A Handful of Summers

by Gordon Forbes

  Abie’s sleepy voice: ‘What the hell is happening?’

  ‘It’s two o’clock,’ Ray says urgently. ‘We’re all at Wimbledon! Twiggy and her friend are here. Where the hell are the tickets? You said you’d get some tickets.’

  ‘Good God,’ says Abie. ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘Look at your watch, Abe! We’re all waiting for you at Wimbledon. Everyone’s on court!’

  ‘Good God,’ says Abie again. ‘You’re right. Listen, just hold it. I’ll be right there. Just tell them all to hold it!’

  Raymond replaces the receiver, doubled up with laughter. ‘What’s the odds he’s jumping about, putting tennis gear into his bag?’ he says.

  Abie’s version of his activities is worth recording.

  ‘By the time Mouse and I get to the hotel,’ he says, ‘I’m so tired I can’t see straight, so I draw all the curtains, get into bed and sleep my brains out. Suddenly there’s this phone call. It’s that idiot Moore. The curtains are so thick that I can’t see too much. I look at my watch, and sure enough it’s two o’clock. I get one hell of a fright. I’m second match on court three, with Forbsey in the doubles. So I get up, throw on my clothes, and take the lift downstairs, carryin’ my bag and rackets. I come out of the lift downstairs, and there’s not too many people about; but I’m in such a hurry I go up to the concierge and say:

  “Listen, I need a taxi, urgently.”

  “Where might you be going, sir?” says the man, looking at me kind of peculiar.

  “I’m on court at Wimbledon in one hour,” I say to him.

  “I hardly think so, sir,” he says. “It’s two-thirty a.m.”

  “A.m. or p.m.?” I shout.

  “A.m., sir”, he says.

  “It’s that bloody Moore,” I say to him. “I mean, Jesus! Are you quite sure it’s not p.m.?”

  “Quite sure, sir,” says the concierge. “We do try to keep in touch with these things.”

  ‘Suddenly the whole thing seems unreal. Here I am, standing in the lobby with my tennis rackets under my arm, arguing with someone about whether it’s two a.m. or two p.m. It’s like I’m dreaming. So I go back to bed,’ says Abie, ‘and would you believe it, I can’t get to sleep?’

  Ray and Harry classed this particular incident as their best practical joke for 1968.

  ‘It was the timing that was so good,’ said Raymond. ‘That, and the sleeping tablet. After that tablet, Abie would believe anything!’

  Wednesday. Rosewall and Pasarell in an absorbing match. Gonzales loses to a Russian called Metreveli. So extraordinary to see a man of such intense fire and willpower brought down by the mere fact that he is no longer young. How superb he must have been. When one considers sheer strength of purpose, the immense burning desire to win, and only to win, Gonzales must rise head and shoulders above the rest. Hoad’s magnificence is in his total mastery of the game itself. Laver’s in his flashing talent and the quiet certainty within him of his own abilities. Rosewall’s in his precision and artistry. But Gonzales is all fire and passion – exultation in the very act of competing!

  Thursday. Abie and I have reached the second round of the doubles, and have to play against Alex Olmedo and Pancho Segura. Fowler and Moore have already indicated that the combined ages of the players will be nearly two hundred years. We begin the match at about three p.m. on court three, and by five forty-five have lost the first set at 32-30. The court is like lightning, and no one can return service. Pancho Segura is at his best in such matches. The crowds adore him. At nine-all in the first set, he sniffs doubtfully at the Robinson’s orange juice.

  ‘Drink it, Poppa,’ says Olmedo. ‘Eet’s good. The Queen, she drinks eet.’

  At 20-all, Segura serves out a long deuce game, then leans against the umpire’s stand.

  ‘Don’t die on us, Segoo’, says Abie. ‘Let’s all four of us finish the match!’

  Segura looks up with a broad smile, puts a hand to his heart and says: ‘She don’t stop pumping, keed. She still goes strong!’

  It is the hottest day of the London summer. At 20-all, I see my first mirage. At 26-all the umpire runs out of new balls. He calls for more.

  ‘Never mind the balls, professor,’ says Segura, ‘eet ees better you change the players!’

