit the castle. I would have particularly liked to find out whether any traces remained of the court-tennis court described in Potter’s book. This led me to the thought that overrode all the others—Baron Ash’s apparent ignorance that one of the Wingfields had invented lawn tennis a hundred years before, and his total lack of interest in the matter. When I got back to New York and looked up Graham Baron Ash in Who’s Who, his attitude became a little less enigmatic. His entry was one of the shortest and tightest in the volume. Ash, it said, was born in 1889, was educated at Radley, and served in the Royal Air Force in both World Wars. From 1938 to 1939, he was High Sheriff of Warwickshire. Under “Recreations” he had listed only one—shooting. Under “Clubs” he had also listed only one—the Royal Automobile. That was it. It was ironic, considering how passionately Major Wingfield had longed for fame as well as for money, that the family castle had fallen into the hands of a shy, introspective old man who had no taste for publicity and promotion, and only wanted to be left alone.
The expedition to Nantclwyd Hall went much more smoothly. It began with a comfortable railroad trip of just under three hours from London to Chester, the old Roman city that today serves as a sort of gateway to northern Wales, and it ended with a taxi trip of around twenty-five miles. I was lucky in that the driver I happened to draw at the Chester railroad station was a soft-spoken, companionable young man who had spent some time in Wales and could understand the directions we were given in Ruthin when we asked the way to Nantclwyd. To me, the words were unintelligible.
The drive to Nantclwyd was a scenic one. I hadn’t been in Wales in almost twenty years, and I had forgotten how lovely the rural sections are—the distinctive way the hills, colored a dozen shades of green, sweep softly down to the small valleys, and the beauty of the trees that dot the hillsides and the valleys. About four miles south of Ruthin, we came upon the entrance to Nantclwyd Hall. A dirt road took us under a stone archway, past a herd of Holsteins, past a large bronze statue of a boar, and over a small bridge. “Nant” in Welsh means a brook or gorge or ravine, and the stream that runs through this valley is the Clwyd—pronounced “clude.” Ahead lay the hall, a handsome three-story, ten-bedroom, multi-chimneyed nineteenth-century gentleman’s country residence built of handmade brick, some of it a deep red. It had been remodelled several times—most recently in 1958, by Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, a specialist in the Italianate style, who, among other things, refinished the back of the house in orange-brown plaster. All told, the property owned by the Naylor-Leyland family covers four thousand rolling, fertile acres. (At one time after the Second World War, an enterprise called the Nantclwyd Estate Home Farms & Market Garden developed into a considerable commercial operation, and, the better to prepare himself for his role in it, Sir Vivyan—Eton, Oxford, and the Grenadier Guards—had attended the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester.) On the right, as the visitor approaches Nantclwyd Hall, a hill of moderate size, clustered with oaks and sycamores, descends to a well-mowed lawn, which sets off the house on all sides. To the left, or east, a hundred yards or so from the house, is a small lake, with a number of swans on it. Closer to the house on the left—the moment you spot it, you know that this is where the first lawn-tennis court must have been situated, and you are right—is a broad lower lawn, separated from the upper lawn by a sharp five- or six-foot bank. When you walk over this sward, you discover that it is not half as smooth as it looks from a distance. This helps to explain why Major Wingfield’s tennis-playing friends at Nantclwyd Hall pinned the nickname of Bumpers on him: no one else was half as agile when it came to adjusting to the erratic bounces the ball took on the bumpy court.
This last piece of information—as a matter of fact, practically everything I wanted to know about Nantclwyd Hall and the Naylor-Leyland family—was supplied to me by Major Rhodes, who acts as a sort of manager of the estate and has an office in a ground-floor corner of the hall. (For the most part, the hall is closed these days, but a section of it is kept open so that friends of the family who are passing through the area can be put up.) A neat, solidly built man of unusual courtesy and affability, Major Rhodes is utterly unlike most of the retired British Army officers I have run into—particularly the stuffy, imperious types who for many years now have latched on as secretaries at many British golf clubs and have come to constitute one of the game’s chief hazards in that land. The Major’s helpfulness confirmed the impression I had got from his letter, which had been three pages long and packed with information that he felt might help me to understand what lawn tennis was like at the start. He had even gone to the trouble of drawing a diagram of the original hourglass-shaped court and noting its dimensions. As we talked, in a sitting room near his office, he provided me with copies of four old photographs of Nantclwyd Hall and the part of the grounds where the tennis court had stood. Then he brought out a fairly large bronze plaque, only recently arrived, which Sir Vivyan had had prepared, with instructions for it to be affixed to the steep bank to the east of the hall. The inscription read as follows:
Major Rhodes and I then walked around to the front of the house, down the bank, and onto the lawn where the first court had been situated. As I was inspecting the historic turf, trying not very successfully to transport myself back a century, Major Rhodes said, in his genial way, “You can see how bumpy it is! We could put it in much better shape, of course, but it really isn’t worth the trouble. As I mentioned, friends of the Naylor-Leylands will occasionally drop by to spend a night at the hall, but that’s about it. Nantclwyd is too remote, I would gather, to draw people who are interested in tennis. Even in this centenary year, we’ve had only one visit from what you might call a tennis group: a television company sent down a crew to photograph the court, and a bearded actor dressed in period costume impersonated Major Wingfield.”
