by John Clarke
Until recently Picasso autographed his racquets after a match and threw them into the crowd. Those lucky enough to catch one were making up to $500 each from fans anxious to purchase a memento of their hero. WTO officials lowered the boom when it became clear that the same people were catching the racquets at each tournament and upon closer inspection proved to be employed as racquet-catchers by Picasso’s company, Racquets Inc. The Spaniard loves the Centre Court atmosphere and was still out there signing autographs when the players were hitting up for the next match.
The English Davis Cup selectors took a keen interest in Ted Forster’s tussle with accomplished Italian Luigi Pirandello but, the minute Forster noticed them conferring, the pressure seemed to get to him. ‘I heard what the women were saying yesterday,’ he confessed. ‘I don’t want to be in some national squad either. This is not a team sport. It’s an individual thing.’
The fact remains that very few other English players could take a game by the scruff of the neck the way Forster did this afternoon for the first set and a half. Pirandello fought back in the second, which he won 6–4 before asking if the line judges wanted to play, since, he said, there seemed no reason why they shouldn’t.
‘Quiet please, Mr Pirandello,’ said the umpire. ‘The crowd has come here to see you.’
‘The crowd has come here to see whatever occurs,’ said Pirandello.
‘They have come to see you two play,’ said the umpire.
‘Do we need a ball?’ asked Pirandello.
‘Of course you need a ball,’ said the umpire. ‘Tennis is a ball game.’
‘Ah! But could they not imagine a ball?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Forster, ‘everybody might imagine a different ball. That, surely, is the reason we are using a real ball.’
‘You’re a big help, Ted,’ said Pirandello. ‘I don’t go around poking holes in your half-baked ideas. I’ll thank you to stay out of it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Forster. ‘I think you’ll find the rules are clear on this point.’
‘You’re about as radical as a chocolate frog. The first time the rules look threatened, you’re in there defending them.’
‘Rubbish,’ replied Forster.
‘Why don’t you just tell the officials you’re gay?’ asked Pirandello.
‘I do. In private.’
What a pity that young Arthur Miller and perennial favourite Henri Matisse had to come up against one another. The American took the first set easily, setting his points up well, manoeuvring Matisse out of position and making it look elementary. As somebody said, it was the best mix of brains and power we’ve seen so far. Matisse lifted in the second, however, scrambling for everything to stay in the match. Miller won the third in a tiebreak but Matisse came back again and the fourth set was the pick of the litter. Miller threw everything at it and Matisse, who came to the net only three times all day, slowly took control from the baseline, hitting a purple patch at 0–4 down and getting it to 6–6. When he won the set in a tie-break the crowd erupted.
In the final set there was only one service break, Matisse hitting four consecutive winners from Miller’s rocketry to go to 4–2 and that was the match. It is a good thing that Miller is playing doubles. He is a very impressive young man.
Ludwig Wittgenstein taught himself to play while in the army and has come from nowhere to take his country’s number 1 Davis Cup singles berth from Kurt Gödel. A handful for many on the tour because of his unusual behaviour, Wittgenstein apologises when he wins a match and questions line calls when he feels he has been given an unfair advantage. Some players have accused him of doing this to disrupt the rhythm of the match.
‘This is quite true,’ says Wittgenstein. ‘I do it in order to break my concentration. I’m sorry if others are affected. Perhaps I will retire. You’re not writing this down, are you?’
William Carlos Williams did little wrong against him in the first set, produced pure poetry in the second and looked invincible at 5–0 in the third. What Wittgenstein had been doing up until this point was not clear but he broke Williams to love and took the next six games and the final three sets with an astonishing array of shots against which it was impossible to mount any kind of defence.
Wittgenstein said he was ‘not pleased’ with the way he played today and lodged a formal protest over the result. ‘Williams won more games than I did. It seems grossly unfair that he should lose.’
