Freelance tennis writer Kamakshi Tandon and I are discussing “A Terrible Splendor,” by Marshall Jon Fisher. The book, released this month, delves into one of the sport’s legendary matches, the 1937 Davis Cup showdown between Don Budge of the United States and Baron Gottfried von Cramm of Germany, played as the world readied for war.
Kamakshi,
You’re right to point out that Fred Perry would have made
another logical counterpoint character in this book; we could have used a little more
of him and a little less of Tilden. Perry strikes me as a unique character, in
that he was one of the first world champions from the proverbial wrong side of
the tracks, yet no one in the history of the game looked more like the classic
definition of a tennis player. He may have resented the game’s snobbish
gatekeepers, but he remade himself in the traditional gentleman’s image. Perry
took his famed laurel wreath logo from the wreath that was once sewn onto the
ribbons given to Wimbledon champions. Ironic to think that that
upper-crusty wreath, combined with the name of a working class tennis champion
from the 1930s, would become a symbol of all things cloyingly hip at the turn
of the century.
I’ll add another player of that era whose life also could
have been profitably fleshed out: Bobby Riggs. He was a sort of an American
version of Perry, a blue-collar spy in the world of top-tier tennis in the
1930s who would go on to have a second life in the Open era—rather than
hipness, Riggs happily became the personification of what was once quaintly
known as the “male chauvinist pig.” Riggs, a lifelong gambler and clown, makes
a few cameo appearances in Splendor; I’d never realized that he’d been such a
thorn in Budge’s side, beating him in a number of big-money matches. But he
could have been used as another example of how tennis was changing and evolving in the 30s. Like Budge, Riggs was part of the California public-court takeover of
the sport in that decade.
Of course, those are just sidelights to this story. The core
of the book is the relationship and contrast between the two opponents that day
on Center Court, Budge and Cramm. I think you said it well when you wrote that
Cramm, destroyed as a man, was left with only his sense of honor in the end,
the thing he had always prided himself on more than anything. That scene where
he teaches Budge the finer points of gentlemanly sportsmanship before their
first match seems to me to be the key to the book and that era of tennis. On
one side you have the teacher, Cramm, who was born into the aristocratic, amateur
code of honor and sportsmanship, of playing tennis for the joy of competing
rather than money. His class of nobles has already lost all power, and in a few years his
country will be wrecked. But he’s transmitting the values of that class to a young American and child of immigrants, Budge. And what strange values they seem to us now. Cramm will
never question a call or throw a point in a theatrical act of “chivalry”
because he doesn’t want to embarrass a linesman. And he won’t accept anything
less than this standard from Budge.
For his part, Budge is the student, but he learns the code of
the sport, and it serves him well. He begins as a Tommy Dorsey-loving
(notice the love of music by both Tilden and Budge, a common theme among tennis
players, and tennis bloggers), red-haired rube from northern California, but like Fred
Perry he quickly cultivates the image and demeanor of the elegant tennis
champion, from his all-white racquet, to his London-tailored white slacks,
right down to his white shoes. The sport makes Budge into a man he might never have been otherwise.
The ethos of the game then was the amateur one, of course; in those days
“professional” was, if not a dirty word, certainly not one that a top tennis
player wanted affixed to his name—it was the sport's version of a tradesman. In
the 70 years since, the meaning of amateur and professional have flipped. Now
the highest compliment you can give a tennis player, or pretty much anyone in
any walk of life, is that he or she is a “true professional.” Like Budge, all
the top pros today have had to learn to handle themselves as just that, pros. In the 1930s the important thing was to play the game the right way, by the
code—if you didn't, you were looked down on because you weren't living up to your class or your calling. Now it’s about playing up to your potential—if you're not, you're looked down on because you're not "getting the most out of yourself" (a strange phrase, when you think about it). Still, when I think of
Budge’s transformation from goofy hick to man of style, I think of Roger
Federer. And when I think of how, after he lost to Perry at Forest Hills
because he'd scarfed too many chocolate sundaes, Budge retreated into the California
hills to begin training in earnest, I think of two recent tennis brats turned
men, Andre Agassi and Andy Murray. Whether they’re called amateurs or
professionals, this individual sport still turns out full-fledged individuals.
My favorite moment from the book? It comes at the end of the
match, when Budge hits a scintillating winner from the far corner as he’s
falling down to clinch the tie for the U.S. When he gets to the net for the handshake, Cramm is waiting for him, as
disappointed as he has ever been after blowing a 4-1 lead, and perhaps even
fearful for his future in Nazi Germany. These, according to Fisher, are Budge’s
thoughts as he approaches his opponent:
There at the net stands his vanquished friend, the most
gracious sportsmanlike smile masking what must be turmoil underneath. Three
Wimbledon finals in a row lost, and now the Davis Cup. But then Budge realizes
that the smile is not a mask. Cramm is genuinely happy. Happy for his friend,
glad for the fans who have watched such a fine match.
Budge moves to hug Cramm, but the German stops him by
clasping his hand. “Don,” he says, “this was absolutely the finest match I have
ever played in my life. I’m very happy I could have played it against you, whom
I like so much. Congratulations.” And with that their arms are around each
other.
First a lesson in sportsmanship, then a lesson in gracious
defeat. Budge may have been the winner, but Cramm remained the teacher. And you
don’t get any better than that.
Thanks for the posts, Kamakshi. You might consider a career as a book critic someday. See you next time,
It’s a spring Sunday ritual. Take a walk, lie in the park,
examine New York City as it turns green all around you, and then go back home
and watch Rafael Nadal pummel some poor glum soul into the red European dust. After
yesterday’s version of this scenario played out as anticipated, I began to
wonder whether it was finally time to add a third item to the brief list of
life’s absolutes: Can we now say, “Death, taxes, and Nadal on clay”?
Last week I stated that there isn’t much new to say about
how Nadal wins, on clay or any other surface. At 22, he’s already reached the
stage where he’s hoisting trophies for the fifth straight time, as he did on
Sunday with the supersized cup that he can barely lift over his head each
year in Barcelona. So, seemingly with nothing left to observe about the guy, I
put down the notebook for Nadal’s final yesterday against David Ferrer and sat
back to watch as a spectator.
But that’s the thing about Nadal. Within his seemingly
regimented—“one-dimensional”—game, he rarely fails to come up with something
unexpected, something you haven’t quite seen even after watching him hundreds
of times. Against Ferrer it was Nadal’s down-the-line forehand that looked new
to me. He routinely cut off the angle on his opponent’s crosscourt backhand
near the service line and, without stopping to set up in any conventional
sense, drilled his forehand into the corner for an easy winner. I associate
this “running through the ball” style of transition attack with Roger Federer,
not with Nadal, but the Spaniard had the confidence yesterday to throw all
grind-it-out caution to the wind.
That said, there’s one other notable aspect about Nadal that
continues to stick out this clay season: Even while he’s doing something
unprecedented, and even while he can appear for long periods to be utterly invincible, he
remains human on the court. That is, he remains subject to anxieties, dry
spells, inexplicable shanks, and even the occasional tactical blunder. After
winning the first set over Ferrer pretty much at will, Nadal’s level dropped in
the second, and more than a few shots flew wildly off his frame. John McEnroe
once said of Federer at his peak that he screwed up just enough to let you know
he was human, before rising to the occasion and becoming infallible again. This
combination made Federer even more impressive than if he’d been perfect all the
way through. If anything, I’ve always felt this was even truer of Nadal: He lets you know that winning is work, and that one missed shot here or there—Ferrer nearly
reached set point on Nadal’s serve in the second—is all it would take for him
to end up on the losing side of any given day. As with Federer once upon a time,
this only makes the fact that Nadal doesn’t lose those key points that much more
impressive.
I went to bed Sunday night having just listened to Tennis
Channel commentators Jason Goodall and Robbie Koenig call the Barcelona final.