  At 29-all Segura turns to the crowd and says:

  ‘I maybe not make eet to the Club tonight, folks!’

  At 31-30, I lose a long service game and we lose the set 32-30. We realise after the match that it is a Wimbledon record – the longest set ever played, surpassing the 31-29 set played by Sedgman and MacGregor against Trabert and Talbert in 1949. Some odd posterity from the tennis gods!

  Diary Notes: Summer 1968

  Graebner playing Roche is a battle of ironclads – a locking in mortal combat of tremendous tennis forces. Like two giant wrestlers they meet; quiver; fluctuate; but never give way. The match is decided by the breadth of a hair.

  Arthur Ashe has developed a superb brand of supercool, cerebral tennis. Lithe movements, a lightning service, and feet with wings attached. Swift, intelligent perfection. Calm intensity. He defeats El Shafei, Newcombe and Okker, but one cannot but feel that this is only a beginning; that there is more to come.

  The last four players in that historic Wimbledon were Tony Roche, Clark Graebner, Arthur Ashe and Rodney Laver. I can still remember the feeling of awe which came over me as I watched Rodney dismantle the aura of cool detachment which Arthur Ashe builds around himself as he plays. The match was too short and one-sided to be classed as good, yet the centre court crowd watched quietly until the last point had been played. They were staggered, as I was, by the sheer artistry of the tennis game of Rod Laver.

  We had planned a holiday on the Greek islands after Wimbledon and our thoughts were already racing on ahead. The remainder of my diary notes are interspersed with passages about Greece. I’ve left them in. There is a great nostalgia attached to the end of things, and the passages seem to soften it. We take the night flight from Heathrow to Corfu. It is my friend, Gerondeanos, who has persuaded us to go. For me, even during my previous travels, the Greek islands have always had about them an untouchable aura – reserved as a playground for potentates; sheiks; people with money – the very rich! Gerondeanos, with his Greek forthrightness, changed all that.

  ‘The islands,’ he says, his eyes softening. ‘They will rinse out your mind. And the sunlight will clear your skin. Come! Come to the islands!’

  And so, with the applause still ringing in our ears, and the sonorous voice of the umpire announcing Laver to be the first Wimbledon Open Champion, we are set down in Corfu, in a limpid Ionian dawn. Clatters of Greek as Gerondeanos supervises the collection of our luggage. A softness in the air which could never be England. And in the morning, when we awake with sunlight filling our room, it is still impossible to imagine that we have arrived. But the view from our little balcony verifies it all. Serene blue bay with fishing boats; a headland with olive trees and the ruin of a fort; the clip-clop of a gharri by the waterfront. The magnificent sky. We have stumbled into a picture postcard.

  It was Laver’s Wimbledon. In the final he defeated, quite easily, the industrious Roche, unravelling him in much the same way as he had done Ashe. Afterwards, it was so clear and logical that he should have won. Even the tennis gods, for once, put aside their devilment and allowed justice to be served and honest history made.

  After watching Rodney George play tennis as an amateur and as a professional; after being his friend and scaring him in the night; after partnering him in doubles, losing to him many times at singles, and defeating him once; after all that, I am absolutely ready to concede that he must be as great as any tennis player can be. He has the ultimate characteristics of the truly great – the ability to become stronger as the competition tightens. To play day after day with no fear at all, no sign of strain, but only the positive will to win. To a
cknowledge the skills of his opponents and to scorn the use of any form of trickery. He astounded the tennis world at Wimbledon with the mastery of his game. He became champion of the world – and, true to the Laver style of things, he did so with modesty and a minimum of fuss.

  He will always be one of the best tennis players who has ever lived.

  Diary Notes: Corfu 1968

  At Paleocastrizza there is no dividing line between sea and sky. Don a diving mask and you can lie on the surface of the bay, suspended in space. Below, thirty feet of translucent water; above, the staggering sky. Never is one so aware of light; pure white sunlight, refracted by the rock walls, splintered by water. Light and water and space, purity of the senses, a total rinsing out of the mind. In this sunlight, fish and wine are new things; the acrid olives a part of the mountain slopes above. V lies on the sand like a seal, her lithe body half-in and half-out of the water. The sun has burned her to a dark copper. Her hair is like flax across her shoulders. Sipping wine I doze, smiling as the memories return.

