|
|
|---|
|
|
SLAM! Sports Century in Review INTERACTIVE CONTESTS ALSO ON SLAM!  |
TENNIS' HERITAGE WAS ITS PRIDE AND CURSE Andre Agassi's baggy shorts and Serena Williams' bright, skintight halter tops are the latest fashion, far cries from the days when decorum demanded pleated white trousers and ankle-length dresses. Women routinely serve at 110 mph, rather than merely plopping the ball in safely with spin. Pete Sampras serves more aces in a match than turn-of-the-century players did in a season. Middle class professionals, not upper class amateurs, rule the courts, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, not merely silver cups and platters, are at stake at the majors. The Grand Slam events, once small, provincial affairs, now boast multiple stadiums and draw tens of thousands of fans each day, along with worldwide television audiences and millions in corporate sponsorships. Where once the best players -- Bill Tilden, Suzanne Lenglen, Ellsworth Vines, Fred Perry, Don Budge, Pancho Gonzales and Rod Laver, among others -- were banned from the majors after turning pro, now they show up with agents cutting deals during matches. Rackets are bigger, lighter and stronger, crafted from space-age composites rather than wood. The once-ubiquitous racket press, with its nuts and bolts and washers in four corners to keep wooden rackets from warping, is a curiosity found only in antique shops. Optic yellow balls made white ones obsolete 30 years ago. Even the lawn in "lawn tennis" has disappeared, except for Wimbledon and a few other events, replaced by hardcourts and clay. Although a few wrinkles in the rules have come along, most notably the tiebreaker, tennis still has the same quaint scoring -- love, 15, 30, 40, deuce, advantage. The dimensions of the court and the height of the net haven't budged. Faults and double-faults bedevil players today as they always have. Cyclops, the electronic eye, guards the service lines at the bigger tournaments, but linesmen still squat in every corner of the court and matches still are called by the umpires perched high in their chairs. The pride of tennis, and its curse, through the century has been its heritage as a sport of the upper crust. The modern game descended from "a portable court" patented in 1874 by Britain's Maj. Walter Clopton Wingfield and sold as a kit, complete with poles, pegs, netting, four tennis bats, a bag of balls, and "The Book of the Game" with its six rules. Laid out on lawns that had been used for croquet, the game was quickly and enthusiastically taken up by the Prince of Wales, Lords and Ladies of the Empire and members of Parliament. Sweden's King Gustav V, Russian royalty and French aristocrats joined in the rage. The class lines remained in place when the game traveled across the Atlantic to high society in America, from Longwood near Boston to Newport in Rhode Island to the West Side Tennis Club in New York. For decades, only genteel amateurs -- those who could afford to play for nothing -- won the trophies, ran the tournaments and locked the country club gates to blacks, Jews and others. The gates widened with the advent of the Open Era in 1968, but vestiges of the past remain, despite the rise in the rankings of the Williams sisters, who are among the few pros to have emerged from public courts. Wimbledon, the most influential tournament, remains firmly in control of the doyens of the All England Club. The U.S. Tennis Association, which runs the mightily profitable U.S. Open and branches out nationally through sectional chapters, retains an air of exclusiveness despite an avowed commitment to grow the game in inner cities. The International Tennis Federation, based in Paris with a haughty, rarefied air of its own, and the ATP Tour, based in Florida, are barely on speaking terms. The WTA Tour, launched in 1973 and given a boost that year by the "Battle of the Sexes" match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, still can't get equal pay with the men at three of the four majors. These kinds of divisions in the hierarchy of the game have plagued tennis throughout the century, at various times splintering the sport and hindering its growth among spectators and players. The huge, gaudy cup that Dwight Davis offered in 1900 to winners of an international team tennis competition essentially pitted three Harvard men, among them Davis as captain, against three British counterparts. Though Davis Cup matches would expand to include dozens of countries, and become the most influential and democratic of tennis events before the Open era, it always stayed under the control of the sport's main powers. The men and women who played at all the major tournaments had to be rich enough so they could afford to travel and practice and play throughout the year without any hope of prize money. Those who had the audacity to try to earn a living from their talents had to give up their amateur status and the chance to compete at Wimbledon, the U.S. Nationals, Davis Cup and the other major events. From the '20s until the creation of Open tennis, when the major tournaments no longer could afford to lock out the biggest names, players made sporadic attempts to create pro tours. Lenglen, an immensely popular Frenchwoman, pioneered professional play in 1926 when she went on an American tour and won all 38 matches against Mary K. Browne. Pro tennis then languished until Tilden, winner of seven U.S. singles titles and three Wimbledons and one of the biggest sports stars of the Roaring '20s, joined several Europeans on a tour in 1931. Tilden won his pro debut against Karel Kozeluh of Czechoslovakia before 13,000 fans at Madison Square Garden. Tilden toured, playing before crowds large and small, until the 1940s when he was pushing 50. He paved the way for Vines, Perry and Budge to leave the amateur ranks and play for prize money. Yet the pro life, despite the occasional jackpot, was more often a slog through the hinterlands on all kinds of courts, from slick wood to fast canvas to patchy grass. Tilden would drive all day and sometimes all night, play a match, then move on. There would be other tours, some successful, most not. Bobby Riggs and Jack Kramer, two of the best players of the 1940s as amateurs and pros, became the greatest promoters. Pancho Gonzales, twice the U.S. champion before turning 21, became the top pro of the 1950s as Kramer took over as boss of the pro game. The great Australian players of the '50s, Frank Sedgman, Lew Hoad, Ken Rosewall, Rod Laver, were quietly put on sporting goods firms' payrolls so that they could keep their amateur status. Eventually, they, too, would turn pro and be banished from the majors. Kramer kept pushing for open tennis, frequently raiding the ranks of the amateurs and stiffening the resolve of the powers at the top until he had to yield to failure at the box office in 1962. For a brief period, pro tennis was dead. That began to change in 1963 when Laver, fresh from his Grand Slam sweep, joined Rosewall and Hoad on their own pro tour while fellow Aussie Roy Emerson began to dominate the amateur game. The Aussies, including Margaret Smith on the women's side, would rule tennis for most of the rest of the '60s. Finally, in 1968, open tennis between pros and amateurs arrived, some 40 years after the issue was first raised, and tennis changed irrevocably. The first U.S. Open champion that year turned out to be Arthur Ashe, a black man who could never have gained access to most tennis clubs in earlier decades. "In the 1970s," tennis Hall of Fame writer Bud Collins observed in his encyclopedia of the game, "tennis became truly the 'in' sport of the great middle class, first in the United States, then abroad. "In a single decade, the sport threw off and trampled its starched white flannel past and became a favored diversion of the modern leisure class -- attired in pastels and playing tiebreaker sets in public parks and clubs. ... All this was inspired by the advent of open tennis." If only that had been envisioned early in the century by those who controlled tennis, the history of the game, its greatest players, and, perhaps, part of our culture, might have turned out different. 
|