This morning I woke up, turned on the TV, and heard them announcing first-round
matches at the Masters event in Rome—the tour is in full swing. As Nadal himself
said after the final in Indian Wells, while contemplating a late flight that
same night to Miami, “The good thing of tennis is when lose you have another
chance next week. The bad thing is when you win, next Tuesday you are [playing]
another time.”
It’s not that bad, Rafa: This week you shouldn’t have to
play until Wednesday. But as I write this, the first round in rainy Rome is going on (speaking of spring rituals, James Blake is about to lose to a no name). The
other members of the Big 4, Federer, Murray, and Djokovic, will all come to the Foro Italico with more rest than Nadal. Can any of them take him off my short list of life’s sure
things?
First Quarter
The question for Nadal, and for this tournament, is how he
feels in regard to his French Open preparation. Does he need some rest, or can
he keep going at full speed all the way through Sunday? This question is tied
up with whether he plans to enter Madrid in two weeks—apparently he’s wary of
playing at altitude there so soon before Paris. Last year Nadal was in a similar
situation when he came to Rome, and he lost early to Juan Carlos Ferrero. While
he cited blisters afterward, he didn’t seem too broken up about getting a few
days off before playing in Hamburg the next week and making the final push to
Paris.
This year Nadal didn’t have to work overly hard in
Barcelona. He won his semi and final in straight sets and didn’t have to play a
quarterfinal at all after David Nalbandian pulled out. So I would expect Nadal,
despite some trepidation, to go after the title in Rome the way he usually
does, and to be fresh enough physically to do it.
But even with a couple days off, his first round could be
tricky. Nadal will play the winner of Andreas Seppi, who has beaten him on
hard courts, and Sam Querrey, who has challenged him on clay. The other half of
his section is relatively stacked—Verdasco, Tsonga, Gasquet, Almagro, Gulbis,
and Andreev are all there, but Nadal will only have to face one of them, in the
quarters.
First-round matches to watch: Almagro-Gulbis, Tsonga-Gasquet. Semifinalist: Nadal
Second Quarter
After reaching his first clay-court semifinal in Monte
Carlo, Andy Murray continues his learn-the-dirt campaign of 2009. Think of it as a
tennis version of Hillary Clinton’s crafty “listening tour” of New York state
in 2000. Murray is taking the pressure off himself by saying that this spring he's essentially conducting research for the future.
He’ll have to be a quick study, because his first opponent
might be Argentine dirtballer Juan Monaco. The two played a three-setter on
hard courts on Miami last month before Murray prevailed. If they play again in
Rome, we’ll get an idea of how the Scot matches up against a guy who makes his
living on this stuff.
If he succeeds there, Murray might have to play either
Nikolay Davydenko or Fernando Gonzalez in the quarters. He beat Kolya, a more
natural clay-courter who seems revived after coming back from an injury, in a
tough two-setter in Monte Carlo. If they play again, it should be equally tight. Semifinalist: Davydenko
Third Quarter
Which Novak Djokovic will we see in Roma? He’s the
defending champion, and he’s coming off a Monte Carlo run that brought out his best
tennis of the year so far—more than at any time in 2009, he fought well when he had to and didn't let his emotions get the best of him.
But if we’ve learned anything about the Serb over the last
year, it’s that he’s more prone to unpredictability and mental inconsistency
than we once thought. Still, I like his draw. Of the guys in his immediate
vicinity, only Safin and Robredo seem at all capable of beating him, and those
two play each other in the first round. On the other side we might get a showdown
between Del Potro and Wawrinka, a match I’d give to Stan based on current form. Semifinalist: Djokovic
Fourth Quarter
Do you have a clue as to how Roger Federer might play in
Rome? If so, you’re a step ahead of me. No matter what he says, his personal life must
be a bit of a distraction at the moment, and so far it’s one that
hasn’t relaxed him on the court.
Federer’s draw won’t help take the edge off, either. Last
year he lost to Radek Stepanek in Rome, and he might find himself across from
the Agitator again this time—they’re slotted to play in the third round. That
is, if Federer gets past his potential opening match against Ivo Karlovic,
never a fun thing to do, no matter what the surface.
On the other side, Simon, Ferrer, Berdych, and the improving
Italian Fognini will fight it out to make the quarters. I got burned picking
Ferrer to reach the final in Monte Carlo, but I liked the way he dictated much
of the play in the second set against Nadal in Barcelona. Semifinalist: Ferrer
Semifinals: Nadal d. Davydenko; Djokovic d. Ferrer
This week freelance tennis writer Kamakshi Tandon and I will be discussing “A Terrible Splendor,” by Marshall Jon Fisher. The book, released this month, delves into one of the sport’s all-time classic matches, the 1937 Davis Cup showdown between Don Budge of the United States and Baron Gottfried von Cramm of Germany, played as the world readied for war.
Hi Steve,
It's always nice to be able talk about your favourite details, as opposed to the main details or the most important details -- a chance to pick out the flavour rather than chewing the meat.
For whatever reason, my favourite little moment is the meeting between Budge and von Cramm ten years later. The match is over, the war is over, and finally, here they are again:
In the summer of 1947 Budge had toured Germany for the first time, playing exhibition matches at American army bases against Bobby Riggs. As they took court in Bad Nauheim one day, he caught sight of a third blond man with an aristocratic posture half-waving to him from behind the fence. "I didn't recognize him at first," Budge said later, "but then suddenly realized it was Gottfried. He seemed embarrassed, concerned that I might not regard him as a friend any more."
He needn't have worried; Budge embraced his old friend, and before long they were playing a series of exhibition matches in Germany.
There's something terribly poignant yet heartwarming about this scene. Remember their first meeting, when von Cramm was the kindly authority figure delivering a lecture on sportsmanship and Budge was the shy, insecure one listening dutifully. And then think of what Von Cramm has been through since, a year in jail and the fear and losses of war: "The war was over. Two of his brothers were dead; most of the brave members of the Resistance he had known in Berlin during the war had been executed. Kai Lund, his old doubles partner, came home missing an arm and a leg, and Henner Henkel had disappeared into the black hole that was the battle of Stalingrad. Geoffrey Nares, of happier days in London, was dead too."
You can see why von Cramm emerges as the hero of Splendor, going from the man who had everything to the man who lost everything except his character and humanity. The 'Aftermatch' chapter, coming as it does after you've developed a link to the people in the book, may be the most stirring part of the book.
Other nuggets that could be added to your list include Tilden's teetotalling habits prompting French diners to order water by saying "I'll have a Tilden" (you might have heard me describe my habit of nursing a drink through the evening as "working a Trudeau"). Also that the First World War broke out during the Germany vs. Australia Davis Cup semifinal in 1914, with reporters quiet about keeping the "WAR DECLARED" telegrams till the match was over; the fact that both Tildon and von Cramm were missing parts of a finger in their playing hand, a discovery that must have created an instant sense of kinship; Daniel Prenn, kicked off the German team for being Jewish and then emigrating to England, taking the tube to watch the match from the stands.
And of course, the story about Don Budge umpiring an exhibition between Fred Perry and Ellsworth Vines and realizing from the chair that the secret of Perry's effectiveness was taking the ball on the rise. Budge taught himself to do the same, without sacrificing power, and -- well, the rest is history.
Perry is in fact the book's one slight miss. Fisher makes a couple of references to him as the dashing English gentleman and such, giving the impression that Perry was also a kind of upper-crust establishment figure. But Perry was seen by some as a brash upstart from the wrong side of the tracks, the son of a Labour party member of parliament and someone who prized victory a little too much. The story goes that after Perry won the tournament in 1934, one of the All England Club members unceremoniously hung his club tie (given to all the winners) over the chair while he was having a bath. (If I recall correctly, Perry also overheard the club member telling his opponent that it was too bad the better man hadn't won.) It might have been worth giving him a page or two as yet another of the establishment-challenging figures of this period.
