Pieces of the Frame

by John McPhee

  In the Members’ Enclosure, on the Members’ Lawn, members and their guests are sitting under white parasols, consuming best-end-of-lamb salad and strawberries in Devonshire cream. Around them are pools of goldfish. The goldfish are rented from Harrods. The members are rented from the uppermost upper middle class. Wimbledon is the annual convention of this stratum of English society, starboard out, starboard home. The middle middle class must have its strawberries and cream, too, and—in just the way that hot dogs are sold at American sporting events—strawberries and thick Devonshire cream are sold for five shillings the dish from stalls on the Tea Lawn and in the Court Buffet. County representatives, whoever they are, eat strawberries and cream in the County Representatives’ Enclosure. In the Officials’ Buttery, officials, between matches, eat strawberries and cream. An occasional strawberry even makes its way into the players’ locker rooms, while almost anything else except an authentic player would be squashed en route. The doors are guarded by bobbies eight feet tall with nightsticks by Hillerich & Bradsby. The ladies’ dressing room at Wimbledon is so secure that only two men have ever entered it in the history of the tournament—a Frenchman and a blind masseur. The Frenchman was the great Jean Borotra, who in 1925 effected his entry into the women’s locker room and subsequently lost his Wimbledon crown.

  The gentlemen’s dressing room is sui generis in the sportive world, with five trainer-masseurs in full-time attendance. Around the periphery of the locker areas are half a dozen completely private tub rooms. When players come off the courts of Wimbledon, they take baths. Huge spigots deliver hot waterfalls into pond-size tubs, and on shelves beside the tubs are long-handled scrub brushes and sponges as big as footballs. The exhausted athletes dive in, lie on their backs, stare at the ceiling, and float with victory or marinate in defeat. The tubs are the one place in Wimbledon where they can get away from one another. When they are finally ready to arrange themselves for their return to society, they find on a shelf beneath a mirror a bottle of pomade called Extract of Honey and Flowers.

  Smith comes into the locker room, slowly removes his whites, and retreats to the privacy of a tub closet, where, submerged for twenty-flve minutes, he contemplates the loss of one set in the course of his match with Fillol. He concludes that his trouble was the rustling ivy. Scott comes in after a 14-12 finish in a straight-set victory over Krog. Scott opens his locker. Golf balls fall out. Scott runs four miles a day through the roughs of the golf course that is just across Church Road from the tennis club—The All-England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, Wimbledon. Other players—Graebner, Kalogeropoulos, Diepraam, Tiriac—are dressing for other matches. Upwards of sixty matches a day are played on the lawns of Wimbledon, from two in the afternoon until sundown. The sun in the English summer takes a long time going down. Play usually stops around 8 P.M.

  Leaving the locker room dressed for action, a tennis player goes in one of two directions. To the right, a wide portal with attending bobbies leads to the outer courts. To the left is a pair of frosted-glass doors that resemble the entry to an operating amphitheatre in a teaching hospital. Players going through those doors often enough feel just as they would if they were being wheeled in on rolling tables. Beyond the frosted glass is the Centre Court—with the B.B.C., the Royal Box, and fourteen thousand live spectators in close propinquity to the hallowed patch of ground on which players have to hit their way through their nerves or fall if they cannot. There is an archway between the locker room and the glass doors, and over this arch the celebrated phrase of Kipling has been painted: “IF YOU CAN MEET WITH TRIUMPH AND DISASTER AND TREAT THOSE TWO IMPOSTORS JUST THE SHAME.”