Day 6
* * *
Miller v. Lardner • Berryman v. Hecht • Grosz v. Prokofiev • Strindberg v. Hardy • Stein v. Hari • Stephen-Woolf v. Schiaparelli • Canetti v. Beckett
* * *
Two hours before Glenn Miller’s match started this morning, a huge crowd, many wearing wartime regalia, waited patiently at Court 6. ‘We used to hear him on the radio but, no, we’ve never seen him play live,’ enthused a man in an old army cap. ‘I’m from Idaho,’ said a woman with a number on her back.
When Miller came out with his opponent Ring Lardner the place went mad. Hats were tossed in the air, whistles were blown and several couples had to be restrained from dancing on the court. It must be said the crowd’s interest in the tennis was less than forensic. It didn’t matter what their man did, they cheered. He won the first set and they went wild. In the second he lost his way and they went just as wild. Lardner, playing beautifully now, took the next two and the match, and the crowd went wild again.
The thing about Miller is that he can be moving in completely the wrong direction and his people don’t care, their heads are bobbing with the rhythm. He can play the same shot six or seven times in a row; they don’t care. He can, as he did at one point, just stand there shuffling his feet for a while, and they all stand up and shuffle their feet. No crowd ever left a court happier and their man had just been defeated.
Lardner is a class act and might ruffle a few feathers here. Miller had no excuses. ‘I was going along all right. I just went missing. I don’t know what went wrong.’
John Berryman turned up this morning wearing someone else’s clothing and clutching a racquet lent to him by the child of a concierge. His opponent Ben Hecht walked him around a bit and gave him plenty of water before the match started, and then Berryman reeled off ten straight games. He was sharp, he moved well, he had it on a string. Hecht had to resign himself to wait. The steam went out of the Berryman serve at about 2-all in the third and he began to lose interest. The longer the match went, the more interest he lost. By the end, he had lost all interest.
There was also tragedy on Court 6 this morning for German-American George Grosz, who was stretchered off following a very nasty fall. He was leaping for an overhead when he seemed to lose balance and plunged to the ground. He had been playing well and was on terms in his match with Russian Sergei Prokofiev.
‘It is always the way,’ said Prokofiev. ‘I got through to the fourth round in the Russian championship one year and by the time I got home my cat was dead, my bicycle had been stolen and I was being denounced as a decadent formalist.’
In a shock result on an outside court, August Strindberg, another of the brilliant Swedes, was filleted by the wily Englishman Thomas Hardy. Play was delayed when a waitress was fired for dropping a tray of drinks in one of the hospitality areas. Hardy approached the umpire and asked if there wasn’t something they could do to help the young woman.
As the incident had occurred outside the court and between points, the umpire explained, it was outside his jurisdiction.
Hardy submitted that, since play had been delayed to accommodate the incident, and since the incident was witnessed by the entire crowd, it was, in terms of time and structure, part of the match; therefore the rules of the game should apply. The young woman should be recalled and the drinks served again.
The umpire summoned Strindberg and explained that the match referee could be consulted if it were the wish of both players.
‘What’s the point?’ said Strindberg.
‘The man is as
king whether we should get the match referee,’ said Hardy. ‘The obvious answer is “yes”.’
‘There is no answer,’ said Strindberg. ‘Life is hideous.’
‘Play,’ said the umpire.
But Hardy’s mind was elsewhere. He served eight consecutive double-faults and made little effort to return Strindberg’s service. Strindberg took the set 6–1 and Hardy sat for a long time with a towel over his head before coming out again. He played like a different man. Mid-way through the third set the despondent Swede was banging his racquet on the ground and conversing with the sky on a range of issues.
Two seeded women went through today. Gertrude Stein was in trouble early against exotic Dutchwoman Mata Hari who spun a web over the first set and it took every bit of the American’s strength to get out from under it. ‘A win is a win is a win,’ said Stein. ‘I played well enough just well enough yes well enough and well enough.’