I looked across the lawn to the small lake, edged here and there with clusters of tall, graceful trees. A few swans floated on the water. The afternoon sun made everything glisten. Major Rhodes must have read my mind, for he said, “I was just thinking that if, for any reason, at some time in the future anyone should want to get the lawn into playing shape and put up on it a replica of the 1873 court, what an ideal setting this would be for a shrine to the game.”
After we had returned to the back of the hall, the Major led the way past some flower beds, which had been left rather shaggy, and on to a low building, covered with grapevines, in which there was a small swimming pool. Just beyond it, Sir Vivyan had later built a small outdoor pool, bordered by yews. A short distance beyond this second pool, most unexpectedly, I caught sight of a rough-finished, pitch-black asphalt tennis court, date of birth unrecorded. It was set off by darkish brick walls eleven feet high. I cannot remember ever coming across a gloomier court, but I was delighted to see it. It was heartening to know that at the place where lawn tennis was first played a love of the game had existed decades later.
Major Rhodes made me a good cup of tea, and then it was time to return to Chester and catch the train back to London and Wimbledon.
Considering that Nastase was the only star of the first magnitude entered in the Gentlemen’s Singles, the 1973 Wimbledon Championships were a smashing success. Wimbledon, of course, faced no financial problems, boycott or no boycott. It is a valid national (and international) institution, and all available seats had been purchased months ahead of time, as they are each year; season tickets to the championships are prized family possessions, handed down in wills from generation to generation no less zealously than season tickets for the Green Bay Packers, the Montreal Canadiens, and other celebrated sports institutions. In addition to putting a few hundred tickets to the Centre Court and the No. 1 Court on sale each day, Wimbledon sells daily general-admission tickets, which give the purchaser standing-room privileges in the two main courts and also the right to watch the matches being played on the fourteen field courts. This helps to explain why the attendance figures vary from day to day. This year, although a mild falloff had been predicted, official attendance on the opening day was 22,600—only a hundred or so below the record for a first day. Even after Nastase had been eliminated, in the fourth round (the round of sixteen), by Sandy Mayer, a twenty-one-year-old from Wayne, New Jersey, who is ranked only eleventh in this country, the crowds continued to pour in in such numbers that the attendance for the twelve days of the championships reached 300,172, the second-highest total in Wimbledon’s ninety-six-year history. One of the things that drew this legion of spectators and, moreover, invested the tournament with an entirely surprising vitality was that several attractive young players caught fire and ignited some extremely stirring action. In addition to Mayer, there were two others in particular—Bjorn Borg and Vijay Amritraj. Borg is a slender seventeen-year-old Swedish boy with long, tousled blond hair, a powerful all-round game, and the cool to come through with his most sensational shots when they count most. Amritraj, a handsome nineteen-year-old Indian from Madras, is tall (six-three), slim (a hundred and fifty-eight pounds), and very dark-skinned—physical attributes of many inhabitants of the state of Mysore, if of few other Indians. A graduate of the University of Madras, Amritraj, who is a son of the general manager of India’s Southern Railways, grew up playing his tennis on the family’s clay court, but he learned some time ago to adapt his strong, stylish game to grass. At Wimbledon, he went to the quarter-finals before losing, 7–5, in the fifth set, to Jan Kodes, of Czechoslovakia, the second-seeded player and the eventual winner, in a match so close that its outcome tilted on whether one overhead smash was in or out. Borg was also eliminated, 7–5, in the fifth set of the quarters, losing to Roger Taylor. Early in the first week, the straw-hatted schoolgirls attending the tournament adopted Borg as their idol, and their reaction to his hard defeat was to rush onto the court, with a frenzy that shocked the staid Wimbledon regulars, and lavish warmth, affection, and consoling words on the nonplussed young man. Mayer, another pleasant youngster with bona-fide poise, got to the semis. There, looking slower afoot and handling his racket less well than he had in his conquest of Nastase, he went down, in four sets, to Alex Metreveli, of Russia. (Mayer, incidentally, was born in Flushing, New York, in 1952, a few months after his mother and father escaped from Hungary.)
Wimbledon was fortunate in two other respects. The first of these was in having a British player—Taylor—come through with a splendid performance. Though he was under a tremendous strain (both because he had defied the A.T.P. boycott and because he was aware that he was carrying the hopes of millions of Britons), Taylor, the big, rugged son of a Yorkshire steelworker, produced some of the best tennis of his life. In tight corner after tight corner, he was able to marshal that necessary extra effort—to summon that one more exhausting step that gave him a chance to get his racket on what had looked like a winning shot for his opponent, and, once in that position, not to take a heedless swing at the ball but to tax himself just a little harder, both physically and mentally, and play a controlled stroke, which, as often as not, eluded his startled opponent. His fighting tennis took him to the semifinals, where he met Kodes—a charmless and somewhat mechanical athlete, as has been recognized for many years now, but nonetheless a tough, sturdy stayer who probably deserves to be ranked among the top half-dozen players in the world today. When their gruelling battle had lasted three hours and twenty-eight minutes, Taylor, after holding his serve, moved to 5–4 in the fifth set, to stand just a game away from victory—the closest any British player had come to reaching the final at Wimbledon since Bunny Austin in 1938. At this juncture, the referee made the rather questionable decision to stop play because a drizzle had begun to fall. Forty-two minutes later, play was resumed. Kodes held his service, broke Taylor’s, and then held his own again in a tense, deuced game for the match: 8–9, 9–7, 5–7, 6–4, 7–5. (At Wimbledon, as the score of the first set suggests, a tie-breaker game is decreed when a set reaches 8–8, not when it reaches 6–6, as is true at Forest Hills. Furthermore, Wimbledon employs a twelve-point tie-breaker, Forest Hills a nine-point version.)