  Rosewall is on the Number Eight Court, anesthetizing Addison. Rosewall wears on his shirt the monogram BP. What is this for? Has he changed his name? Not precisely. Here in this most august of all the milieus of tennis, here in what was once the bastion of all that was noblest and most amateur in sport, Rosewall is representing British Petroleum. Rosewall represents the oil company so thoroughly, in fact, that on the buff blazer he wears to the grounds each day, the breast pocket is also monogrammed BP. There is nothing unusual in this respect about Rosewall. All the tennis players are walking billboards. They are extensions of the outdoor-advertising industry. Almost everything they drink, wear, and carry is an ad for some company. Laver won his grand slams with a Dunlop. He has used a Dunlop most of his life. His first job after he left his family’s farm in Queensland was in a Dunlop factory in Sydney, making racquets. Recently, though, he has agreed to use Donnay racquets in certain parts of the world, and Chemold (gold-colored metal) racquets elsewhere, for an aggregate of about thirty thousand dollars a year. In the United States, he still uses his Dunlops. Donnay has him under contract at Wimbledon; however, the word among the players is that the Rocket is still using his Dunlops but has had them repainted to look like Donnays. Roche and Emerson are under contract to Chemold. They also have golden racquets. All things together, Ashe makes about a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a year through such deals. He gets fifty thousand for using the Head Competition, the racquet that looks like a rug beater. He gets twenty-five thousand from Coca-Cola for personal appearances arranged by the company and for drinking Coke in public as frequently as he can, particularly when photographers happen to be shooting him. Lutz and Smith are under contract to consume Pepsi-Cola—in like volume but for less pay. Ask Pasarell if he likes Adidas shoes. “I do, in Europe,” he enthuses. He is paid to wear Adidas in Europe, but in the United States he has a different deal, the same one Lutz, Graebner, Smith, and King have, with Uniroyal Pro Keds.

  Players endorse nets, gut, artificial court surfaces, and every item of clothing from the jock on out. Some players lately have begun to drink—under contract—a mysterious brown fluid called Biostrath Elixir. Made in a Swiss laboratory, it comes in small vials and contains honey, malt, orange juice, and the essences of ninety kinds of medicinal herbs. Others have signed contracts to wear copper bracelets that are said to counteract voodoo, rheumatism, and arthritis. Nearly everyone’s clothing contract is with one or the other of the two giants of tennis haberdashery—Fred Perry and René Lacoste. When Pilic appears in a Perry shirt and Ashe in a Lacoste shirt, they are not so much wearing these garments as advertising them. Tennis is a closed world. Its wheeler-dealers are bygone players (Kramer, Dell). Its outstanding bookie is a former player. Even its tailors, apparently, must first qualify as Wimbledon champions—Lacoste, 1925, 1928; Perry, 1934, 1935, 1936. Rosewall has somehow escaped these two. He wears neither the alligator emblem of Lacoste nor the triumphal garland of Perry. However, he is hardly in his shirt for nothing. In addition to the BP, Rosewall’s shirt displays a springing panther—symbol of Slazenger. All this heraldry makes him rich before he steps onto the court, but it doesn’t seem to slow him up. He is the most graceful tennis player now playing the game, and gracefully he sutures Addison, two, four, and zero.

  The Russians advance in mixed doubles. Keldie and Miss Harris have taken a set from the Russians, but that is all the Russians will yield. Keldie is a devastatingly handsome tall fellow who wears tinted wrap-around glasses and has trouble returning serve. Miss Harris has no difficulty with returns. In mixed doubles, the men hit just as hard at the women as they do at each other. Miss Harris is blond, with her part in the middle and pigtails of the type that suggests windmills and canals. She is quite pretty and her body is lissome all the way to her ankles, at which point she turns masculine in Adidas shoes with three black bands. The Russians show no expressions on their faces, which are young and attractive, darkeyed. The Soviet Union decided to go in for tennis some years ago. A program was set up. Eight Russians are now at Wimbledon, and these—Metreveli and Miss Morozova—are the outstanding two. Both use Dunlops. They play with balletic grace—remarkable, or so it seems, in people to whose part of the world the sport is so alien. Miss Morozova, a severely beautiful young woman, has high cheekbones and almond eyes that suggest remote places to the east—Novosibirsk, Semipalati
nsk. The Russians, like so many players from other odd parts of the earth, are camouflaged in their playing clothes. They are haberdashed by Fred Perry, so they appear more to come from Tennis than from Russia. Think how bad but how distinctive they would look if their clothes had come from GUM. Think what the Indians would look like, the Brazilians, the Peruvians, the Japanese, if they brought their clothes from home. Instead, they all go to Fred Perry’s stock room on Vigo Street in London and load up for the year. The Russians are not permitted to take cash back to Russia, so they take clothing instead and sell it when they get home. Perry has a line of colored garments as well as white ones, and the Russians take all that is red. Not a red shirt remains in stock once the Russians have been to Vigo Street. Miss Morozova fluidly hits a backhand to Keldie’s feet. He picks it up with a half volley. Metreveli puts it away. Game, set, and match to Metreveli and Miss Morozova. No expression.

