Doping, match-fixing, appearance fees heading through the roof: When you think about it, tennis isn’t all that bad today. You should have seen it in the 1980s, when there seemed to be no cure for any even more dangerous disease: the exhibition. At a certain point, Ivan Lendl, world No. 1, attempted to play virtually nothing but exos. It almost seemed that tennis as competition, rather than as paid vacation for the stars, might become a thing of the past.
Despite the history of all-whites and the crisp lawns, if you’re looking for purity in tennis, you’ll have to go back further, much further, maybe even back to the first time it was played at an English garden party—though, who knows, there was probably a bet on that match, too. That being said, though, while appearance fees existed in the amateur 1950s and 60s, it was also a time when a few players were still able to consider it a game.
The lawns of amateur tennis were a false utopia, a bastion of hypocrisy, but they must have had an allure. Bud Collins begins his book, My Life with the Pros, taking aim at what he calls the “Badgers,” the fusty amateur officials and tournament directors who let you know how important they were with their badges. Nevertheless, it only takes him a few pages to begin waxing lyrically about the glory days of the USLTA National Doubles when it was held on the immaculate grass at Longwood Cricket Club.
Walking onto the broad veranda, I was unprepared for the spectacular changes in this usually placid retreat. The wide open plain before me had become a theater of the athletic. The courts were fenced off into neat, precise battlegrounds, watered, rolled, and made up with fresh lime. They smelled fresh, alive, sensuous. The stadium flaunted awnings, bunting, national flags, varicolored umbrellas shading courtside boxes, and people.
Such people. The girls and ladies of Longwood still lead any spectating—and ogling—league I’ve ever encountered . . .
Ditto for Collins’ British counterpart, Richard Evans. A lifelong supporter of the pro cause—he worked for the ATP in its early days—he nonetheless gravitates to the amateur 60s when describing favorite moments and players:
The late Rafael Osuna quick-stepping his way through matches of dazzling brilliance against Rod Laver and Manuel Santana. One of the fastest and most cunning players of his era was Osuna, a delightful man whose only reaction to a shot good or bad was to tug on the gold cross that hung fron his neck, turn on his heel and march rapidly back to the baseline. You got breathless just watching him.
In comparison, Ramanathan Krishnan was a heavy-footed plodder, until the wand he called a racket conjured up strokes of magic.
So maybe the tennis wasn’t so bad among the amateurs. Maybe it had an appeal that went beyond wins and losses. Maybe, because there was no prize money on the line, raw power was emphasized less. It had been pros such as Kramer and Gonzales who had brought the more practical Big Game to tennis (though judging from this video, Osuna served and volleyed as well). Maybe, when the commercial is taken out of the equation, artistry fills the gap. It's nice to think so, anyway.
Here’s Gordon Forbes, the poet of the Lawns, describing a match between another Latin touch artist, Santana, and Torben Ulrich
What more unconventional, almost occult, tennis match could one want? For several games they try things—their strokes, the flight of the ball, the quality of the court, the air movement, various slices and spins, like musicians tuning their instruments. Torben ponders immensely between points, strokes prodigious poses, thinks, listens, reflects. Manuel selects his strokes like a surgeon selecting his instruments—but it is Torben who leads 8-7 and forty-love. He loses the game and seven more set points before losing the set at 17-15. These situations bring to light a splendid bit of whimsical Ulrich logic. “You know, Gordon,” he says to me in the change-room, swathed to the eyes in towels: “Manuel is so good under pressure it is a disadvantage to lead 40-0. You have a better chance leading 30-0 or 30-15. But 40-0 is very dangerous.”
It’s hard to imagine another sporting universe where a man like Torben Ulrich could thrive. This is the Danish lover of modern jazz, freest of the globe-trotting free spirits and tennis bums of the time. He was a journeyman player but champion oddball, who “saw everything upside down,” according to friends. Ulrich’s practices might consist of him booking a court for dusk and sitting alone on it for an hour so he could feel is as the sun went down. Or he would try to get a better sense of the ball by moving it around the court with his nose. He also liked to practice his errors. Even on tour Ulrich played clarinet in jazz clubs at night and wrote music reviews for newspapers in the morning. He may have been the only player to get better as he got older, when he began to focus on the game more—his best years were on the senior tour.
Ulrich is also the subject of one of my favorite stories (Forbes's, of course) from a tennis court, one that would be, at best, unlikely today.
I see it as if it were yesterday, Torben walking on the court at Wimbledon to play a very young and very eager Tony Roche; Tony getting ready to spin his racquet, saying, “Would you like to call, Mr. Ulrich”?
And Torben saying, “You know, Tony, they say you have a beautiful service. I would like very much to see it, so why don’t you serve first?”
Its no coincidence that Forbes closes his amateur-era memoir, A Handful of Summers, with bit of vintage Ulrich wisdom:
“After all, Gordon,” he says suddenly after one of his silences, “What really is tennis?”
When I don’t reply, he says, “Only a game, you see. That is all it really is. Only a game.”
Chalk one up for amateur tennis. You—or, if not you, some crazy jazz-loving Dane—could say those words and truly mean them.
***
Have a good weekend