Finally, Wimbledon was lucky in that the women, who had to assume so much of the load, carried it off just as successfully as they did last year, when the hassle between the I.L.T.F. and the W.C.T. kept many of the best men out of the tournament. The quality of their tennis was first-class all the way. Amazingly, the eight top-seeded women got to the quarter-finals, and the top four got to the semifinals. There Margaret Court, of Australia, the No. 1 seed, lost, 6–1, 1–6, 6–1, to Chris Evert, the eighteen-year-old Floridian, who was the No. 4 seed, and Billie Jean King, of California, the defending champion and No. 2 seed, beat Evonne Goolagong, the twenty-two-year-old Australian girl, 6–3, 5–7, 6–3. In the third set of her semifinal, Mrs. Court seemed almost as tight as she had against Bobby Riggs in their highly ballyhooed match at the San Diego Country Estates in May. The knowledgeable Wimbledon galleries admired Miss Evert’s artful use of the lob in that third set—and her skill in disguising the shot—but during her matches Miss Evert is so unsmiling and self-possessed, so completely Little Miss No Nonsense, that the British fans, who enjoy suffering along with a nice, sporting, vulnerable girl like Christine Truman, haven’t yet really taken to her. (Off the court, there is a lot more humor and spontaneity in Miss Evert than her court manner would lead one to guess.) In the other semi, aside from the fact that Miss Goolagong is looking so much prettier this year, there was a déjà-vu quality about her match with Mrs. King. For all her quickness of movement and her flair for shotmaking, Miss Goolagong seldom plays the tennis we know her to be capable of, except in isolated passages, and in this contest her brilliance was limited to two bursts: in the second set she fought off three match points before going on to take the set, and in the third she saved five match points with some marvellously daring shots (such as a fast forehand half volley whipped briskly crosscourt) before finally succumbing. No one expects sustained miracles from Miss Goolagong, but she must realize by now that she will never fulfill her exceptional potential unless she makes up her mind to strike the ball with more pace and sharpness on all her strokes. Her second service would be a good place to start.
This was an unusual Wimbledon in that both singles finals were held on the second Saturday, a daylong rain having made it impossible to play the women’s on Friday, as is customary. Accordingly, instead of beginning the first match at two o’clock, the regular starting hour at Wimbledon, the women’s final between Mrs. King and Miss Evert was moved up to one-thirty. It proved to be a far more memorable match than the men’s—the first All Iron Curtain final in history—which Kodes, who is a shade faster, sounder, and more imaginative than Metreveli, took in three dull sets, 6–1, 9–8, 6–3. That afternoon, I arrived at the All England Club at twelve-fifteen—much earlier than I had meant to, but one sometimes forgets to allow for the swiftness and efficiency of the London subway system. Anyhow, exploring the grounds, I found a couple of hundred people grouped around one of the field courts, where Mrs. King was warming up with Betty Stove, the big Dutch girl. As we all appreciate, Mrs. King, who is now twenty-nine, is a remarkably fine tennis player, but there are days when some spectators—and I must admit I am one of them—find her a little hard to take. These are the days when she falls into an emotive mood in which she projects her unquestioned will to win by giving herself audible fight talks, registering her disappointment after poor shots by tossing her racket around, and urging herself on by punching the air with her fist or some other such go-go-go mannerism. It follows that I am most sympathetic to Mrs. King when she is most restrained. On this Saturday, as she rallied with Miss Stove, she seemed more natural than I had seen her in years, almost wholly unconscious of the gallery—just herself, without an ounce of theatricality. An hour or so later, when she walked onto the Centre Court with Miss Evert, she seemed exactly the same. I didn’t know whether this pacificness boded well or ill for her, but, as it turned out, she played some of the best tennis of her career—certainly the best single set of her career—and all without one grimace, one exclamation of chagrin, or one grandiose gesture. Since Miss Evert, a fearsome hitter, will drive anyone off the court who is foolish enough to engage her in protracted baseline rallies, Mrs. King’s strategy was to keep changing the pattern and rhythm of her own attack. In the backcourt, she played her ground strokes with great variation, putting all kinds of cuts, spins, and slices on the ball. Sometimes she followed her forcing shots into the forecourt and sometimes she didn’t. She did other helpful things. She served beautifully. She returned serve with care. Whenever Miss Evert presented her with an opening, she not only was quick to seize it but put the ball away with volleys punched deep into the corners. Continuing to alter her tactics and speeds, she never permitted Miss Evert a chance to find her own tempo. In no time at all, the first set had gone to Mrs. King, 6–0. She had lost only nine points to an opponent who was not playing at all badly. She continued this dream tennis through the first two games of the second set. Then the magic faded a little as Miss Evert started to hit more solidly through the ball on her shots and Mrs. King made a few human errors. At 5–5, though, stepping up the pace again and playing a succession of stunning strokes, Mrs. King broke Miss Evert’s service, and then she held her own at 15 for the match. I don’t believe I have ever seen anyone, man or woman, play as superb a set as Mrs. King’s first. (I did not get to watch Suzanne Lenglen in action, but I never saw my favorite woman player, Alice Marble, play a more impressive or enjoyable match than Mrs. King had.)
