Pieces of the Frame

by John McPhee

  At the London School of Economics, we ran into another kind of obstacle—prejudice. It seemed to be both intranational and international: an odium for Cambridge and a manic dislike of Americans. Prejudice can be worth quite a few points in a basketball game, especially if the most actively prejudiced person is the referee. Except in tournaments and other vital events, most basketball games in England then were officiated by agents of the home team. The referee supplied by L.S.E. was, in my opinion, as prejudiced a man as has ever blown a whistle. In a normal game, the L.S.E. team could have been beaten handily, but we spent most of the evening watching L.S.E. players miss foul shots. They made enough to win, however. I was fouled out of the game in the first half. So were Dye Thomas, Pinckert, Romero, Solomon, and Moro. I drew one foul standing still with my hands on my hips, an attitude I had assumed in order to demonstrate that I was making no contact whatever with the man I was supposedly guarding. The referee would simply blow the whistle and point at you with pleasure, his eyes sparking. I may be prejudiced, but I’m sure he thought we were all either Americans or peers of the realm.

  To the unbiassed eye, the Cambridge basketball club presented a truly curious sociological phenomenon. Almost no one played basketball according to his national characteristics. The English members of the squad, for example, were anything but reserved; they were outrageously flamboyant in their style of play, rifling flat-trajectory shots from forty feet out as if they were throwing darts, sniffing through the rule book to discover obscurities like the air dribble, even giving one another a boost in pursuit of rebounds. The Americans—Moro, Pinckert, and I-showed the least Yankee ingenuity. We were less inventive because we had seen great American players play. We slavishly imitated the controlled skills of these stars, just as most American basketball players do. The Welshmen were by far the most businesslike of the lot of us—reliable, steady, work-horse ballplayers, always cold sober (our Welsh Thomas was Dye, not Dylan). These paradoxes did not prevail throughout the squad. Our Scot did indeed have an eruptive temper, and the Caribbeans were unquestionably languid. Our Canadian, however, was fantastically out of character. On the English courts, most of which were cold, he was forever blowing on his hands, and games had sometimes gone well into the second quarter before he was fully warmed up.

  During the Christmas vacation, I spent a fortnight in London, riding the high buses—once, inevitably, to the Tower. What American youth would not yearn to see the Tower of London? It was to poisoning, hanging, beheading, regicide, and torture what Yankee Stadium was to baseball. The two young sons of Edward IV were murdered in the Tower by their uncle, King Richard III. The Duke of Clarence was drowned there in a tub full of Cypriot wine. King Henry VI was hacked to death in the same turret where the crown jewels of England are now kept. Sir Thomas More was a prisoner in the Tower before he was led outside the walls onto Tower Hill and beheaded publicly. In private, Anne Boleyn knelt to the sword and Lady Jane Grey to the axe, at a beheading block within the walls.

  Standing there beside that block on an overcast December morning, as one of a group of tourists, I happened to see that my feet were straddling a white line painted on the asphalt of the parade ground that adjoins Waterloo Barracks, one of the substructures within the walls. Our guide, a Yeoman Warder, or Beefeater, in medieval costume, was probably saying that the barracks were built in the middle of the nineteenth century and are the youngest of the Tower’s substructures … . I was not listening to him. The white line made a large rectangle in the middle of the parade ground. There was a circle in the center and at each end the startling outlines of basketball foul lanes.

  “Any questions?” the guide asked.

  “Who plays basketball here?” I said. There must have been thirty people on the tour, and they all turned around to look at me. Some of them laughed nervously. I thought for a moment that I had imagined the court. But then the guide explained that the Tower is garrisoned by Her Majesty’s Royal Fusiliers. They stay in shape by playing basketball during non-visiting hours.

  When I returned to Cambridge, I instantly got hold of the secretary of the basketball club and urged him to write to the Royal Fusiliers and set up a match. He said I was daft; but he wrote the letter. The Royal Fusiliers responded at once. They had a building in which they ordinarily played their matches, but they were delighted that Cambridge University would like to play them in their Tower.