  Graebner and Tiriac, on Court 3, is a vaudeville act. The draw has put it together. Graebner, the paper salesman from Upper Middle Manhattan, has recently changed his image. He has replaced his horn-rimmed glasses with contact lenses, and he has grown his soft and naturally undulant dark-brown hair to the point where he is no longer an exact replica of Clark Kent but is instead a living simulacrum of Prince Valiant. Tiriac hates Wimbledon. Tiriac, who is Rumanian, feels that he and his doubles partner, Nastase, are the best doubles team in the world. Wimbledon disagrees. Tiriac and Nastase are not seeded in doubles, and Tiriac is mad as hell. He hates Wimbledon and by extension he hates Graebner. So he is killing Graebner. He has taken a set from him, now leads him in the second, and Graebner is fighting for his life. Tiriac is of middle height. His legs are unprepossessing. He has a barrel chest. His body is encased in a rug of hair. Off court, he wears cargo-net shirts. His head is covered with medusan wires. Above his mouth is a mustache that somehow suggests that this man has been to places most people do not imagine exist. By turns, he glowers at the crowd, glares at the officials, glares at God in the sky. As he waits for Graebner to serve, he leans forward, swaying. It is the nature of Tiriac’s posture that he bends forward all the time, so now he appears to be getting ready to dive into the ground. Graebner hits one of his big crunch serves, and Tiriac slams it back, down the line, so fast that Graebner cannot reach it. Graebner throws his racquet after the ball. Tiriac shrugs. All the merchants of Mesopotamia could not equal Tiriac’s shrug. Graebner serves again. Tiriac returns, and stays on the base line. Graebner hits a backhand that lands on the chalk beside Tiriac. “Out!” shouts the linesman. Graebner drops his racquet, puts his hands on his hips, and examines the linesman with hatred. The linesman is seventy-two years old and has worked his way to Wimbledon through a lifetime of similar decisions in Somerset, Cornwall, and Kent. But if Graebner lives to be ninety, he will never forget that call, or that face. Tiriac watches, inscrutably. Even in his Adidas shoes and his Fred Perry shirt, Tiriac does not in any way resemble a tennis player. He appears to be a panatela ad, a triple agent from Alexandria, a used-car salesman from central Marrakesh. The set intensifies. Eleven all. Twelve all. Graebner begins to chop the turf with his racquet. Rain falls. “Nothing serious,” says Mike Gibson, the referee. “Play on.” Nothing is serious with Gibson until the balls float. Wimbledon sometimes has six or eight showers in an afternoon. This storm lasts one minute and twenty-two seconds. The sun comes out. Tiriac snaps a backhand past Graebner, down the line. “God damn it!” Graebner shouts at him. “You’re so lucky My God!” Tiriac has the air of a man who is about to close a deal in a back room behind a back room. But Graebner, with a Wagnerian forehand, sends him spinning. Graebner, whose power is as great as ever, has continually improved as a competitor in tight places. The forehands now come in chords. The set ends 14-12, Graebner; and Graebner is still alive at Wimbledon.

  When the day is over and the Rolls-Royces move off toward central London, Graebner is not in one. Graebner and his attorney waive the privilege of the Wimbledon limousines. They have something of their own—a black Daimler, so long and impressive that it appears to stop for two traffic lights at once. Graebner’s attorney is Scott, who is also his doubles partner. They have just polished Nowicki and Rybarczyk off the court, 6—3, 10—12, 6—3, 6—3, and the Daimler’s chauffeur takes them the fifteen miles to the Westbury, a hotel in Mayfair that is heavy with tennis players. Emerson is there, and Ashe, Ralston, Pasarell, Smith, Lutz, van Dillen. Dell and Kramer are both there. Dell, lately captain of the American Davis Cup Team, has created a principality within the anarchy of tennis. He is the attorney-manager of Ashe, Lutz, Pasarell, Smith, Kodes, and others. Dell and Kramer sit up until 3 A.M. every night picking lint off the shoulders of chaos. Their sport has no head anymore, no effective organization, and is still in the flux of transition from devious to straightforward professionalism. Kramer, who is, among other things, the most successful impresario the game has ever known, once had all the power in his pocket. Dell, who is only thirty-two, nightly tries to pick the pocket, although he knows the power is no longer there. Every so often they shout at each other. Kramer is an almost infinitely congenial man. He seems to enjoy Dell in the way that a big mother cat might regard the most aggressive of the litter—with nostalgic amusement and, now and again, a paw in the chops.