Mrs. King’s victory served to remind us of the phenomenal record she has compiled at Wimbledon. Only three times in the last eleven years has she failed to reach the final of the singles. She has now won the singles five times, not to mention the women’s doubles nine times and the mixed doubles three times. One can understand why her doubles partner, Rosemary Casals, who is a few years her junior, refers to Wimbledon as “the old lady’s house.”
Mrs. King’s spectacular triumph was just the thing needed to get the machinery for an autumn meeting between her and Bobby Riggs started again. The previous May, after he had defeated Mrs. Court with no trouble at all in their nationally televised match on Mother’s Day, there had been a lot of talk to the effect that he should next play Mrs. King to prove that his victory was no fluke, but nothing had been pinned down. Now, on her return from Wimbledon, there was spirited bidding among the television networks for the rights to a King-Riggs confrontation, and in mid-August the American Broadcasting Company announced that it would be televising the match in prime time on the night of Thursday, September 20th, from the Astrodome, in Houston, for a purse of a hundred thousand dollars—winner take all. Within a matter of weeks, the two participants had been deluged with all kinds of commercial tie-ins, and it became clear that the loser would pull in at least a hundred thousand dollars from these subsidiary gleanings and that the winner’s total haul would far surpass two hundred thousand.
All this constituted an astounding coup for Robert Larimore Riggs, considering that, at fifty-five, he was twenty-five or thirty years past his prime time as a tennis player. In 1939, he had won Wimbledon; in 1939 and 1941, Forest Hills; in 1946, 1947, and 1949, the United States Professional Championship. As a professional, he had held a decided edge in his many meetings with the great Don Budge, but somehow Riggs’ exceptional talents—the dependability of his strokes, the shrewdness of his tactics—were underestimated, even when he reigned as champion, possibly because he had such a large supply of whatever is the opposite of charisma. He was too short: five-seven and a half. He had a pesty, chesty personality. (He became much more likable in later years.) Above all, he was a gambler—an honest, self-avowed hustler but a hustler nonetheless. This was one of the chief reasons he was continually in hot water with the United States Lawn Tennis Association during his amateur years. It was typical of Riggs that just before the 1939 Wimbledon tournament began he got down a bet of a hundred pounds at 3–1 odds that he would win the singles, and talked the bookmaker into letting the money ride, in the event that he took the singles, on the doubles at 6–1, and then on the mixed doubles at 12–1. He won all three titles and £21,600, or a hundred and eight thousand dollars. From his early years, Riggs, the fifth, and youngest, son of a Los Angeles minister of the Church of Christ, had to have some “action” going in order to enjoy his tennis thoroughly. Since his acuteness as a bettor soon got around, he was forced to invent all sorts of zany, offbeat wagers to lure the pigeons to his roost. There is a wonderful story—no doubt embellished over the years—of how, during his amateur days, he was pitted in an early round of one of the big Eastern tournaments against a run-of-the-mill player who would normally have been lucky to get more than two games in a set from Riggs. When their match had been in progress about an hour, some friends of Riggs’ walked over from the clubhouse to see how close he was to wrapping it up. They were astonished to find that the second set had only just got under way. Indeed, it took Riggs well over two hours to subdue his much inferior opponent. This was hard to believe to start with, but what made it all the more enigmatic was that the scores were 6–0, 6–0, 6–0. When his friends demanded an explanation, Riggs said, with a little smile, “I had a bet going that I could beat that bum love, love, and love without coming in past the service line. That’s why it took so long.” According to locker-room lore, Riggs in time became a compulsive gambler; that is, if he lost a string of bets he had to keep on betting until he was cleaned out or finally broke his losing streak. For example, the story goes that in the summer of 1948, after losing a dozen or so bets running, he ran into Bob Falkenburg. Wimbledon champion that year, Falkenburg was not an outstanding all-round player, but at that time he unquestionably had the most powerful serve in the world. Riggs, in his desperation to win a bet, proposed to Falkenburg that they play a match for five hundred dollars. It would be for one set, and he was prepared to give Falkenburg a sizable handicap—five games and his serve. Somewhat stunned by this proposition, Falkenburg didn’t answer immediately, and, interpreting his silence as a sign of possible lack of interest, Riggs quickly added, “Also, I’ll wear an overcoat.” Falkenburg took the bet. Riggs, flopping around the hot court in a heavy camel’s-hair job, took the set 7–5. He was healthy again.