  It was the last match of our season, toward the end of the Lent term. A Beefeater led us through a gate in the Tower walls. He was excited about the game, talking animatedly as he walked, kicking ravens out of his path and praising the sharpshooting skills of the Royal Fusiliers. It was a wonderful day—the first blue sky over London in seven weeks, he said. The captain of the Fusiliers met us outside Waterloo Barracks and invited us in for tea. He said a lorry would be coming directly with the baskets and backboards, mounted on steel poles. When the lorry finally came, we were out on the parade ground dressed and ready, the Royal Fusiliers in dark uniforms, Cambridge in pale Cambridge blue. We all cheered its arrival. We were getting cold, just standing there smoking and passing basketballs around with nothing to shoot at. Pinckert set a basketball on the beheading block. Russ Moro lectured the English members of the squad on the history of the Tower, whose pinnacles soared above us in the miraculously clear air. The crowd—exclusively composed of Beefeaters and ravens—was getting bored. The Beefeaters were all but clapping their hands in unison, and the ravens were starting to leave.

  The lorry backed up to the foot of one foul lane and stopped. Two soldiers got up on the tailgate. They shoved the heavy steel mounting out the back end and tilted it upward until its twin poles were secured in casings embedded in the asphalt. There at last stood the phenomenon I had been waiting to see, a basketball hoop, net, and backboard rising up in the very center of the Tower of London. In moments, we would be sending long shots arcing past the high battlements, adding a wild footnote to the history of the game. Meanwhile, the lorry driver prepared to move off to the other end of the court. After a great gnashing of gears, he started up with a violent jolt—and surged backward rather than forward, smashing into the support poles of the erected basket and snapping them off at the ground. The soldiers didn’t even bother to set up the other basket. It was just jolly bad luck, that was all. There was a lot of swearing on the part of the Fusiliers, and the lorry driver had to take considerable mockery. For my part, I would have settled for an improvised half-court game there in the Tower, but that apparently did not cross the minds of our hosts, who had never completely understood why we wanted to play in the Tower in the first place.

  We all climbed into the lorry and were driven to a sports hall near Tower Hill. It had a large basketball floor. Light bulbs hung from the ceiling in steel cages. The windows were sheathed with steel latticework, and some natural light was entering through filters of coal dust. “There now, chaps, this is more like it anyway, isn’t it?” said the captain of the Fusiliers. We all agreed. Her Majesty’s Royal Fusiliers were splendid fellows, and they were anxious that we enjoy our visit with them. We would have been uncharitable to admit our disappointment, but the ultimate score of the game was probably an indirect expression of it—Cambridge 95, Royal Fusiliers 42. It was the worst beheading in the history of the Tower, inside or outside the walls.

  Centre Court

  HOAD ON COURT 5, weathered and leonine, has come from Spain, where he lives on his tennis ranch in the plains of Andalusia. Technically, he is an old hero trying a comeback but, win or lose, with this crowd it is enough of a comeback that Hoad is here. There is tempestuous majesty in him, and people have congregated seven deep around his court just to feel the atmosphere there and to see him again. Hoad serves explosively, and the ball hits the fence behind his opponent without first intersecting the ground. His precision is off. The dead always rise slowly. His next serve splits the service line. Hoad is blasting some hapless Swiss into submission. As he tosses the ball up to serve again, all eyes lift a
bove the court and the surrounding hedges, the green canvas fences, the beds of climbing roses, the ivy-covered walls—and at the top of the ball’s parabola, it hangs for an instant in the sky against a background of half-timbered houses among plane trees and poplars on suburban hills. Rising from the highest hill is the steeple of St. Mary’s Church, Wimbledon, where Hoad was married sixteen years ago. He swings through the ball and hits it very deep. “Fault.” Hoad’s wife, Jenny, and their several children are at the front of the crowd beside the court, watching with no apparent dismay as Hoad detonates his spectacularly horizontal serves.

  Smith, in a remote part of the grounds, is slowly extinguishing Jaime Fillol. Tall, straightforward, All-American, Stan Smith is ranked number one in the United States. He grew up in Pasadena, where his father sold real estate. A fine basketball player, Smith gave it up for tennis. He is a big hitter who thinks with caution. Under the umpire’s chair is his wallet. The locker rooms of Wimbledon are only slightly less secure than the vaults of Zurich, but Smith always takes his wallet with him to the court. Fillol, a Chileno, supple and blue-eyed, says “Good shot” when Smith drives one by him. Such remarks are rare at Wimbledon, where Alphonse would have a difficult time finding Gaston. The players are not, for the most part, impolite, but they go about their business silently. When they show appreciation of another player’s shot, it is genuine. There is no structure to Fillol’s game. Now he dominates, now he crumbles. Always he faces the big, controlled, relentless power of the all-but-unwavering Smith. Smith does not like to play on these distant courts close to the walls of the Wimbledon compound. The wind rattles the ivy and the ivy sometimes rattles Smith—but hardly enough to save Fillol.