And for balance -- since we've talked about all the interesting and colourful little details in the book -- here's one paragraph I thought was a bit strange:
During the 1937 Wimbledon the papers discussed the controversy over the very word television. "The word is half Greek and half Latin," intoned one editorial. "No good will come of it." Cramm may well have read this and thought of two other Greco-Latin hodgepodges -- automobile and homosexual -- and smiled [note: ironically]: there you have it, the three great scourges of the twentieth century.
This sounds rather far-fetched, unless von Cramm had an etymological bent we don't know about. Besides, I'd opt for "ideology," "ethnicity" and "nuclear" -- whatever their linguistic roots.
One of the things the book does extremely well is combine the big picture with the small details. Fisher may be lucky to be writing about extraordinary people in extraordinary times, but the effectiveness with which the material is organized is skill. There's a general sense of the political atmosphere in Europe one minute, then the next a listing of the day's headlines to bring it to life.
Combine this with the book's fragmented structure, and there's almost a kaleidoscopic effect at the end -- the feeling of a million different pieces in this vibrant episode finally coming together, and a sense of awe that it all actually happened.
This week freelance tennis writer Kamakshi Tandon and I will be discussing “A Terrible Splendor,” by Marshall Jon Fisher. The book, released this month, delves into one of the sport’s all-time classic matches, the 1937 Davis Cup showdown between Don Budge of the United States and Baron Gottfried von Cramm of Germany, played as the world readied for war.
Hi Kamakshi,
Sports is social history. History repeats itself. I’ll throw in a third unavoidable truism for good measure: History is written by the winners. You’re right that if Cramm finishes off Budge in the fifth, this book isn’t written. The historical losers would have won that day, which would rob the event of any significance for us now. One of the highlights of Splendor to me was learning more about the 1936 Berlin Olympics, held the year before this match. I didn’t realize that Germany won, I believe for the first and only time, more gold medals than the U.S. I guess it’s no coincidence that there’s never been a book published in the U.S. celebrating this fact. The only thing we remember is that Jesse Owens won gold while Hitler watched (as Fisher details here, we’ve also decided to forget that Owens praised Hitler when he got back to the States, an inconvenient reminder that as an African-American, the track star may have had his own ideas about the greatness of his country).
I’ll leave the question of historical determinism by mentioning that Cramm didn’t merely lose this one match to Budge. He was a terminal runner-up, losing the Wimbledon final three straight times, in part because he was as much an aristocrat as he was a competitor. A born royal who never needed to prove anything on a tennis court except to himself, he played for the beauty of playing and lived by its gentleman’s code. Cramm’s game as described by those who saw it sounds almost Federer-esque. His strokes were smooth, unhurried, fully extended. Against Budge, Cramm, a homosexual, was also conflicted about playing for his country. He felt like he was playing for his life in one sense, because the Nazis had been rounding up gay men and had him under suspicion. A win here might have made him untouchable. On the other hand, while Cramm would eventually serve on the front lines on the murderous Russian front in World War II—a death wish, perhaps?—he detested his government and wasn’t playing to represent them.
Budge, by contrast, was a working class American who was quietly driven to become No. 1 in the world—he would make the Grand Slam his explicit goal the following year. And unlike Cramm, he was an untroubled patriotic kid who felt fully backed by his country. Believe it or not, Budge and his teammates were given a ticker-tape parade up Broadway after bringing home the Cup. An historian might analyze this match and say that a country like Nazi Germany, which was so internally conflicted that its best tennis player was under constant threat of imprisonment, was doomed to defeat in a war against the U.S. It didn’t have the will of enough of its people behind it, including a high achiever like Cramm.
You mention the recurring use of Levels of the Game as a framework, and I did notice that both Fisher and Wertheim finish their acknowledgments by citing the book as inspiration (Wertheim a little defensively, as if to explain why his book wasn’t quite Levels of the Game in the end). The model has reached beyond tennis. This spring, a writer used the 1979 NCAA basketball championship game, which featured Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, as a lens into a wider history of college basketball. But you make a good point that Levels of the Game, rather than being a recounting of an era or even of two people, is really about what goes into a tennis match and how it demonstrates the personalities of two people.
To cite history again, it’s also matters when a book is written—the aim of each is a product of its age. Levels was written in 1968-69, a time when the meaning of everything was up for grabs. For example, as a rock music writer, I’ve always thought of that as a golden age when critics didn’t just review records but wrote about how music fit into the wider culture, about how and why it was made. Levels is written in that spirit. It looks at how the meaning of something is structured.
Fisher is looking at a time period instead, but the concept still works. Maybe it would be better if tennis writers just didn’t tell us they were using Levels as their inspiration; it raises the bar pretty high. (I don’t think John McPhee himself ever matched it; did you read his weird and rambling lacrosse piece in the NYer recently?) Fisher’s account is convoluted at times, but it’s worth reading for the story of Germany in the 1920s and 30s, particularly during the bizarre hyper-inflation of 1923, when money becamse worthless and so did all conventional values; for the stories of Cramm and tennis in Nazi Germany, which I didn’t know well; and for the wealth of details that show us again just how much the sport has changed, for better and worse, over the decades.
A few examples. Budge loudly and regularly shouts “Oh baby” in real admiration of Cramm’s winners—can you imagine anything like that today? A writer of the stature of James Thurber is there to cover the match. It was the first time anything other than the DC final had been played on Centre Court; all preliminary rounds in the past had had to make do with Court 1. Budge and the U.S. captain, Walter Pate, sip tea on the sidelines. Ed Sullivan and Bill Tilden almost come to blows in the stands. Budge swings a 16-ounce racquet. Budge loses the final of the U.S. Championships in five sets to Fred Perry because his diet for the previous month consisted primarily of chocolate milkshakes. Tilden, the greatest player of the first half of the century, won professional matches into his 50s, but would end his life begging people at an L.A. club to let him be a fourth in their rec doubles matches. And finally, a Baron plays Davis Cup.
Any favorite details of yours, Kamakshi?
Steve
This week freelance tennis writer Kamakshi Tandon and I will be discussing “A Terrible Splendor,” by Marshall Jon Fisher. The book, released this month, delves into one of the sport’s all-time classic matches, the 1937 Davis Cup showdown between Don Budge of the United States and Baron Gottfried von Cramm of Germany, played as the world readied for war
.
Hi Steve,
Are sports determined by world events? Yeah, nothing like a nice easy question to get started. Reminds me of the time my high school history teacher ended the final class of the semester by telling us about his own high school history exam, which consisted of one question: Do men shape history, or does history shape men?
Needless to say, we spent more time freaked out about how we could possibly have answered that question than studying for the stuff that was actually going to be on the exam.
Like the tireless GOAT debate, the fun is all in contemplating the complexity of the topic itself.
Basically, though, I don't really think that world history shapes tennis history. It's simply that their edges are so ragged we can put them side-by-side and see some kind of fit. There may be one great force behind it all, but so diffuse we can't really trace it with any coherence.
But world affairs do affect tennis — just like they do every other sphere of our lives, whether we realize it or not. Players, people, equipment, tournaments and even court surfaces are all a product of their times, affected by wider trends and prevailing characteristics.
More than anything, international events, tennis, and all manner of other things operate in the same types of patterns and cycles, so parallels are common. History repeats itself, after all.
Still, whether coincidence or destiny, it's true that the confluence of events in A Terrible Splendor is remarkable. World War II looms, and in Davis Cup it's U.S.A. vs. Germany, Don Budge vs. Gottfried von Cramm. A drained Britain leading to a standoff between the Americans and Germans for world supremacy. Initially, American hope that the battle could be avoided altogether. A passive beginning, going down two sets. Then a spur to action, with a fightback in the third and fourth sets turning the contest around. High drama in the fifth, with Germany coming very close to victory before going down to a sudden charge from the other side. (Note to history enthusiasts: Yes, this is dramatically simplified. But let's spend more time on the tennis than lend lease or Yalta.) But I think von Cramm could just as easily have held serve twice and ruined the whole analogy. Just in that case, it might not have been called the greatest match of all time and there might not be a book being written about it now.