Riggs’ penchant for hustling—first at tennis and later at golf, where he became a 3-handicap player and a deadly putter under pressure—helped to break up his two marriages. (He has two children by his first marriage and four by his second, which lasted twenty years.) Last winter, after he had been out of the spotlight as long as Alida Valli and Steve Van Buren, he became news again. At that time, having become immersed in the booming new senior (forty-five and over) tennis circuit, he grew annoyed by the demands that Mrs. King and the other women stars were making for a larger share of the prize money at Wimbledon, Forest Hills, and the other traditional championships. He genuinely felt that the women simply didn’t deserve more money—they didn’t even play as good tennis as the best seniors did. To drive home his point, he declared that a man like himself, with one foot in the grave, could still beat the top women players. This led him to formally challenge Mrs. King to a match; he would put up five thousand dollars—winner take all. Mrs. King turned him down, but Mrs. Court, whom he approached next, accepted his challenge. Riggs instantly launched a fantastic promotion campaign—among other things, billing himself in this age of women’s lib as the country’s No. 1 male-chauvinist pig—and he eventually stirred up such interest in the match that the Columbia Broadcasting System decided to televise it. It was held at the San Diego Country Estates, in an atmosphere that recalled the bizarre bygone era when heavyweight fights for the world championship were held in small, remote towns of the old West (Corbett vs. Fitzsimmons at Carson City, Nevada, in 1897; Jeffries vs. Johnson at Reno, Nevada, in 1910; Dempsey vs. Gibbons at Shelby, Montana, in 1923). Work had been started only a few months before on the San Diego Country Estates, a resort development in the arid Cuyamaca Mountains, fifty miles northeast of San Diego, and close by Wildcat Canyon. The players, press, and officials were put up at the clubhouse of the San Vicente Golf Club, which is a part of the project. (Though the clubhouse was completed, only a few of the holes were, which is par for the course these days.) For the big match, the management put in a cement court and erected bleachers for thirty-five hundred spectators. During the first game—as early as that—it became evident that Mrs. Court, who throughout her career has been subject to strange crises de nerfs, was not herself at all. (The only other top-level athlete in recent years who has suffered these periodic emotional hang-ups is Jim Ryun, the great runner.) Riggs, for his part, was as relaxed as if he were in his own living room. He walked through the two sets, 6–2, 6–1, with an almost errorless display of controlled, soft-ball tennis. He had trained hard for the match and was in perfect trim. Under the direction of Rheo Blair, a Hollywood nutritionist, he had reduced from a hundred and sixty pounds to a hundred and forty-four in eight weeks. He had followed a strict diet of protein and dairy foods, and had built himself up by taking four hundred and fifteen pills a day, containing liver extract, germ oil, vitamins, and predigested proteins. Blair is no man for halfway measures. The night before the match, he came down to the San Diego Country Estates and personally prepared Riggs’ dinner—a baked potato and an avocado salad.
Because of the considerable interest in the Riggs-King match, which was to be held eleven days after the conclusion of Forest Hills, a good deal of extra attention was paid to Mrs. King’s progress from the first day of those championships. In winning her first two matches, she played quite well, but both on and off the court she looked a bit wan and seemed to have less verve than she had at Wimbledon. Some Riggs partisans, who regard him as the most gifted psycher since Rasputin, claimed that Mrs. King was already feeling the strain of her coming evening in the Astrodome, but most people attributed her lack of animation to the heat. The day before the start of the championships, a fearsome heat wave, which was to last nine days, hit the New York area, and, with the temperature constantly in the nineties and the humidity intense, the field at Forest Hills found the going enervating. In the third round, Mrs. King came up against Julie Heldman, an experienced internationalist, who can play good, intelligent tennis on her day but who more often than not finds it difficult to maintain her patience and her concentration. (For some inexplicable reason, this match was scheduled not for the stadium court or the grandstand court but for the clubhouse court, which is distractingly noisy and also has such scabrous grass that old Bumpers Wingfield himself would have found it hard to cope with the bounces. Mrs. King and Miss Heldman did not like this court assignment at all.) For a while, their match went much as one might have expected. Mrs. King, in fair enough form, won the first set, 6–3, and went to a 4–1 lead in the second. Then the pattern of play gradually changed. Mrs. King began to move more and more slowly to the ball, and Miss Heldman, encouraged by a series of passing shots, began to hit the ball more forcefully, especially with her forehand. She swept the next five games, to take the set, 6–4. After she had gone out in front 3–1 in the third, and deciding, set, she asked Mrs. King, who by then had slowed down to a walk, how she was feeling. Mrs. King replied that she felt as if she were going to faint but said she wished to continue. When they were changing courts after the next game (Miss Heldman had won it, to lead 4–1), Miss Heldman, ready to begin play, asked the umpire if the minute’s rest allowed was up. Mrs. King then said, “Well, if you want it so much, you can have it,” and told the umpire she would have to retire from the match. Dr. Daniel Manfredi, the tournament’s chief physician, who examined Mrs. King, announced later that it was a good thing she had stopped play when she did, or she might well have collapsed in the ninety-six-degree heat. He explained that Mrs. King, who had been suffering from a cold, had been taking penicillin, and that the combined effect of the drug and the tremendous heat had brought on chills and nausea.
With Mrs. King’s unfortunate early departure, the women’s singles lost a good deal of their interest, naturally. At the same time, this was one of the most bountiful Forest Hills we have had in ages, packed with an abundance of rousing matches and with many matches that provided stretches of absorbing tennis or isolated moments of high drama. Let me describe, as briefly as I can, some of the main ingredients of this cornucopia.
Pancho Gonzales, who is now forty-five, is nearing that time of life when, at least in blazing-hot weather, he can play only one set going all out. In the first round, against Tom Okker, who was seeded seventh, the old, graying lion shot the works in the first set and forced it to 6–6. In the nine-point tie-breaker, he fell behind 2–4, but an ace helped him to pull up to 4–4. Gonzales would be serving the deciding point of the tie-breaker, and, under the rules in force at Forest Hills, on that point the receiver has the choice of which court he wants to receive in. Okker chose the backhand court. Gonzales pushed his hair back off his forehead, and then, moving into an easy windup, as if he would be going with an off-speed breaking serve, cracked a bullet that hit the sideline chalk about four feet up from the service line. The ball whizzed past Okker before he could get his racket on it—a perfect serve. It may be the last great shot we will see Gonzales play at Forest Hills—though, with Gonzales, one never knows. Okker then sailed through the next three sets with the loss of eight games.