  John Alexander has brown hair that shines from washing. It hangs straight and touches the collar of his shirt in a trimmed horizontal line. The wind gusts, and the hair flows behind him. Not yet twenty, he is tall, good-looking, has bright clear eyes, and could be a Shakespearean page. In his right hand is a Dunlop. He drives a forehand deep cross-court. There is little time for him to get position before the ball comes back—fast, heavy, fizzing with topspin.

  In Alexander’s mind, there is no doubt that the man on the other side of the net is the best tennis player on earth. He hit with him once, in Sydney, when Laver needed someone to warm him up for a match with Newcombe. But that was all. He has never played against him before, and now, on the Number One Court, Alexander feels less the hopeless odds against him than a sense of being honored to be here at all, matched against Laver in the preeminent tournament of lawn tennis. The Number One Court is one of Wimbledon’s two stadiums, and it is a separate closed world, where two players are watched in proximity by seven thousand pairs of eyes. Laver is even quicker and hits harder than Alexander had imagined, and Alexander, in his nervousness, is overhitting. He lunges, swings hard, and hits wide.

  Laver is so far ahead that the match has long since become an exhibition. Nonetheless, he plays every point as if it were vital. He digs for gets. He sends up topspin lobs. He sprints and dives for Alexander’s smashes. He punches volleys toward the corners and, when they miss, he winces. He is not playing against Alexander. He is playing against perfection. This year, unlike other years, he does not find himself scratching for form. He feels good in general and he feels good to be here. He would rather play at Wimbledon than anywhere else at all, because, as he explains, “It’s what the atmosphere instills here. At Wimbledon things come to a pitch. The best grass. The best crowd. The royalty. You all of a sudden feel the whole thing is important. You play your best tennis.”

  Laver, playing Alexander in the second round, is in the process of defending the Wimbledon title. In the history of this sport, no player has built a record like Laver’s. There have been only three grand slams—one by Budge, two by Laver. Wimbledon is the tournament the players most want to win. It is the annual world championship. Budge won Wimbledon twice. Perry won it three times. Tilden won it three times. Laver has won Wimbledon four times, and no one at Wimbledon this afternoon has much doubt that he is on his way to his fifth championship. There are a hundred and twenty-eight men in this tournament, and a hundred and twenty-seven of them are crowded into the shadow of this one small Australian. Winning is everything to tennis players, although more than ninety-nine per cent of them are certain losers—and they expect to lose to him. Laver, who has a narrow and delicate face, freckles, a hawk’s nose, thinning red hair, and the forearm of a Dungeness crab, is known to all of them as Rocket. Alexander, who is also Australian and uses a Dunlop no doubt because Laver does, has just aced the Rocket twice and leads him forty—love. To prepare for this match, Alexander hit with Roger Taylor, who is left-handed, and practiced principally serving to Taylor’s backhand. Alexander serves again, to Laver’s backhand. When Laver is in trouble, fury comes into his game. He lashes out now and passes Alexander on the right. He passes Alexander on the left. He carries him backward from forty—love to advantage out. Alexander runs to the net under a big serve. A crosscourt backhand goes by him so fast that his racquet does not move. In the press section, Roy McKelvie, dean of English tennis writers, notifies all the other tennis writers that beating Laver would be a feat comparable to the running of the first four-minute mile. The match is over. “Thank you,” Laver says to Alexander at the net. “I played well.” A person who has won two grand slams and four Wimbledons can say that becomingly. The remark is honest and therefore graceful. Alexander took four games in three sets. “I’ve improved. I’ve learned more possibilities,” he says afterward. “It should help me. The improvement won’t show for a while, but it is there.”