A few quibbles aside, I did like the book — several chunks of it enormously. I knew the outlines because I'd read Budge's own entertaining account of the match, but there's enough in the topic that it's overflowing even out of Splendor's much lengthier treatment.
I'm glad the book is good because the excellent prose and evocative subject matter would probably have guaranteed it positive reviews in general publications anyway, even if the integrity of the material hadn't been there. The German side is mostly new to me, so I can't really judge it, but I see a lot of meticulous stitching elsewhere. I agree with you that the story would have worked without as much Bill Tilden, and maybe even been neater — but Tilden is so compelling that I can understand not being able to resist writing him at length, and he also pads out certain themes that Fisher seems to want to focus on.
The other short player portraits in the book were very enjoyable too — I never knew that Alice Marble and Frank Parker's lives were quite that dramatic. And all the famous non-tennis name-dropping — Alistair Cooke, James Thurber, Ed Sullivan, etc. — adds a bit of mainstream glamour but also helps show that the match was really a happening event.
I did have to laugh when I first saw the cover, which has the subhead, "Three extraordinary men, a world poised for war, and the greatest tennis match ever played."
It was just a few days earlier that I'd finished Jon Wertheim's Strokes of Genius— "Federer, Nadal, and the greatest match ever played."
Seems like you can't get anywhere these days unless you're writing about the greatest match ever played, so there are a lot of them about, just like there are a lot of "fifth Slam"s and "second-oldest tournament in North America"s. And "greatest player of the all time"s, of course.
The simultaneous release of Splendor and Strokes of Genius seems apt (or is it fate? :). Aside from being about the greatest match ever played, they also share a common structure, borrowed from Jon McPhee's Levels of the Game, which details the U.S. semifinal between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner. Using the match as the base of the narrative, it weaves the story of the players' lives in between detailed description of the play.
Throughout Splendor, I kept waiting for my favourite anecdote about the end of the Budge-von Cramm match. Since it was about the only thing that never arrived, here it is from Budge's memoirs:
I know I was still in a daze in the locker room. It was as if everyone was trying to outdo each other in congratulating me. Tilden came in, and it was right then that he came over and told me it was the greatest tennis match ever played. Others had about the same thing to say as Tilden did — everyone, that is, except Jack Benny. He came in with Lukas an Sullivan, and while they were raving on at length, Benny just shook my hand and mumbled something like "nice match," as if I had just won the second round of the mixed doubles at the club. I remember, Jack Benny was the only calm person in the whole locker room. The place was like a madhouse.
...After I won at First Hills, I went out to Los Angeles to play the Pacific Southwest Tournament. After my first-round match there, which was a rather normal, unexciting one, I looked up from my locker, and who should be coming at me but Jack Benny. He was positively beside himself, hardly pausing to say hello before he launched into a babbling, endless dissertation on how wonderful, how exciting, how fantastic the Cramm match had been. It was like one of those scenes from his show. I would keep trying to interrupt him, unsuccessfully. "But Jack" — I would try to start. And he would go right on.
"Magnificent, Don. It was just marvelous. Why when you— it was incredible. And then you -- why, I've told everybody about it." And on he went.
"But Jack," I kept on, so that at last he stopped long enough to take that pose he is famous for, the palm cupped on his cheek, staring at me curiously. "Jack, I don't understand," I began. "At Wimbledon, after the Cramm match, you were the only person I met who was relaxed and calm. Now you carry on like this. The match was two months ago. Then you were unmoved. Now you're jumping around all excited. What is it?"
"Don," he said. "The truth is, that the Cramm match was the first tennis I ever saw. Now since then I've seen others, but at the time I thought all matches were more or less like that."
Remebering this, it was delightful to read in Strokes of Genius that umpire Pascal Maria's wife was attending the Wimbledon final as her very first match. "You don't need to watch tennis again," he told her afterwards.
In some ways, I had the same reaction as Jack Benny when I first read Levels of Game, at a time when I hadn't read many tennis books. I kind of assumed they were all like that. Eventually, though, I realized exactly what it had accomplished.
The difference between Levels of the Game and its two successors is that in the former, the structure of the book is determined by its purpose: to show all the things that go on and into a match -- the levels of the game, in fact. In Splendor and Genius, this same structure is adopted more as a concept. There's no question that the execution in both cases is impressive. But has this has become the only way to write a book about a match, or can there still be others?
The other thing Splendor and Genius have in common with each other and in contrast with Levels of the Game is limited access to the protagonists. In Fisher's case, too much time has passed; in Wertheim's case, not enough for the still-active players to be available for long interviews.
The biggest impact of this is on the match description. That might seem counterintuitive, but to really explain a match in that kind of detail, you have to get inside the players' heads. Biography and anecdotes are a little easier to get second-hand.
Ashe does a deep knee bend to remind himself to stay low. Graebner hits a big serve wide, and a second serve that ticks the cord and skips away. Double fault. Carole pats the air. Calm down, Clark... The score is love-thirty. Ashe thinks,"You're in trouble, Clark. Deep trouble."
"I'll bet a hundred to one I pull out of it," Graebner tells himself. Crunch... Now the thought crosses Graebner's mind that Ashe has not missed a service return in his game. The thought unnerves him a little. He hits a big one four feet too deep, then bloops his second serve with terrible placement right into the center of the service court.
Jon mentions in his acknowledgments that McPhee was actually able to sit down with both Arthur Ashe and Graebner separately to go over a tape of the match, and there's no substitute for that.
It's ironic, too, because Levels of the Game is about a relatively mediocre match, really a bit of an ace fest. Splendor and Genius are about incredible matches, and yet they have to do more detective- and guesswork when describing the contest.
In Splendor, one of the times where the match play is strikingly alive is in the description of the doubles rubber a day earlier, where a sore-shouldered Budge asks Gene Mako to take all the overheads despite the fact that Mako's service swing was decimated by a severe injury a few years ago. The description was so natural and detailed, the quotes so beautifully fitted, I had to flip to the notes to see the source material. Turns out it was from a direct interview with Mako, one of the few player interviews Fisher was able to do.
Fisher wraps up by saying that "the book's structure came to almost simultaneously with the initial idea," and refers to Levels of the Game as the "germinating agent that lies deep within the mind of every tennis-loving writer."
What do you think, Steve? Are all such books just destined to chase Levels of the Game? Or are there other paths to forge?
This week freelance tennis writer Kamakshi Tandon and I will be discussing “A Terrible Splendor,” by Marshall Jon Fisher. The book, released this month, delves into one of the sport’s all-time classic matches, the 1937 Davis Cup showdown between Don Budge of the United States and Baron Gottfried von Cramm of Germany, played as the world readied for war.
Hi Kamakshi,
Let me start by saying that it’s nice to know that a tennis book can still get published even when it's primary topic is not a player's eating disorder. This is not to say that A Terrible Splendor doesn’t contain its share of disorders, many of which are far grimmer than anything we honor with the term today. But this is a book of history as well as tennis, as absorbing for its narrative of the Nazis' Night of the Long Knives as it is for its description of the five sets between Budge and the Baron.
I’d read much of the information in various places before, whether it was a Bud Collins encyclopedia, Frank DeFord’s Bill Tilden biography, TheRise and Fall of the Third Reich, or our buddy Digby Baltzell’s decline and fall of the WASP tennis establishment. Woven together, though, it all seemed new, other than the background on Tilden, which I thought was the book’s one flaw. Big Bill did figure into the Cramm-Budge story—he was friends with the German, had been a Davis Cup star for the U.S. for years,and attended the match—and he remains the most entertaining character in U.S. tennis history even 50-some years after his death, but I thought Fisher used him to pad out Splendor a little. Not that I didn’t enjoy reading all the stories about Tilden’s comically haughty dominance. It shows how powerful his persona really was. Even in a book about two other tennis players, he overshadows the proceedings.