In the second round, there was a major upset. Nastase, the eccentric defending champion, who hears a different tambourine from most people, was pitted against Andrew Pattison, of Rhodesia, one of the many tall, blond, strong, able young men who people tournament tennis these days. After taking the first two sets, Nastase began to clown around, and, before he knew it, Pattison had won the next two sets and was out in front 5–3 in the deciding set. At that point, the match was called because of darkness. Upon its resumption the next day, Nastase held his serve, but Pattison then held his for set and match. A cultivated young man of twenty-four, Pattison attended Stellenbosch University, in South Africa, where he majored in mathematics. He is currently attached to the Lakeway World of Tennis, Lamar Hunt’s huge development outside Austin, Texas, with which the veteran South African star Cliff Drysdale is also connected.
In the third round, two of the young Wimbledon heroes burst upon the scene to the delight of the galleries: Amritraj defeated Rod Laver, seeded fourth, in five furious sets, 7–6, 2–6, 6–4, 2–6, 6–4, and Borg scored an equally flabbergasting upset over Arthur Ashe, seeded third, 6–7, 6–4, 6–4, 6–4. Ashe has for years possessed one of the fastest and roughest serves in the game, but as the match wore on, the aggressive Swedish youngster found it no problem at all. In the final set, for example, he broke Ashe’s service twice, first at 15 and then at 30, the second time by rocketing back two returns of service for clean placements. Amritraj also hits the ball with enormous power, but his victory over Laver, who is now thirty-five, depended on fine all-court play, especially an excellent return of service and some lightning-fast moves in the forecourt to set up winning volleys. Frequently, after Laver had passed him down the line or crosscourt with that wonderful topspin backhand drive of his, Amritraj, bursting out into a wide smile, would applaud the shot by slapping the face of his racket with his hand. This was no synthetic exhibition of sportsmanship. Amritraj is the genuine thing. In addition, he is an extraordinarily charming and bright young man, and he should add a great deal to the tennis scene in the years ahead.
Borg, playing more erratically than he had against Ashe, went out in the fourth round to Pilic in four sets, and Pattison went out to John Newcombe, the formidable Australian, also in four sets. Perhaps the best tennis of this round was produced by Jimmy Connors, a twenty-one-year-old protégé of the two Panchos, Gonzales and Segura, who comes from Belleville, Illinois. A relaxed left-hander with a helpful sense of humor, Connors clobbers everything with terrific speed and snap. Against Okker, whose weakness is his own lack of severity, everything went in for Connors, and he won by the lopsided score of 6–3, 6–2, 6–4. This took us to the quarter-finals. In the top half of the draw, Stan Smith, last year’s Wimbledon champion, and Kodes, this year’s, got through to the semis—Smith easily, Kodes only after a bitter five-set battle with his old European rival Pilic. In the lower half, we had two very attractive matches: Connors vs. Newcombe, and Amritraj vs. Ken Rosewall, the ageless Australian control artist, who hadn’t lost a set during the first four rounds. Newcombe got by Connors, 6–4, 7–6, 7–6, in a slam-bang duel that was as close as the score, Newcombe winning both tie-breakers, five points to four. The other match was quite different. Rosewall simply wouldn’t let Amritraj get rolling. For example, the tall, lithe Indian would unfurl one of his big serves, absolutely loaded with spin, and precise little Rosewall—looking hardly different from the way he did at seventeen, twenty-one years ago, when he first appeared at Forest Hills—would twinkle into position and, with that fantastic eye-and-hand coördination of his, meet the ball so squarely in the center of his racket and so firmly that he would, in effect, rob the serve of all the stuff Amritraj had put on it, and send the ball shooting back, loaded with his own spin and diving right at Amritraj’s feet. The scores were 6–4, 6–3, 6–3. “I never played a man who returned serve so well,” Amritraj said with an admiring sigh. “I’ve always loved watching Rosewall play. I was looking forward to seeing what it would be like to come up against that famous backhand. Well, today when I saw it, I wanted to come off the court as soon as I could.”
No two people see a tennis match the same way. I mention this because for me the best tennis of the championships was, oddly, provided by the three-set semifinal between Newcombe and Rosewall. Both, I thought, were close to the top of their game. Newcombe, who had played only nine previous tournaments this year and was so far off form in the spring that he lost to comparative nobodies in the first round of the French Open and the second round of the Italian Open, was pounding in that heavy service, returning service purposefully, stretching wide for cutoff volleys—the whole potpourri he dishes up when he is really on. Rosewall was Rosewall, handling Newcombe’s power adroitly, and rather consistently playing the real winning shot off what had looked like the winning shot. It was wonderful tennis, and yet on paper—Newcombe, 6–4, 7–6, 6–3—it appears nothing special. The whole course of the match might have been different, Rosewall ruminated afterward, had he cashed in on the break point he held on Newcombe’s very first service. After that, he was always playing catch-up tennis. Not until the tenth game of the second set did he succeed in cracking Newcombe’s serve, and by then he had already dropped his own serve once in that set. In effect, he had only prolonged the set. He lost it in the tie-breaker when the winning point, a backhand volley by Newcombe, hit the tape and crawled over the net. Rosewall spent a long time in the locker room thinking about the match. After all these years, all these campaigns, he still takes defeat quite hard whenever he feels he was playing well enough during a tournament to win it.