  Roger Taylor leans against the guardrail on the sun-deck roof of the Players’ Tea Room. He is twenty-five feet above the ground—the Players’ Tea Room is raised on concrete stilts—and from that high perspective he can see almost all the lawns of Wimbledon. There are sixteen grass courts altogether, and those that are not attended with grandstands are separated by paved walkways ten feet wide. Benches line the edges of the walkways. Wimbledon is well designed. Twenty-five thousand people can move about in its confined spaces without feeling particularly crowded. Each court stands alone and the tennis can be watched at point-blank range. The whole compound is somehow ordered within ten acres and all paths eventually lead to the high front façade of the Centre Court, the name of which, like the name Wimbledon itself, is synecdochical. “Centre Court” refers not only to the ne plus ultra tennis lawn but also to the entire stadium that surrounds it. A three-story dodecagon with a roof that shelters most of its seats, it resembles an Elizabethan theatre. Its exterior walls are alive with ivy and in planter boxes on a balcony above its principal doorway are rows of pink and blue hydrangeas. Hydrangeas are the hallmark of Wimbledon. They are not only displayed on high but also appear in flower beds among the outer courts. In their pastel efflorescence, the hydrangeas appear to be geraniums that have escalated socially. When the Wimbledon fortnight begins each year, London newspapers are always full of purple language about the green velvet lawns and the pink and blue hydrangeas. The lawns are tough and hard and frequently somewhat brown. Their color means nothing to the players or to the ground staff, and this is one clue to the superiority of Wimbledon courts over the more lumpy but cosmetic sods of tennis lawns elsewhere. The hydrangeas, on the other hand, are strictly show business. They are purchased for the tournament.

  Taylor is watching a festival of tennis from the roof of the Tea Room. Szorenyi against Morozova, Roche against Ruffels, Brummer against O’Hara, Drysdale against Spear—he can see fourteen matches going on at the same time, and the corkpopping sound of the tennis balls fills the air. “This is the greatest tournament in the world,” he says. “It is a tremendous thrill to play in it. You try to tune yourself up for it all year.” Taylor is somewhat unusual among the people milling around him on the sun deck. For the most part, of course, they are aliens, and their chatter is polyglot. Hungarians, Japanese, Finns, Colombians, Greeks—they come from forty nations, wh
ile home to Taylor is a three-room flat in Putney, just up the road from Wimbledon. Taylor is a heavyset man with dark hair and a strong, quiet manner. His father is a Sheffield steelworker. His mother taught him his tennis. And now he is seeded sixteenth at Wimbledon. It took him five sets to get out of the first round, but that does not seem to have shaken his composure. His trouble would appear to be in front of him. In the pattern of the draw, the sixteenth seed is the nearest seeded player to the number-one seed, which is tantamount to saying that Taylor’s outlook is pale.

  On the promenade below, a Rolls-Royce moves slowly through the crowd. It contains Charlie Pasarell, making his appearance to compete in singles. Is Pasarell so staggeringly rich that he can afford to ride to his matches in a Rolls-Royce? Yes—as it happens—but the Rolls in this case is not his. It is Wimbledon’s and it has been sent by the tennis club to fetch him. Wimbledon is uniquely considerate toward players, going to great lengths to treat them as if they were plenipotentiaries from their respective nations and not gifted gibbons, which is at times their status elsewhere. Wimbledon has a whole fleet of Rolls-Royces—and Mercedes, Humbers, and Austin Princesses—that deploys to all parts of London, to wherever the players happen to be staying, to collect them for their matches. Each car flies from its bonnet a small pennon in the colors of Wimbledon—mauve and green. Throughout the afternoons, these limousines enter the gates and murmur through the crowd to deliver to the locker rooms not only the Emersons, the Ashes, the Ralstons, and the Roches but also the Dowdeswelles, the Montrenauds, the Dibleys, and the Phillips-Moores.

  In the Players’ Tea Room, the players sit on pale-blue wicker chairs at pale-blue wicker tables eating strawberries in Devonshire cream. The tearoom is glassed-in on three sides, overlooking the courts. Hot meals are served there, to players only—a consideration absent in all other places where they play. Wimbledon is, among other things, the business convention of the tennis industry, and the tearoom is the site of a thousand deals—minor endorsements, major endorsements, commitments to tournaments over the coming year. The Players’ Tea Room is the meat market of international tennis. Like bullfight impresarios converging on Madrid from all parts of Spain at the Feria of San Isidro, tournament directors from all parts of the world come to the Players’ Tea Room at Wimbledon to bargain for—as they put it—“the horsefiesh.” The Tea Room also has a first-rate bar, where, frequently enough, one may encounter a first-rate bookie. His name is Jeff Guntrip. He is a trim and modest-appearing man from Kent. His credentials go far deeper than the mere fact that he is everybody’s favorite bookie. Years ago, Guntrip was a tennis player. He competed at Wimbledon.