Virginia Stephen-Woolf had an easier time with the stylish Italian Elsa Schiaparelli and spoke after the match of having seen Sarah Bernhardt practising. ‘She is magnificent and what a booming serve. It’s so very hard to get good service these days.’
But was she happy with the way she played?
‘Not bad. But it would be nice to get a boom of one’s own.’
There were plenty of empty seats out on Court 1 tonight for the match between Elias Canetti and Sam Beckett. A solitary bare tree stood against the sky and the contest began bleakly for Beckett, the Bulgarian passing him on both sides at will.
‘If he works out what you’re thinking,’ Beckett said later, ‘he can take you apart.’ But Beckett was nothing if not patient. He waited. In fact waiting probably won him the match because by the time he’d finished waiting he was hitting the ball beautifully.
‘I was lucky,’ said Beckett.
‘I couldn’t work out what he was thinking,’ said Canetti.
‘I wasn’t thinking anything,’ said Beckett.
‘Nothing?’ asked Canetti.
‘No. Not nothing,’ said Beckett. ‘I wasn’t thinking anything at all.’
Day 7
* * *
Mead v. Duncan • Disney v. Strachey • Cavafy v. van Gogh • Chandler v. Rodo
* * *
Margaret Mead was exposed this afternoon by a terrifically energetic performance from Isadora Duncan. In a folkloric display, Duncan drew on European traditions and Mead capitalised on the Samoan style but threw in ‘a few of my own ideas as well’.
Duncan was delighted with her win although if she keeps playing in long flowing robes she runs the risk of serious injury. ‘It feels fantastic,’ she said. ‘I feel like a river running.’ She may feel like a river but she has only to step on her own hem while accelerating across court and the flow will slow to a trickle. Great to watch but fraught with danger.
The feature match of the morning session was unfortunately something of a fizzer. American college sensation Walt Disney has won more money on the tour in the past year than his opponent today has made in his life. He has sponsorship deals running out his ears and knows only one type of game, which he describes as ‘winning’. He may have to put his game on ice for a while after the sobering experience of ‘winning’ only two games against Lytton Strachey, a gangling Englishman to whom he hardly spoke.
Celebrity guest Oscar Wilde reported that he and his friend Whistler are ‘enjoying proceedings enormously. We love the tennis and we’ve just had some blueberries. As I’ve always suspected, Whistler is a confirmed Blueberryist.’
‘The blueberries you eat?’
‘One doesn’t eat blueberries. One drifts through schools of them, mouth open. Blueberries are the plankton of the high teas.’
‘How can one eat something without putting it in one’s mouth?’
‘Only with a great deal of practice.’
‘It seems self-contradictory.’
‘Self-contradiction is the soul of wisdom and the basis of the British postal system.’
‘The British postal system? How so?’
‘Every day millions of envelopes are placed in pillar-boxes. Indeed I’m told this occurs even in parts of Shropshire. Each envelope displays an address which, by virtue of being elsewhere, is the direct opposite of the location of the pillar-box. It is this contradiction to which the postal system must…’
‘Address itself?’ speculated Whistler.
‘Exactly so.’
In the highlight of the day’s live television coverage, we saw the Egyptian-born Greek Cavafy from Alexandria up against Holland’s Vincent van Gogh who lives in Arles and is regarded by many as French. Vangers is regarded by many as the best player never to win a grand slam tournament. Plagued by ear problems which have affected his balance and by balance troubles which have affected his ear, he has career prizemoney to date of nil. He began wildly, returning service by rocking back onto his right foot and belting the ball with astonishing power as high in the air as he could. If it came down on his own side of the net, he shouted at it and hit it again. After doing this six times in a row he was spoken to by the umpire.
‘Mr van Gogh,’ he said. ‘You must stop it. We are here to play tennis.’
‘I am playing tennis,’ said van Gogh.
‘You are not playing tennis the way tennis is played,’ said the umpire.