I’ll begin this book club with a question, maybe unanswerable, but still interesting to me. Are you a believer in the idea that sports, and in particular tennis, very closely mirror world history, to the point where they are almost determined by it? They are to some degree, of course—it’s hardly surprising that the demise of the Soviet Union would lead to an influx of Russian talent into pro tennis. But sports sociology types like Baltzell and C.L.R. James tell us that there is virtually nothing coincidental that happens in professional or international sports—the rises and falls of certain players, certain styles, certain countries are determined irrevocably by social changes. Tennis has been even more closely linked to society at large because of its traditional connection to the ruling classes. (Is there a better term for “ruling class” out there since I went to college? One that’s quite so grad-school righteous?)
In this worldview, the fact that Tilden, the last cricket-club gentleman tennis champion, won his final Slam in 1930 is linked to the stock market crash of 1929 and the demise of his aristocratic class in the 1930s. The rise of Budge, Riggs, Gonzalez and other California public-park champions syncs up with the Great Depression. The lawless era of Connors and McEnroe begins with the end of all traditional standards of behavior in 1968. I’d add two of my own theories in this vein, for fun: Sampras, Courier, and Chang suddenly join Agassi at the top of the sport around 1990, just as the U.S. is becoming the world’s uncontested superpower. And in 2001, a couple months before 9/11, Federer beats Sampras at Wimbledon and the balance of power in the men’s game shifts away from the U.S. again. (No, I don't think of that match as the "9/11 of tennis.")
The connection in Terrible Splendor is, obviously, the battle between the American Budge and the German Cramm on a neutral tennis court in Britain, and the coming war, which would be fought largely by those same three countries. These are the world’s political powers, so it makes sense that they would have the resources and desire to develop the world’s best athletes, if not for pride than at least for propaganda. But part of what makes the story make sense is that the U.S. won on the court, just like it won on the battlefield. Did it have to work out that way? Was the Baron, the representative of the newly powerless European nobility, doomed by history to lose to Budge, the can-do California kid and pure product of democracy? The German was up 4-1 in the fifth, after all. History cut it pretty close.
Or is this all a bit much to bite off in a blog post? You can always just tell me what you liked about the book.
You, the tennis fan tuning in without a care in the world,
may think of this as the clay-court season. It may even be your favorite time
of year. But for those of us who are paid to analyze the sport, the ides of
April can bring with them a sensation of dread. This is the point each
year when Rafael Nadal begins to make life as difficult as possible for us. How many different ways are there to say “wow,” anyway? On
Sunday, Tennis Channel commentator Robbie Koenig was forced to plead to a
higher power to come up with a superlative when Nadal tracked down a seemingly
ungettable drop volley from Novak Djokovic. After the third replay of Nadal’s
crosscourt flick winner, Koenig finally gave up trying to figure out how it had
been done and cried, “only the good lord above knows.”
I know, you’ve heard it all before. You may even be getting
a little sick of the Nadal love, the “gritty fighter” and “humble young man”
stuff, the same way you may have
gotten a little sick of the Federer love, all the talk of “genius” and “class”
and “religious experience,” that preceded it. So I’ll give you a break and start
my Monte Carlo wrap-up by asking a question about the surface itself. Now that
I think about it, that may be another topic you’ve had enough of, but a tennis
writer has to start somewhere.
Can we now agree, after this weekend's play, that clay is the best
surface for the men’s game today? Seeing Nadal, Djokovic, and Murray hit every
shot imaginable and run down every ball possible, I’m willing to say yes. Clay,
which keeps topspin from skipping though the court while at the same time
enabling players to slide themselves into position for hard-to-reach balls,
allows the current generation to show off all of their skills like no other
type of court.
First, Nadal, Djokovic, and Murray, like most of their peers, hit heavy topspin forehands and back them up with penetrating two-hand
backhands. If you’ve ever played on slow clay, you know that, the surface’s
reputation aside, you need to generate enough pace and spin to hit a heavy ball that goes
through the court—Lleyton Hewitt, a consummate grinder and winner of many
hard-court titles, has never been a master of the surface because he can’t push
his opponents off the baseline. Second, Nadal, Djokovic, and Murray all have
touch; clay, even more than a slow hard court, gives them the time not only to
set up and hit that shot, but to slide and reach a very good drop from
their opponent. Third, these guys can all play defense, which we know is a
prerequisite on dirt—Pete Sampras was about offense at all costs, and
clay was his bete noire.
Now that the serve and volley is nothing more than a
change-up play, clay is the surface that demands the most complete game from players.
Instead of an all-world serve—none of these three guys ever hold just by
blasting aces—the foundation of the sport today is a mix of accuracy and power
from the baseline. While Murray won without doing much attacking on the hard
courts in Key Biscayne, he was forced to show everything he had to stay with
Nadal in Monte Carlo. His game became much more varied and entertaining when he
did. Ditto Djokovic. In Miami, Djokovic was generally content to put the ball
in the middle of the court; Mary Carillo even said he looked tentative. Compare
that to how he played the final in MC. The hooked forehands that
sent Nadal wide; the frozen-rope backhands that had the Spaniard at full stretch; the ability to change directions with the ball and hit corners from
anywhere: This is the old Djokovic, the real Djokovic, and hopefully the one
we’ll see again in the future. As for Nadal himself, I don't need to
mention how much clay suits his skills, the same ones that have made him the
best and arguably most complete player today. It hardly seems an accident that
he developed them on clay and extended them to other surfaces afterward.
In reviewing the Hamburg tournament last year, where
Djokovic and Federer each took Nadal to three sets before losing, I said that
while they had gotten closer than ever to beating him on clay, it had only
served to show how far away they still were. I’d say the same for Djokovic
after Monte Carlo, even though it was a very positive final weekend for him. It began in the second set of his semi, when Stan Wawrinka let him
back into the match with some pointless errors after he’d won the first set. What was
important was that Djokovic took the opportunity. He didn’t just ride the
momentum to the second set and then fall back into his usual frustrated ways
when that momentum ran out, as it was inevitably going to in the third.
Instead, Djokovic stood and fought—yes, just like Al Gore—even when points weren’t
coming easily for him. He played with the mix of patience and patterned
aggression that once was his trademark, and it won him the match.
Djokovic was even better against Nadal. He
weathered a first-set storm without getting visibly discouraged. He
served lights out in the second set. He took his shots high and early. He
moved Nadal off the court before coming forward. He wrong-footed him with his
volleys. Most important and most difficult, Djokovic executed the
riskiest of shots—like, say, the backwards-falling, inside-out forehand from the
behind the baseline that lands smack on the sideline in the opposite corner—to
perfection, which is the one true key to hanging with Nadal on clay. Then Djokovic made
two simple but fatal mistakes: At 0-1 in the third, on two separate game
points, he double faulted. That was enough. Nadal won the third 6-1. Why,
after all that, would Djokovic—or we—believe that he could ever beat the guy on
this stuff? Not that it matters to me much: I’m just happy to see them bringing
out the best in each other again.
I get a different feeling with Murray. While he lost in
straights to Nadal on Saturday, I think he believes he can beat him either in Paris or Rome. After playing poorly and testily
until 6-2, 5-3, Murray loosened up when all seemed lost. As he said after the
match, he used high looping defensive strokes well when he was pushed out of
position, and like Djokovic he walked the tightrope of risk well, which, against Nadal, means
he just barely reined his most aggressive instincts in. The last few games and
the tiebreaker were spectacular and emotional (the effort required in a quality
clay match also seems to drag out deeper emotions from players and fans—everyone leaves
a little drained). Nevertheless, as Murray said afterward, when all the emotions had been spent and the spectacular shots hit, it was Nadal who won the two most colossal and
crucial points of the tiebreaker. Still, I’d give Murray a decent shot at
cracking the code against him on clay. Unlike Djokovic, he still believes
anything is possible. Even the impossible.