  Raymond Moore defeating Andrés Gimeno, to the delight of Harry Fowler. In the madness of this new London scene, he has fallen into the habit of referring to Ray as ‘she’.

  ‘She’ll have to have her hair shampooed for her next match,’ he says excitedly. ‘She’ll have plenty of TV close-ups to contend with, and we don’t want the British viewing public to think that they’re at Madame Tussaud’s!’

  The first-round loss of Virginia Wade to a Swedish girl, and the tears which she couldn’t hide. I watch the match with Marty Riessen, and at one point he says quietly:

  ‘You can’t play if you can’t see, you know. And you can’t see if your eyes are full of tears. So it’s not advisable to cry if you’re losing, although often it is very difficult not to do so!’

  Who but a player would know of the true compassion in Riessen’s light-hearted words?

  Diary Notes: Corfu 1968

  Take the mountain road, which winds almost vertically from Paleocastrizza to Lacones, and sit at the little restaurant cut into the mountainside. The parapet on which my elbow rests drops away to the sea a thousand metres below. Now the bays where we swam are no more than ice-blue covers, the deeper waters as deep-blue as ink. We eat cheese and figs and drink a cloudy local wine, sharp with the tang of grapes, and afterwards there is baklava and the strong, sweet coffee.

  Billie Jean King won the ladies’ singles with the same inexorability with which Laver won the men’s. They are, in a way, cut of the same mould, those two, although of course their personalities differ widely. Billie Jean is the modern American female through and through, and a great tennis player. More than great.

  I find, in this book, that I have used up all my adjectives on the men players – I suppose because they are much easier for me to understand.

  But the girls were as much a part of this section of tennis history as were the men. We watched them, loved them, were amused by them, and annoyed when their matches went on too long and held up the starts of our own. We laughed at their funny service actions, and the mighty female swings they made at overheads.

  ‘All arms and grunts and open mouths,’ said Lew Hoad once, ‘and after all, not much to show for it!’

  And there’s this mental picture of Roy Emerson waiting in the Wimbledon change-room and idly watching a match on the television set.

  ‘Here’s a lob,’ he murmurs, ‘and here’s a lob, and here’s another lob. And here’s the lob with the wind, that will lob into the Royal Box.’

  ‘What’s going on, Emmo?’ someone asks.

  ‘Women’s’ doubles,’ says Roy.

  Billie Jean and her colleagues soon changed that.

  Players such as she, Margaret Court, Maria Bueno, Virginia Wade or Dalene Hard could bury overheads with the best of them.

  But now, thinking back about all the girl players of that era, I find that there were only a handful who really perfected what was the simplest and most complicated of all things in tennis – the classic service swing.

  Diary Notes: Corfu 1968

  The main street of Lacones is eight feet wide and winding. The little shop into which we are lured boasts two superb tame roosters, with beads around their necks. Also a half-dozen cotton scarves, orange liqueur, bottles of walnuts, olives, pecans, cumquats. Cheese, melons, figs and a rack of postcards. The old Greek owner whips out glasses, pours us liqueurs and stands back with the air of someone who has done a trick. We buy a scarf and feed liqueur to the roosters, and when we leave we are presented with a handful of walnuts.

  Afterwards we wander in the quiet olive groves, the air heavy and scented, an aura of peace so pure that we cannot speak, each passing minute a tangible, precious thing. It is the last day, and nearly time to go. Time to move again.

  On the very last page of that worn island notebook I found a little scribbled paragraph, which in retrospect appears both cryptic and prophetic:

  They’re interfering with our game! Not the fifteen-loves, or the deuces or ads, or even the backhands and forehands. But something more devious. They’re tampering with the actual spirit of the thing . . . changing the heartbeats. Synthetics are encroaching. I’m afraid for the old things: wood; gut; grass; clay. I can’t even tell whether it’s good or bad. Only that it’s changing.

  Old T.S. someone has a line which relates: ‘Now I fear disturbance of the quiet seasons,’ he wrote somewhere.