‘I am hitting a tennis ball with a tennis racquet,’ said the troubled Dutchman, ‘in tennis clothing, on a tennis court, in a tennis tournament. I am, in fact, currently talking to a tennis umpire.’
‘You are too wild, too fierce,’ said the umpire. ‘Who is your coach?’
‘Coach? I play as I see,’ said van Gogh as he walked back to his place.
Cavafy, for his part, played classical tennis. His racquets were of the small-headed, wooden-framed variety and each was contained within a racquet-press. He stood well up to receive but when van Gogh gets onto his serve it can really motor, and time and again the Greek maintained his frieze-like position as the ball scorched down the backhand side and slammed into the canvas behind him. After a while, van Gogh’s primitive swinging began to produce results and the Cavafy service game, lovely to watch and based on the eternal verities, took on an air of infinite sadness.
There were further shocks for American tennis in the late afternoon. Californian Ray Chandler was on court for two hours and fifty-seven minutes today trying to cut himself free of Uruguayan qualifier José Rodo, who has been critical of the game in America and likes nothing more than an opponent who has done well there. Chandler learnt his tennis in England and has good technique coupled with American confidence. Plagued by injuries, he has sometimes missed entire seasons, so is seldom in the business of putting together a demanding fortnight of five-set matches. He lost today, but only just and has lost so many times now he says if he ever won anything he’d walk into a door getting up to collect it.
‘Rodo was good,’ he said. ‘He had good feet. He got to the ball like an anaesthetist with an early tee-time. Last night was beginning to look like a bad idea. The “little sleep” theory needed work and I made a note to talk to the guy in charge of the daylight. Way too bright. I pushed a few back and tried to remember what I was doing here. Everywhere I looked there were people, like extras in some meaningless advertisement. Just faces. And some legs. I preferred the legs.
‘I lost a game and got something wet from the court-side fridge. I tried to sip it but I wasn’t fooling anyone. The place was a mess. Someone could clean up later. Right now I had to think. I went out again and bent a couple at the guy up the other end. A dame behind me yelled, “Out.” She was right. It was that sort of a day.’
Day 8
* * *
Muir v. Galsworthy • Wolfe v. Cummings • Fitzgerald v. Neruda • Nin v. West • Sayers v. Yourcenar • Stopes v. Moore • Porter v. Pankhurst • Pavlova v. Dietrich
* * *
It was a treat this morning to watch the resourceful Scot Edwin Muir jump for joy after his unexpected win over
big John Galsworthy. ‘It was like a dream,’ he said. ‘A mythological dream of some sort.’ Muir’s main game is to play doubles with his pal Wally Benjamin and if he can pick up a little business in the singles it’s always a bonus.
‘It’s just great to be here,’ he said in his Robbie Burns brogue. ‘Fantastic. Och, there are some gae bonny players here the noo. I was watching Bing Crosby wi’ Walt Disney on yon practice courts yesterday. Ver’ different from ain another but both brilliant.’ ‘What is the difference?’ quizzed Mailer, doing the rounds.
‘The difference?’ said Muir. ‘Bing sings. But Walt disney.’
Americans Tom Wolfe and Ted Cummings, both very fit players of great power, came out and for two and a half hours they stood and delivered. Wolfe has a huge booming serve and Cummings, who serves underarm, has a return as good as any in the game. Their media call after the match was also a contrast in styles. Wolfe spoke for some time about being in Paris for the first time.
Cummings recalled being in France some years ago in baffling circumstances. ‘I remember an ambulance and a train accident and I think I was arrested and then I was back in every our town blooming in the blossoms in the sweet time is our time is my time six love.’
Another rising star to make an appearance today was the popular Scott Fitzgerald, who looks to many Europeans to be the quintessential American and to many Americans like something out of a play. He looked sluggish and there have been suggestions he is suffering from a virus. He was lucky to get home in the first-set tie-break against clay-court exponent Pablo Neruda, but after that it was all the Chilean. If you’ve never seen Chileans celebrate, get along to Neruda’s second-round match.
