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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."