The other semifinal, Smith vs. Kodes, undoubtedly produced spottier tennis, but what a dramatic match it turned out to be! Kodes, who comes from Prague, is a good-looking, medium-sized man of twenty-seven with curly light-brown hair, a light mustache, the muscular legs of the soccer player, a good eye, very quick reflexes, and a commendable amount of stubbornness. He took the first set, 7–5, and was leading 4–0 in the second when Smith, who had looked slow and stiff all during the tournament, came to life, fought his way back to 4–4, and ultimately took the set by capturing the tie-breaker, five points to four. Kodes was of the opinion that Smith’s serve on the winning point had been well out (he was not the only person who saw it that way), and when the call stood he manifested his rage by kicking a hole through the seat of one of the chairs that are put out for the players to sit on during the intervals when they are changing courts. Smith then won the third set, 6–1, and looked very much in command, but the fourth set was all Kodes, and went to him, 6–1. The fifth moved slowly to 2–2, 3–3, 4–4. By that time, dusk had fallen. Overhead, a pale moon had risen in the sky, and the west wind, which had blown lightly all day, was now rustling noisily through the trees. These were hardly appropriate conditions for a match of such significance, but since neither player wanted it to be called and resumed the next day, the umpire let it go on. In the tenth game, Smith held a break point on Kodes’s service at 30–40, but Kodes bailed himself out by getting in a big, skidding first serve on the next point. The long eleventh game was decisive. Serving at 5–5, Smith, after fighting off two break points, blew two volleys in a row. Kodes then served out at love for set and match.
It was a good final—much better, I must confess, than I thought it might be. Off his showing against Rosewall, I thought that Newcombe would not have much trouble with Kodes—that it would go four sets at the most. In capturing the first set, 6–4, Newcombe did look impressive, winning Kodes’s serve at love in the ninth game and then holding his own at love in the tenth by the simple expedient of hammering in four consecutive first serves. Few cannonballs in the business are as tough to handle as Newcombe’s, and his second serve has hardly less crunch. There is nothing complicated about his service action. A rangy, broad-backed six-footer (with a face like an Australian Gary Cooper), he throws his whole body into his service as his racket comes winging over his shoulder like the arm of a windmill. His forward momentum helps to carry him more than halfway to the net as he follows his service in, and this puts him, especially when you take his wide reach into consideration, into the perfect position to volley the return of service.
In the second set, there were some changes. Newcombe’s timing began to slip—both his footwork and his anticipation suddenly seemed laggard—and, simultaneously, Kodes’s whole game picked up. Among other things, his serve had more pace and more depth, although there had been no visible alteration in his wooden-soldier, by-the-numbers service technique: lean back, lean forward, bounce and catch ball, bounce and catch ball again, lift head toward the sky, toss ball up and swing racket back, hit ball. Kodes’s return of service also came on. As he gets set to receive, the accent, again, is not on grace but on efficiency. The head and neck are thrust far forward; the neck swivels as if it were trying to screw itself into the shoulders; the racket is extended with both hands clamped tautly on it; the knees are deeply bent, and sway from side to side. The overall posture is not unlike that of a novice skier tensing up at the top of a frightening slope. It works for Kodes, though. From it, he can spring into position to meet his opponent’s serve in an instant. Coming on confidently now, he won Newcombe’s service twice in the second set, frequently hitting the cannonball back faster than it came over, and placing it well, too. He took that set, 6–1. He went on to take the third, 6–4, thanks in about equal measure to his acrobatic scrambling around the court—he made some incredible gets—and to a plethora of shouldered forehands, overhit backhands, and other assorted errors by Newcombe. (In one game in this set, the break game, he was guilty of five errors and two double faults.) In the fourth set, however, Kodes made a costly mistake: he let down a fraction. It was understandable. He was now feeling the toll of being embroiled in what turned out to be his third five-set match in four days. Slowly, Newcombe started to take advantage of Kodes’s less pressing play, and fought his way back into the match. This was no easy thing to do, since the only stroke he could really depend on was his serve. In any event, he won the fourth set, 6–2, to square the match. Then he won the deciding set, 6–3. The one service break in this set came in the fourth game, and after that Newcombe held on grimly.
At the press session afterward, Kodes surprised me by saying, “In the fifth set, the guy is always going to make it who makes the break first.” Not necessarily. But I suppose a man might feel that way after fighting Newcombe for three hours or so. It must be something like fighting Rocky Marciano. Even on those nights when Marciano scored with few clean blows, he wore down his opponents with all those heavy, attritive punches that landed on the arms, the shoulders, the neck, the back. Finally, they couldn’t lift their hands.
Newcombe, who is twenty-nine, has now won six major titles: three Wimbledon Championships, two United States Championships, and one Australian Championship. The last came this winter, when he turned down a spot on the rich W.C.T. tour and, instead, chose to play Davis Cup for Australia in the preliminary rounds against Japan and India. It is only right to note that he also devoted some of that time to exploring the possibilities of organizing a Far Eastern circuit, which would be played in the autumn of the year. Brainy, congenial, quietly ambitious, independent, Newk, who is an authentic citizen of the world (he and his wife, a native of Germany, and their three children make their permanent home at his tennis camp in New Braunfels, Texas), has always wanted a life with something more in it than a constant diet of competitive tennis. The only difficulty with staying away from the tournament world for long periods is that it becomes much tougher to win when one returns. At Forest Hills, Newcombe had the essential determination and found a way.