As I said at the top, there aren’t many new praises left to
sing about Nadal. But let me point out two moments from this
weekend that struck me as instructive about him. Murray broke for 4-5 in
the second set, after Nadal had held at least one match point. Nadal then lost the
next game, which was to be expected. But what he didn’t do was lose game after
that, the one that would have put him down 5-6 and likely cost him the set. It would have been superhuman if Nadal had come right back and broken Murray at 5-4 for the match. He
didn’t do the superhuman. He just did what he needed to do to stem Murray’s
momentum and get back to level terms in a tiebreaker, where they’d be starting
from scratch. It sounds simple, but how many times have we seen players
collapse completely and lose the set 7-5 in that situation?
The second instance came in the final. Nadal went down 3-1
in the first set but immediately found his best form and ran off five straight
games. Then, as often happens, he lost that form at the beginning of the second
set. In the third, rather than try to get back on the attack right away, Nadal
stayed with a defensive game and slowly, step by step, shot by shot, began to
go for a little more. The damn burst at 0-1 when he ripped a winning backhand
pass down the line, the best-looking and most full-blooded shot he’d hit in
about an hour. While Nadal kept that shot well within the lines, it gave him the
confidence to go for more for the rest of the set.
What else is there for a tennis analyst to add about the
humble and gritty man from Mallorca? How about we talk about his eyebrows? Are they ever not lowered to just above eye level, in a look of
aggressive concern? I’ve seen a picture of Rafa at age 3 with his uncle Miguel Angel, dressed in a soccer uniform, and he has that same expression. How
do you keep that look going for an entire match? More important, how do you
keep that mindset—aggressive concern—going for two, three, five hours at a
time? When I imagine the mental energy and tunnel vision needed to do that,
only one word comes to mind. Wow.
I recently wrote an article for TENNIS Magazine describing
10 must-see tennis clips on You Tube, most of which have been featured here in
the past. I clearly had no idea that this video, from the “Match of the
Century” between Suzanne Lenglen and Helen Wills at Cannes in 1926, was
available on the site. I had no idea the legendary encounter had been filmed at
all.
If you’ve read any tennis history, you’ve read about this
match. If you’re like me, you've also wondered just a little about what all the fuss
could possibly have been about. How did the first, and it turned out, only
meeting between the great Frenchwoman and the young American, in the final of a
tiny tournament 40 minutes west of Monte Carlo and many miles from Wimbledon,
turn into an event that, as one writer put it, “stopped the entire world”?
I keep meaning to find out. A 500-page book
about the match and its participants, The Goddess and the American Girl, by
Larry Engelman, has been sitting in my bookcase in my office for about three
years now. It looks interesting, but something about the tone of it when I skim
a few pages throws me. From what I can tell, Engelman always refers to Wills by
her full name, Helen Wills. Is that kind of weird? I’ll get to it eventually. Arthur Ashe and Don Budge both liked it, which must mean something.
Googling around today, I found an absorbing article on the
match by Frank Lidz in the Sports Illustrated vaults. Its first three paragraphs shed a little light on how this match may have become so, as they
said back then, so ballyhooed
The
Riviera had a kind of Post impressionist air and light in February of 1926 when
Helen Wills came to Cannes to play tennis with Suzanne Lenglen. The French
franc was about 25 to the dollar and a bottle of the wine of Provence was 10
sous. Hemingway had just left for New York to peddle The Torrents of Spring.
Fitzgerald was holed up at a resort in the Pyrenees, where Zelda was taking"
the cure. An adaptation of The Great Gatsby was playing on Broadway (Hemingway
said he had paid to get in and would have paid to get out). Matisse was in
Nice: Picasso was married to Neo-Surrealism and a ballerina named Olga Koklova.
It was the last lovely time before the Western world turned sour and modern.
February
in New York City was cold and rainy, and the gin at the Texas Guinan Club was
made in bathtubs in Jersey City. Every American sportswriter who could spell
Paris (about half of them) figured it was a whole lot better to be in Cannes
than covering two-bit pugs duking it out in St. Nicholas Arena up on West 66th
Street. Things were just as dull in London, Madrid and Paris itself. The
cricket pitches were empty, the bullrings were shuttered, and nothing was
running at Longchamp. It was time for a "ballyhoo," one of those
spontaneous media circuses that erupted whenever reporters were bored and
thirsty and tired of looking at their editors.
Newspapers reveled in a
heyday of fad, fashion and overnight heroes, and the impending tennis match
between Wills and Lenglen had everything a jaded, bloodless American city
editor needed: a classic story of innocent America (in the guise of the sweet,
uncomplicated, 20-year-old Wills) versus decadent Europe (the amorous, vain,
hard-drinking, 26-year-old Lenglen).
So it was a hype job! I didn’t know they did things like
that in the olden days. Still, the two protagonists in this story are
doubtlessly compelling characters, and in the clip from the match above, they
look like they could rip the ball, too. Of course, the video may have been sped
up just a hair . . .
In honor of the tour’s spring swing through the Cote d’Azur,
I give you the match of the century.
—You can see from the start this was a media circus. The
information about the event posted at the right says that 3,000 people jammed
the seats and there was media there from all over the world. They’re also all over
the court.
—Love the Lenglen look: White coat and trademark bandeau.
Her popularity inspired the All England Club to build Center Court so it could
accommodate her fans. Wills’ visor is cool, too—no nonsense American-girl style, I suppose. But she has to wait for Lenglen to finish signing autographs before she can walk onto the court. I like how Lenglen skips over to the sidelines to catch up.
—From this high-speed evidence, Lenglen got good extension on her forehand, leaned into the ball, and never seemed to miss a first
serve. Does she hit her backhand in that backwards Frankie Durr style, with the
thumb separated from her other fingers?
—Each player split-steps, which surprises me. I always
picture Lenglen, “La Divine” to the French, leaping through the air before hitting the ball.
—How about the Wills topspin forehand?
—Neither player took much time, or any time, between points.
Both walked straight to the other side of the court on changeovers as
well. From what I’ve read, that’s the way it stayed until the early 70s, when
the 90-second changeover was instituted to provide time for TV commercials.
—Was that a sip of brandy that Lenglen went back to the
corner for? She and Wills were both the products of hard-driving tennis dads.
Lenglen’s encouraged her to brace herself with brandy when she played. That
still sounds better than the bizarre exercises that Marion Bartoli’s dad, the
updated version of the ambitious French tennis father, has her do. The more
things change…
—Again, the information on this clip describes the odd
double ending to the match that we see here. It ended once, the stands emptied,
but a line judge made his way through the crowd to inform the players that an
“out” call on a Wills’ shot had come from the crowd. They replayed the
point, Wills tied the set at 6-6, but Lenglen won the next two games to
finish her 6-3, 8-6.
—From 1919 to 1926, Lenglen lost one match; from 1927 to
1933, Wills, known as “Little Miss Poker Face,” was undefeated. As the
broadcaster at the end of this clip says, “She ruled with an iron grip.”
Imagine my surprise when I wandered through the Tate Modern last year during Wimbledon and came across a large portrait of her by Diego Rivera. She was
California royalty and the perhaps the most dominant player in tennis history. Lenglen
was French royalty and the sport’s first international celebrity. I guess it
really was a match worth dropping what you were doing to see.
No, I’m still here, still at my desk, still leaning back in an ergonomically dangerous posture, still staring at my computer and clicking the mouse—how, exactly, did this become the primary activity of humanity?—and still marveling at Marat Safin’s backhand. I’ll miss that the most when the big guy calls it quits. Wait, now he’s serving—I guess I’ll miss that shot, too, even though he’s just used it to double fault while trying to close out the first set against Nicolas Lapentti.