  Well, I fear disturbance of the quiet seasons of tennis. I don’t even know why I should. I will hardly be affected!

  The poem goes on:

  ‘Winter shall come, bringing death from the sea.’ But of course that’s going too far! I suppose that sometime, on those quiet beaches, it came home to me that tennis really had changed; and that the kind of tennis that had been my life had been left behind, and that with it I had left behind a part of my life . . .

  5 John Newcombe

  6 Mouse: Abie’s affectionate nickname for his wife, dating back to their first meeting.

  Postscript

  Wimbledon: 1977

  Staircase number one, again: the same seat! Grave-eyed David Mills, the All England Club Secretary, has seen to that. I find the seat and sit there, chin in hands. The sunny court again, with all its simple age and pomp. A year has passed since I sat here, and since all those memories came pouring through my head. Well, I’ve rounded them up now, and got them written down. Trapped between the covers of this book. They were special for me, those days. And this court somehow seems able to recapture the old perspective, if only for an hour or two.

  It is two o’clock. The players emerge, and I feel again the heart’s lifting, and simultaneously the irresistible touch of melancholy.

  Borg and Connors, superbly modern.

  They play. The polished, expensive strokes of two young tennis millionaires.

  And while they play, it is easy enough to watch, and to contemplate, in a lazy kind of way, this centenary Wimbledon.

  The mood has been festive and the crowds denser than ever. And marvellous tennis. Superlatives congregate and mill around, but one finally selects Rodney Laver’s words, spoken on the players’ roof garden.

  ‘A fair bit of old tennis going on down there, Gordon, old sport!’ Nothing if not mild, our Rodney.

  Abie is here for the veterans’ event. He stands in the crowd below the players’ restaurant and bellows up at his friends. He never seems to want to speak to the people near him – always someone who’s somewhere else, just within shouting distance.

  Connors, meanwhile, is winning the first set. He’s playing too perfectly altogether – like a complicated machine that has been finely programmed to hit hundreds of risky winners, and then been overwound. Watching him, one senses overkill. Feels instinctively that his best shots would be worth more than only one point. ‘He can’t keep doing that,’ one mutters. And, of course, he c
an’t.

  Gerulaitis, now. He is very much in command of his senses. It’s hardly possible to play a better match than he did against Borg in the semis. ‘Fair bit of old tennis there’, one could safely say. And if understatements are to be the order of the day, one could also safely say that Case and Masters have played men’s doubles before. Definitely put in some practice.

  And that Virginia Wade ‘came good’, as the Aussies say, at an opportune time. Very opportune. So opportune that one suspects the divine intervention of mellow gods. And with it all she looked more handsome than ever before – shorter hair and eyes, eyes, eyes. England has been subjected to a huge collective ecstasy.

  And, as I’ve said before, tennis has changed. Come into money, and gone public. One walks about in the players’ restaurant, waiting to get tea, and hearing things like ‘contracts’, ‘franchises’, ‘legal representatives’ and ‘12.5 million by May’.

  It’s the day of the superstar. The superstar, the super-coach, the how-to books, the tennis universities and the track suits with the stripes down the side. And a whole new set of people who follow the game. At Queen’s Club on Sunday they had a sort of combination backgammon – pro-celebrity tennis day, seething with the jet-set. Glamorous people, carelessly strolling and emitting expensive smells. Cliff Drysdale, debonair and polished, and Brian Young, the living legend, hitting determined forehands with the handle of his racket stuck, it seemed, in his trouser pocket! Some of the celebrities have terrifically unique styles of play! Jeannie and I furtively joined the strollers, being neither pros nor celebrities.

  Oh, there are new kinds of people in tennis these days, especially in the States. Social sort of people who have heard that it is ‘in’ to ‘have trouble with your forehand’, or a ‘touch of tennis elbow’. They quickly get equipped with Fila7 gear and several rackets, teaching pros and phrases like ‘topspin lob’, ‘punch-volley’ and ‘hitting through the netman’. And if, after ten lessons, they can’t play well with the Wilson steel, they can try the Kawasaki graphite, or the Head Aluminium, or Boron X-T or Durafibre or Glaflex. Or maybe take the old road and go right back to wood.