To everybody’s gratification, Mrs. Court was victorious in the women’s singles, beating Miss Evert in the semifinals and Miss Goolagong in the final. The other semifinalist was Helga Masthoff, of Germany, who made her only previous appearance in our championships ten years ago, when she was Helga Niessen. By any name, she is rara avis. A pretty young woman with large doe eyes and the long legs of a model, she stands a slender six-one. She regularly appears on court wearing a plain white sports dress with a little lace on it, and a white cloche-type hat with a small bill. Some of her movements are oddly angular. When she is serving, for instance, she raises one leg, storklike, before striking the ball. For the most part, though, she does everything—even the grubby things like covering court assiduously—with elegance and a certain soignée quality, as if she were entering the casino at Monte Carlo. Although her strokes are rather unconventional, she is a deceptively good tennis player. She is the current German champion, and she has been a finalist in the French Championships and a quarter-finalist at Wimbledon. She took the second set from Miss Goolagong and could well have taken the third. It is a shame, really, that she didn’t marry a nobleman, for it would be remarkably fitting to hear the umpire calling out, “Advantage, Countess Masthoff.”
Preceded by ten days of incessant hoopla and drumbeating, the day of the second Battle of the Sexes, September 20th, at length rolled round. That evening, more than thirty thousand people, the largest crowd ever to watch a tennis match, piled into the Astrodome to see how well Mrs. King would do against Riggs. (She went in a 5–2 underdog.) Along with this, about fifty million Americans, supplemented by the citizens of fifteen foreign countries, eventually watched the telecast. Something—maybe just the knowledge that they would be making sports history in a big way—beguiled the promoters into providing the match with an atmosphere that was part circus, part Hollywood première, part television giveaway show, and all bad taste. Escorted by a troupe of male attendants waving hot-pink, fuchsia, and white plumes, Mrs. King made her entrance carried high on a litter, like an Ethiopian potentate of old. Riggs, clad in a gold-and-maroon warmup jacket with a commercial message for a candy bar—Sugar Daddy—inscribed on it, was wheeled in by some showgirls as he reclined in a chariot. For the life of me, this resembled nothing so much as the late Bobby Clark, with his painted-on glasses, making his entrance in a Broadway musical. To add to the rampant maladroitness, the anchorman for the telecast was Howard Cosell, complete with dinner jacket and a conspicuously thin understanding of tennis. To make sure that the woman-vs.-man theme of the promotion was not forgotten, Cosell was assisted by Rosemary Casals, Mrs. King’s longtime friend and doubles partner, and, to balance things, Eugene Scott, a former Davis Cup player. From the outset, there was nothing tentative—to use Miss Casals’ favorite word—about her remarks but, rather, an unvarying belligerence. Scott had comparatively little to say; as a man who had picked Riggs to win easily, there just wasn’t much for him to comment on. As everyone knows, Mrs. King defeated Riggs very soundly in straight sets, 6–4, 6–3, 6–3. To Miss Casals’ credit, she had predicted the score right on the nose.
There doesn’t seem much point in analyzing the match in detail at this date. The first mild shock came in the sixth game of the first set when Riggs, who had just broken Mrs. King’s service to go into the lead, was immediately broken back. This is precisely what doesn’t happen in a typical Riggs match, and it reinforced a feeling many viewers had had from the start that he was in much less sharp physical shape than he had been against Mrs. Court. Too much partying, probably. At any rate, after that break-back, Mrs. King was never in trouble of any sort the rest of the evening.
A second mild shock was provided by the way in which Riggs lost the first set. With games 4–5, he was serving. The score went to 30–all. On the next point, a critical one, he threw up a lob to Mrs. King’s backhand side—a good tactical play. It was a little short, though, and Mrs. King put it away with a sensational leaping backhand volley. (Miss Casals was also right in reminding us early on that Mrs. King plays the backhand volley as well as anyone in the game.) Then, on set point for Mrs. King, Riggs, the fabled nerveless hustler, double-faulted.
After that, I don’t think anyone was surprised that Mrs. King won, but they were by the ease with which she did it. Despite the hard occasion, she kept her nerves well in check. She was the superior player in just about every respect. She served better on the fast acrylic-fibre surface. (Riggs could not get his first serve in all night.) With her fine anticipation and her speed afoot, she ran down most of his chips and dinks and other junk, frequently ending these exchanges with passing shots for clean winners. His famed lob, which was not working well, gave her no trouble, and, by my count, she missed only one overhead smash in the three sets. And, finally, and most emphatically, she beat him cold in the forecourt, outmaneuvering him and playing better shots. (By the way—not that genetic corroboration is necessary to bring out what an exceptional athlete Mrs. King is—her younger brother, Randy Moffitt, pitches for the San Francisco Giants.)
This brings us to the real enigma of the match. What was Riggs, the master strategist, the Einstein of the en-tous-cas, doing playing serve-and-volley all night? That is Mrs. King’s game, not his, and he doesn’t play it well. To put it another way, why didn’t Riggs spend more of his time back at the baseline, where he thrives, patiently playing his game, and feeding Mrs. King his best junk, the stuff that has been winning for him for years? And why, with all his tennis acumen, did he keep playing Mrs. King’s stalwart backhand? I have no idea. Perhaps Mrs. King was so much the superior player that night that nothing Riggs tried would have prolonged the match appreciably. Anyway, the South Sea Bubble of 1973 has burst—with the difference from the original that everyone has got rich. I’m sorry that Major Wingfield couldn’t have been around to see his game played in the Astrodome and, possibly, to slide in for a few well-paying commercials himself. One must settle for the reasonable in this world, however, so let us hope that Baron Ash, tardily awakening to the charms of tennis, got down a few quid on the winner. ♦