  Ashe goes off to Trader Vic’s for dinner dressed in a sunburst dashiki, and he takes with him two dates. Ralston joins them, and raises an eyebrow. “There is no conflict here,” Ashe says, calmly spreading his hands toward the two women. Later in the evening, Ashe will have still another date, and she will go with him to a casino, where they will shoot craps and play blackjack until around 1 A.M., when Ashe will turn into a tennis player and hurry back to the hotel to get his sleep.

  In his flat in Dolphin Square, Laver spends the evening, as he does most evenings, watching Western films on television. Many players take flats while they are in England, particularly if they are married. They prefer familial cooking to the tedium of room service. Some stay in boardinghouses. John Alexander and fifteen other Australians are in a boardinghouse in Putney. Dolphin Square is a vast block of flats, made of red brick, on the Embankment overlooking the Thames. Laver sits there in the evening in front of the television set, working the grips of his racquets. He wraps and rewraps the grips, trying for just the right feel in his hand. If the movie finishes and some commentator comes on and talks tennis, Laver turns him off and rotates the selector in quest of additional hoofbeats. He unwraps a new grip for the third or fourth time and begins to shave the handle with a kitchen knife. He wraps the grip again, feels it, moves the racquet through the arc of a backhand, then unwraps the grip and shaves off a little more wood.

  Gonzales sometimes drills extremely small holes in his racquets, to change the weight. Gonzales, who is not always consistent in his approach to things, sometimes puts lead tape on his racquets to increase the weight. Beppe Merlo, the Italian tennis player, strings his own racquets, and if a string breaks while he is playing, he pulls gut out of his cover and repairs the damage right there on the court. Merlo likes to string his racquets at thirty pounds of tension—each string as tight as it would be if it were tied to a rafter and had a thirty-pound weight hanging on it. Since most players like their racquets at sixty pounds minimum, Merlo is extremely eccentric. He might as well be stringing snowshoes. When someone serves to him, the ball disappears into his racquet. Eventually, it comes out, and it floats back toward his opponent like a milkweed seed. Merlo’s game does not work at all well on grass. He is fantastic on clay.

  Many players carry their own sets of gut with them. Professional stringers do the actual work, of course, using machines that measure the tension. Emerson likes his racquets at sixty-three pounds, very tight, and so does Smith. Since the frame weight of “medium” tennis racquets varies from thirteen to thirteen and three-quarters ounces, Smith goes to the Wilson factory whenever he can and weighs and feels racquets until he has selected a stack of them. He kills a racquet in six weeks. The thing doesn’t b
reak. It just becomes flaccid and dies. Strings go dead, too. They last anywhere from ten to twenty-eight days. Smith likes a huge grip—four and seven-eighths inches around. Some Americans wrap tape around their handles to build them up, and then they put new leather grips on. Australians generally like them smaller, four and five-eighths, four and a half. As Laver whittles away beside the television, he is progressing toward four and a half. When he is ready to go to bed, he switches off the television and, beside it, leaves a little pile of wood chips and sawdust on the floor.

  Dennis Ralston carries his own pharmacy with him wherever he goes—Achromycin, Butazolidin, Oxazepam, Robaxin, Sodium Butabarbital. He is ready for anything, except sleep. The night before a match, he lies with a pillow over his head and fights total awareness. At 3 A.M., he complains bitterly about the traffic on New Bond Street, outside the Westbury. There is no traffic on New Bond Street outside the Westbury. Mayfair is tranquil in the dead of night, even if the tennis players are not. All over London, tennis players are staring open-eyed at dark ceilings. Some of them get up in the night and walk around talking to themselves—while Laver sleeps in Dolphin Square. Laver can sleep anywhere—in cars, trains, planes. He goes to bed around 1 A.M., and always sets an alarm clock or he would oversleep, even before a final.