Such pure and uncluttered technique was Safin's blessing and his curse. How could anyone live up to all that potential? Wait—he’s just started screaming in a rage so profound and inner-directed it almost sounds suicidal. Some of you might miss that; I’d say half of the standing-room crowds that the Russian draws everywhere he plays are hoping to see him lose it. I’ll try to remember Marat instead as an example of just how good tennis can look and sound—there’s never been a better practice player—rather than the symbol of futility that he has become. And I’ll try to forget the way he lost the first set to Lapentti today. Safin ignored the first rule of returning a drop shot: keep the ball in front of you. At 6-6 in the tiebreaker, he scrambled forward for a short ball and, rather than pushing it down the line in front of him, he flicked it crosscourt, right to to Lapentti, and left the rest of the court wide open. I’ll also try to forget that he broke another fundamental rule—never lob over a net man when you’re inside the baseline—when he was up 5-2 in the third and at deuce. Safin's ill-conceived slice lob drifted wide, he lost the game, and . . .
Wait, as I'm writing this, Safin has just been broken for 6-5 in the third set. On break point, he missed a first serve, then stepped back and pounded the ball he had been carrying in his pocket out of the arena. Of course, when he asked the ball boy for another one so he could hit his second serve, the kid didn’t have one, which delayed his second ball even more—talk about Marat being Marat. After he lost that game, Safin, naturally enough, took his racquet and hurled it against the base of his chair on the sidelines, where it snapped clean in half at the handle. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a stick break quite that way. Then, as if all this wasn’t enough, he went down 40-0 in the next game, triple match point, before coming all the way back to break and send the match to a decisive tiebreaker. There, naturally, Safin saved two match points, one with an ace, before double-faulting at 6-6. Finally, with darkness encroaching, he lost 8-6. I guess I will miss the Safin persona, as well as the game. Who else could give us all that in the course of three hours?
As appropriate as it may be, “outta here,” is not a reference to Safin, either. As you baseball fans may have guessed, it alludes to the passing this week of the Voice, Harry Kalas, the play-by-play announcer for the Philadelphia Phillies since 1971 and the soundtrack of summer in Pennsylvania. “That ball is outta here,” was his catchphrase to describe a home run. It became the words he used as he left a bar—“I am outta here!”—and even when he toasted friends at their weddings—“You’re bachelorhood is outta here!” All of Philly is mourning its most beloved citizen. I’ll pay tribute to Kalas later here, but first, some tennis.
1. This week has been my first experience with the Tennis Channel in HD, on a flat-screen TV. You get more—there’s more sunlight on the clay and in the air, more color in the stands, and more court on the screen. So much more court that you can see where the clay ends on the sidelines. My square box TV doesn't extend that far wide, which gives you the illusion that there's no end to the clay, that the court is eternally there and may have even been put down in Monte Carlo by the tennis gods a century ago. On the flat-screen, the surface looks like a red carpet that’s been rolled out on top of a stage for the week.
2. You don’t just get more of everything with HD, you get more with clay—more of the players, that is. Did you know that Safin owned that little sidespinning drop shot he used so effectively this week, or that Berdych, if the rally lasts long enough, can begin to look like a robot when he hits the ball? Did you recall what a pleasure it can be, whether he’s winning them or not, to watch David Nalbandian construct a point and move around a court?
On hard surfaces, Andy Murray’s recent risk-averse style had begun to look dull and overly safe. On clay, where a wider variety of shots is required, it looks brilliantly subtle: a slice down the line, then a routine crosscourt forehand, then a forehand with a little more air under it down the line to push the pother guy back, then, just when you don’t expect it, a ground stroke that wrong-foots his opponent without flirting too dangerously with the sideline. Murray is going to get better on clay, and it will be a pleasure to see him bring his particular skills to the surface. It should bring out the best in him.
3. Four times I’ve set out to watch Gilles Simon closely and write about his game. Four times he’s lost before I had the chance. That can’t be a good sign for his continued Top 10 status.
4. A two-set match, even if it’s close and the quality of play is high, has no dramatic arc. Four or five sets can seem unnecessary. A best-of-three set match that goes the distance is ideal. I know that because I sat down last night and saw that Berdych, hardly my favorite guy to watch, and the tremendously named journeyman Fabio Fognini were playing. Normally I’d head elsewhere or hit the fast-forward button, but they were starting a third set, so kept it right there. I’m glad I did. Fognini, despite the trademark nonchalant Italian strut between points, is a pretty fun guy to watch on clay. I like the abbreviated forehand, and like all Italians, he has a great feel with the racquet—they all seem to just graze the ball back over the net.
5. Speaking of Italians, let me take a break from tennis to mention a movie I saw this weekend, Gomorrah. It’s set in the slums of Naples—no touristy historic buildings enter the camera’s view; it could just as well take place in L.A. or Southeast Asia—where the Mafia has spread its tentacles into every corner of existence. The movie rotates between five characters who are all caught up with the mob in one way or another and can’t escape. There’s a ruthless fatalism to each of their stories, but it’s saved from its own grimness by the beauty of the shots. The camera lingers over the faces of the main characters the way an Old Master lingered over a portrait subject. As in any good movie or TV show, everything you need to know is in the face.
6. During Key Biscayne I talked about the pleasure of watching a match online, with the sound on and the full array of cameras working, but with an an empty announcer’s booth. I watched Safin vs. Lleyton Hewitt in this way in Monte Carlo and noticed something I hadn’t noticed in Miami. The tendency of the announcer is to focus on each player individually; left to its own devices, my mind saw the match for what it really is, a relationship, friendly but adversarial, between two people for a couple of hours. It was the match itself I followed, rather than what one player or the other was doing right or wrong. My only complaint was that I was forced to look at Hewitt’s multi-green Yonex outfit, certain to be one of the fashion faux pas of the season. What I wasn’t complaining about was the Monte Carlo cameramen’s uncanny ability to find every single good-looking woman in the audience during in the span of a changeover. (Only the camera guys in Rome are more dedicated to that particular craft.) There’s nothing the commentators need to add to that.
7. Was I right in Indian Wells when I wondered if Nadal had tweaked his forehand? In his first-round Tuesday, it looked to me like he had abbreviated it further. He was starting it out at his side, with the racquet face parallel to the court.
8. As for Roger Federer, neither marriage, impending fatherhood, or the onset of another clay campaig affected him in his own first-rounder. He looked the same as always as far as I could tell, and hit some nice defensive backhands while I was watching. It’s a shot he’ll need. Thursday we’ll see a rare matchup between Federer and his fellow Olympic gold medalist Stan Wawrinka. Federer is 2-0 against his voodoo buddy, but they haven’t face each other since 2006. I’ll take Federer.
9. My clay season didn’t officially begin in Monte Carlo. This weekend I got a chance to see Jelena Jankovic win her first tournament of the season, on dirt in Marbella. This is a good thing; I want her playing well. But I would only give JJ’s performance a qualified thumb’s up. She won with defense, even more so than she has in the past, and she relied on the inconsistency of her opponent, the occasionally brilliant—when she gets it right, she really gets it right, and vice-versa—Carla Suarez Navarro. Jankovic’s gets were supurb, but she has work to do in putting together offensive points. She has some time.
10. As I mentioned at the top, Phillies’ broadcaster Harry Kalas died Monday at 73, after 38 years with the team. He was found passed out in the commentator’s booth before a game in Washington, D.C. If you don’t know him from the Phils, you may know him as the God-like voice of the gridiron through his work for NFL Films.
Kalas was famous for owning the Voice, an effortlessly booming set of pipes weathered by booze and cigarettes and shot through with character. His signature calls were, “Long drive, way back, that ball is outta here. Home run, Michael Jack Schmidt”—think of how Pat Summerall would say “James Scott Connors” after Jimbo hit a big shot at the Open—and “Swing and a miss, he struck him out.” In the clip below, the Voice says those very words as the Phillies win the 2008 World Series. The guy to his right making a silent buffoon of himself is his longtime booth partner, Chris Wheeler. I can’t say anything, though, that’s pretty much what I was doing at that moment.
