Page Title
Ups and Downs in Big-Time Tennis
by Elliot Berry
The following is the first part of an excerpt from Elliot Berry's new book,
"TopSpin: Ups and Downs in Big-Time Tennis." The excerpt is from
the Wimbledon chapter of Berry's book, which describes Berry's personal
reaction to the opening day of the 1994 Wimbledon Championships. The chapter
also covers Berry's detailed narration of the first round matches between
Pete Sampras and Jared Palmer, and between Karsten Braasch and Jonathan
Stark. Berry's love of Wimbledon and his knowledge of big-time tennis shine
through in every paragraph.
The book (334 pages) is recently released by Henry Holt and Company, and
is priced at $27.50 in hardcover. To order the book in the U.S., call 1-800-488-5233.
It is also available on the Web at: http://www.books.com/scripts/view.exe?isbn
0805035435.
Part One: Wimbledon
The players love it and fear it. They can feel Wimbledon in their stomachs
a month before they get there. The ball, like their tennis fortunes, can
kick in or slide away, changing directions in unexpected ways. The uncertainty
is in the turf itself. Feet make the game. Clay courts and hard courts
are safer roads. The footing is more sure there. The beauty of the
grass is that it breathes. It lives. It is English.
Hard courts are more like American highways, omnipresent, imposing,
yet often cracking. We seem to like our climaxes straight, fast, and requiring
little care or doubt. The surface in France is red like the earth itself
in Roussillon. The French like longer battles and slower climaxes - and
they get them on the clay. The Australians, great sportsmen and sportswoman,
competitive and somewhat cost-effective by nature, broke fully with their
English past in the real estate upmarket of the 1980s, building a beautiful
modern stadium in Melbourne and rubberizing their court surfaces. They
will save money in the long run, but in going to a more American surface,
they lost part of their grassy connection to England and to the true legends
of world tennis: Frank Sedgman, Lew Hoad, Rod Laver, Roy Emerson,
John Newcombe, Ken Rosewall, Margaret Smith, and Evonne Goolagong, Australian
tennis heroes and masters of the grass-court game.
The English have never poured cement or rubber over their lawns. They cling
to their grass and gardens perhaps more deeply than to their monarchy.
At Wimbledon, the English have both a pastoral and a political memory.
Rising from the tradition of eighteenth-century cultivated 'wildernesses,"
such an integral part of the drama of Jane Austen's novels, the tennis lawns
at Wimbledon remain "great lawns." They sometimes feel
like the victory gardens that still dot English cities. The Wimbledon grass
may appear Tory in its 'elegance,' but what is required to win at Wimbledon
is mostly Labor....
On opening day, Centre Court was surrounded by police and guards who kept
the grassy theater empty until the appointed hour. I slipped in a little
early. Four large, squarish holes were sunk deeply into the lawn. White
lines ran long and perfectly straight the length of the bare grass court,
and the net was missing. There were only twenty minutes left to the start
of first-day play, and on the famous grass court where Don Budge played
Fred Perry, and where John McEnroe played Bjorn Borg, a young woman in a
long, pleated summer skirt with floral designs sat sideways on a pillow,
weaving grass by hand. Every so often she consulted a map of the lawn and
gestured firmly to a slight, blond young man in red sneakers, indicating
where to place his kneeling pad to assist her in reweaving a few errant
strands which, from my vantage point, already looked perfect. I felt like
shouting, "Pickett's Charge is coming!" But that would have been
American of me, and I was a visitor. Suddenly a tall, distinguished-looking
man in overalls appeared with an electric meter, and he took height measurements
of the grass at several locations around the court. I loved the craziness
of the place, this Wimbledon, though I might not want to live by all its
rules.
Up in the stands, still empty just before the two o'clock start,
a young woman guard, wearing bright red lipstick, a blue skirt, a white
shirt, and a round white sailor's dress hat, smiled up at a slender male
guard of her acquaintance. They looked like shy lovers from World War II.
The sky was an English gray, and the octagonal eaves of the tennis theater's
roof seemed the color of a black English umbrella. The grass was so green
in this darkened English fight.
The press rooms were buzzing with good cheer, pecking-order tension, and
predictions. Outside the grounds, queues inched politely forward. Ticket
touts and bobbies, sons of the same working class, did their English dance
of disgruntlement, propriety, and looking the other way. Newspaper boys
with pictures of Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras on the front pages of editions
whose cover pages changed every eight hours were hawking the faces of today's
heroes, much as their fathers and grandfathers had hawked editions that
described Bill Tilden's unexpected loss to Henri Cochet, Pancho Gonzalez's
victory at age forty-one over Charlie Pasarell, and those titillating Wimbledon
"scandals" that have run happily and uninterrupted from Joan Lycett
playing in bare legs and ankle socks in 1931 to the romantic interlude in
1993 between Andre Agassi and that old teenager-at-heart, Barbra Streisand.
I love the raging doubt of it all. The unknown is exciting, tantalizing,
nearly sexual the first day of a big tournament. The pressure is
such that every player in the draw meets himself or herself as never before.
Wimbledon is a place players have to keep coming back to in order to learn
the surface and the place. Even Roy Emerson lost at Wimbledon for ten straight
years before he won it twice in a row in 1964 and 1965.
Some players are naturally better suited to grass, through power or agility,
preferably both. Grass generally rewards big serves and the bravery
of coming forward to net, but in recent years the return has become as important
as the serve itself, as Borg, Connors, and Agassi have all demonstrated
at Wimbledon. The real challenge of grasscourt play is not just power but
balance. Lefties like Laver, McEnroe, and Roche got down so low to the
ball and angled approach shots and volleys so deftly they almost made the
ball roll. Righties like Budge, Kramer, Newcombe, Becker, and Edberg seemed
to catapult into play above the ball, drilling it down hard, heavy through
the grass. Neither method of attack is foolproof or easy for mere mortals
to copy. As the well-known English tennis mortal Larry Adler described
his own grass-court struggles to the gossip columnist at the Evening Standard
the night before Wimbledon, "I play Cinderella tennis ... I can't quite
get to the ball."
The opening-day crowd was finally allowed into the stands. The best-dressed
people seemed to be in the Royal Box, though everyone in the Centre Court
enclosure looked dressed up for a country wedding. Down below, two short
men in overalls unfolded the net like a flag and tied it fast to wooden
net posts the color and thickness of the wood of an old yacht's mast. A
burst of applause rose from the crowd. The linespeople, clad in drab olive-green
skirts and trousers under bright green blazers, were marching onto Centre
Court with all the pride and panache of handlers at a dog show.
Then came the players. The two Americans bowing to the Royal Box
looked sleek, dark, and handsome, like fighter pilots before a mission.
Jared Palmer was wearing all white. Pete Sampras sported a loose
white shirt and checked shorts. The loudspeaker indicated as they warmed
up that three presentations would be made from the Royal Box.
The elegant Duchess of Kent and her impeccably tailored, chinless husband,
the duke, received an award for the meritorious service of his family since
1929, but I was more interested in the little Australian who stood up shyly
behind them in the Royal Box. He was royalty as I understood it. He had
proven himself and was not born to it. He smiled modestly, his left shoulder
slightly lower than his right, his face still freckled, his hair redder
than it had been in several years.
"Rodney George Laver," said the announcer in perfect BBC English.
"The greatest player of them all," I whispered to myself - with
the possible exception of Tilden and apologies to Kramer and Gonzalez.
It had been exactly twenty-five years since Laver won the second of his
two grand slams. Sampras, who idolized Laver, put his racket down
flat on the grass and applauded with the rest of us, and we were
all on our feet. Laver took the lovely Waterford crystal bowl in his right
hand and gave a single wave of his famous left hand. I remember all those
wooden Dunlop rackets with Imperial gut that he and the other Australians
and the best European used to play with other Americans, who used Wilsons,
mostly Kramers. Rod Laver had had it all as a player. His eyes were a
little misty and still shy as we cheered him, and he sat down too soon,
which was exactly when to sit.
"It's dead-on two o'clock," said the snappily dressed Englishwoman
stretching near me.
And then, in the complete silence that followed, Pete Sampras began defending
his title with a huge serve that nearly aced Palmer.
Nevertheless, Sampras's long, handsome body looked unhappy, as it
often does early in a match. The beauty of Sampras's tennis is
that he builds up to a kind of sporting orgasm over the course of a match
rather than try to have it all right away in bursts of anger or nervous
energy. Sampras seems at times a brilliant somnambulist.
Gradually Sampras's inner smile emerged, but his basic modesty ensured
that his, surface would always be less electric than Agassi's. Where Sampras
is quietly brilliant like a good book, Agassi is often irresistibly brilliant
like television.
On the third point of the match, Sampras slipped on the lawn, turning the
grass a darker shade of green but skidding back to his feet without ripping
the turf. Slightly embarrassed, Sampras recovered with another ace at break
point for Palmer. The serve took one heavy bounce off the grass and thumped
the backstop, undeciphered, like a memory gone by. Sampras, like
Laver, was modest on the surface but huge in reserves. Palmer loped
back to the deuce service box.
Pete Sampras's service motion is a thing of beauty. He leans back on his
right foot, and the toes of his left foot rise up. It is a deceptively
easygoing motion, but lightness is the key to power.
Jared Palmer was leading 3-2 when I got up to leave, sure of a Sampras victory
yet pleased with the elegance of both players. Palmer had a very neat serve-and-volley
game, but I felt that eventually this talented son of a tennis camp owner
would, at a crucial moment, lose his balance on a low volley and trip on
his own neatness. Palmer tends to stiffen when things get close,
whereas Sampras moves under pressure as if he has virgin olive oil in all
his joints.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of "TopSpin: Ups and Downs in Big-Time Tennis."
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