While he always had the Voice, what was best about Harry was the way he chose to use it. In past summers in PA, if you flipped around the dial, you'd know you were watching the Phils without having to look at the screen. You’d know you found the right channel because of the silence; there would be whole minutes of it even as the game was going on. Kalas and his late booth mate Richie Ashburn were notable for what they didn’t need to say during a broadcast. They were baseball’s version of the BBC's old Wimbledon announcer, Dan Maskell—they let the game speak for itself.
Now the team has lost its most distinctive element, one that we had thought would always be there. It doesn’t help that, like a lot of young announcers, the new Phils guys are a mix of the nondescript and the awful. What happened to the Voices of old? Are the young guys too squeaky clean these days to have any character in their pipes? When the Phils came to San Francisco, one of the city’s famous Irish pubs kept a seat open for Kalas every night in case he walked in. I guess he usually did.
Like all baseball announcers, who are hired by the teams, Kalas actively rooted for the Phillies and wore their World Series rings on his fingers. But my best memory of listening to him came when he rooted for an opposing player. It was 1978 and Pete Rose was threatening Joe DiMaggio’s “unbreakable” record of 56 straight games with at least one hit—it was fun to watch the uptight Clipper squirm in the stands as the scuzzy Charlie Hustle dared to challenge his sacred achievement. Rose had hit in about 40 straight games when his team, the Reds, came to Philly.
In one of those games, it appeared that his streak was going to end. Rose didn’t have a hit going into the 9th inning, and he wasn’t due up. I went to bed and turned on the clock radio in the dark to listen to the end. Like everyone else not named Joltin’ Joe, I wanted Rose to keep going, even if it was at the expense of the Phillies. The Reds kept their 9th inning alive just long enough to give Pete one more chance. Kalas, excitement ringing through his words, made the incredulous call as Rose—with his mix of comical passion, deceptive intelligence, and well-timed chutzpah, he was baseball’s Rafael Nadal—laid a bunt down the third-base line. As Kalas boomed out his description of the play—the Phillies’ Mike Schmidt grabbed the ball and fired it to first as Rose barreled down the line—my head shot off the pillow and I put my face as close as I could get it to the radio. Rose was safe; the streak lived. You could hear the admiration somewhere deep in Kalas’ voice. I was about an inch from the radio, eyes bugged out.
When something good happens at the ballpark, you stand up to show your appreciation. When something exciting happens in a game and you see it on TV, you might lean forward so you can focus in on it more closely. These are at least reasonably logical reactions. But what could I have gained from being closer to the radio? What drove me to react like that? What else? It was the Voice.
Spring is the season of rites. There’s the Masters. There’s
Opening Day. There’s the Kentucky Derby. There are leaves out and windows down. There's the family dog getting into the kids' Easter baskets and making himself sick on chocolate (maybe that was just a rite of spring at my house). All of these are events that we anticipate happily, the same way we look
forward to spring itself—it’s no accident that you’ve never heard of a “rite of
winter.”
Tennis has its own symbolic seasonal curtain-raiser. Where the
others are mostly colored green, our sport’s comes in reddish orange and pale blue.
That’s the combination you see from the top of the Monte Carlo Country Club.
Closest to you is the gritty, textured red of a clay court, one of the game’s
most historic, and beyond that is the wave-dotted blue of the Mediterranean. We've seen this sight many times, but I for one never get tired of it. I’ll take the
sparkling contrast of that expansive vista over the stuffy, over-groomed
dogwoods and azaleas at Augusta National any day.
In 2009, Monte Carlo, to the distress of a few European
players, has been moved a half-notch down the ATP totem pole. It’s no longer a
mandatory Masters event, but it still offers 1000 ranking points to the winner.
That makes it just as valuable to the top players, as a title in its own right
and a tune-up for the French Open, as it has always been. This fact has been
borne out by the draw, which includes all of the tour’s current name brands:
Nadal, Federer, Murray, and Djokovic.
Tennis’ rite of spring began a day early in 2009. In an
experiment that seems not to have caught on in most places, Monte Carlo staged
a few first-round matches on Sunday. But the name brands are still being held
in reserve—one of them even spent the early part of his weekend getting
married. Let’s see which of their spring starts looks the most promising.
First Quarter
There’s another tennis ritual at this time of year, of
course: The dominance of Rafael Nadal. Over the last four years, he’s lost a
total of two matches in the lead-up to the French Open, while winning eight
Masters events. Every spring we wonder if he can run the table again, and every
year he comes out like a new man on clay, his recent losses forgotten, and does
it again. Even those two losses, to Federer in Hamburg 2007 and Ferrero in Rome
2008, seemed fortuitous for his French Open aspirations.
There’s another element to Nadal’s dominance. He tends to
use this time of year to avenge earlier hard-court losses and stop players from
gaining any momentum against him. This year his quarter may afford him a chance
to do this again. The top two seeds after Nadal are Juan-Martin del Potro and
Gael Monfils, both of whom have beaten him in 2009. Those two are slotted to
the play in the fourth round for the right to face Nadal in the quarters.
Other worthy names, but likely losers to Nadal: Hewitt,
Monte Carlo resident Marat Safin, and Stepanek
Semifinalist: Nadal
Second Quarter
Andy Murray brings his 26-2 season record into Nadal’s half
of the draw. With him are . . . well, not a whole lot. Davydenko, Nalbandian, and
Cilic are the other three seeds here, and the only guy I can find who even remotely qualifies as a dangerous floater is Monte Carlo resident Tomas Berdych (he
and Murray are 1-1, though they haven’t played since 2006).
Murray’s results on clay have been the biggest
disappointment of his career so far—he trained on the stuff as a kid and has
developed the patience and stamina for it in the last year. His draw in Monte
Carlo gives him an excellent chance to get his clay legs underneath him and
make some long-awaited strides on the surface.
Semifinalist: Murray
Third Quarter
This section is the province of the ever-more-unpredictable
Monte Carlo resident and No. 3 seed Novak Djokovic. He reached the semis last
year, and while these days it’s hard to tell from week to week what kind of
patience level he’ll bring to the court, he should benefit from the lack of
intense heat and humidity, which staggered him in Indian Wells and Key
Biscayne. Djokovic’s strongest competition will likely come from one of a
mini-Spanish Armada: Verdasco, Ferrer, and Almagro are all in this quarter, and
all could outlast or outhit Djokovic on a good day. While Verdasco is more comfortable on
hard courts, Almagro had a solid start to the year on dirt, winning in
Acapulco, and Ferrer beat the Serb on the stuff in Davis Cup last month.
Semifinalist: Ferrer
Fourth Quarter
The name-brand player who got hitched over the weekend was,
of course, Roger Federer. It’s been a topsy-turvy year for Federer, both
professionally and personally, but in taking an 11th-hour wild card into Monte
Carlo he seems to have decided that the best place for him at the moment is on the tennis
court. It's hard to argue: Judging by his total lack of consistency in the U.S. last month, the
more balls he hits, the better.
His quarter is not a frightening one. He could be pitted in
a third-rounder against his countryman Stan Wawrinka, provided Stan can get
past Igor Andreev and his vicious clay-oriented forehand. After that, Federer’s most
likely quarterfinal foes will be Simon or Robredo. It’s hard to say how the
world No. 2’s form will be on clay right now. He’s had his ups and downs and
his share of happy distractions so far in 2009. While his backhand remains a major question mark—Simon, who beat him in Toronto last summer, could make him hit a lot of them—Federer survived many a grinder over the last three clay springs. He has been the runner-up in Monte Carlo three straight
times and hasn’t lost to anyone not named Nadal here since 2005.
