by John McPhee
Laver becomes quieter before a match. He and his wife, Mary, ordinarily laugh and joke and kid around a lot together, but he becomes silent as a match draws near. “The faster the pace, the more demands there are upon him, the better,” she says. So Laver goes out in the morning and does the shopping. He drops off the laundry. Sometimes he washes clothes in the bathtub. He goes to his favorite butcher and buys a steak. He also buys eggs and greens. Back in the flat, two and a half hours before the match, he cooks his training meal. It is always the same—steak, eggs, and greens. He likes to cook, and prefers to do it himself. It keeps him busy. Then he gets into his car—a hired English Ford—and drives to Wimbledon. He ignores the club limousines. He wants to drive. “If he weren’t a tennis player, he’d be a road racer,” Mary says. “He has a quick, alert mind. He’s fast. He’s fast of body, and his mind works that way as well. The faster the pace of things, the faster he moves.” He particularly likes driving on the left-hand side of the road. It reminds him of Australia, of which he sees very little anymore. His home is in California. Each day, he plots a different route through Greater South London to Wimbledon. This is his private rally. It is a rule of the tournament that if a player is so much as ten minutes late his opponent wins by a walkover. Laver knows his labyrinth—every route alternative, every mews and byway, between the Embankment and the tennis club, and all the traffic of London has yet to stop him. He turns off Church Road into the parking lot. His mind for many hours has been preoccupied with things other than tennis, with cowboys and sleep and shopping lists and cooking and driving. He never ponders a draw or thinks about an opponent. But now he is ready to concentrate his interest on the game—for example, on Wimbledon’s opening day, when the defending champion starts the tournament with a match in the Centre Court.
Laver walks under the Kipling line and through the glass doors, and fourteen thousand people stand up and applaud him, for he is the most emphatic and enduring champion who has ever played on this court. He stacks his extra racquets against the umpire’s chair, where the tournament staff has placed bottles of orange squash and of Robinson Lemon Barley Water should he or his opponent require them during change-overs. There is plain water as well, in a jug called the Bartlett Multipot. Behind the umpire’s chair is a green refrigerator, where tennis balls are kept until they are put into play. A ball boy hands him two and Laver takes the court. He swings easily through the knockup. The umpire says, “Play.” Laver lifts his right hand, sending the first ball up into the air, and the tournament is under way. He swings, hits. His opponent can barely touch the ball with his racquet. It is a near ace, an unplayable serve, fifteen—love. Laver’s next serve scythes into the backhand court. It is also unplayable. Thirty—love.
The man across the net is extremely nervous. His name is George Seewagen. He comes from Bayside, New York. This is his first Wimbledon and his friends have told him that if you don’t get a game in the first round, you never get invited back. Seewagen would like to get two games. At Forest Hills thirty-four years ago, Seewagen’s father played J. Donald Budge in the opening round. The score was 6—0, 6—1, 6—0. When Seewagen, Jr., arrived in London, he was, like nearly everyone else, tense about the luck of the coming draw, and before it was published he told his doubles partner, “Watch me. I’ll have to play Laver in the Centre Court in the first round.” The odds were 111 to 1 that this would not happen, but Seewagen had read the right tea leaf, as he soon learned.
“It was hard to believe. I sort of felt a little bit upset. Moneywise, London’s pretty expensive. First-round losers get a hundred pounds and that’s not much. I figured I needed to win at least one match in order to meet my expenses, but now I’d had it. Then I thought of the instant recognition. People would say, ‘There’s the guy that’s opening up Wimbledon with Laver.’ At least my name would become known. But then, on the other hand, I thought, What if I don’t get a game? Think of it. What if I don’t win even one game?”
Seewagen is an extremely slender—in fact, thin—young man with freckles, a toothy grin, tousled short hair. He could be Huckleberry Finn. He looks nineteen and is actually twenty-three. His credentials are that he played for Rice University, that he beat someone named Zan Guerry in the final of an amateur championship in Rochester, and that he is the varsity tennis coach at Columbia University. There were, in other words, grounds for his gnawing fears. By the eve of Wimbledon, Seewagen’s appearance was gaunt.
Everyone goes to Hurlingham on that ultimate Sunday afternoon. All through the previous fortnight, the tennis players of the world have gradually come to London, and by tradition they first convene at Hurlingham. Hurlingham is a Victorian sporting club with floor-to-ceiling windows, sixteen chimney pots, and wide surrounding lawns—bowling lawns, tennis lawns, croquet lawns, putting lawns—under giant copper beeches, beside the Thames. Some players play informal sets of doubles. Others merely sit on the lawns, sip Pimm’s Cups under the sun, and watch women in pastel dresses walking by on maroon pathways. In the background are people in their seventies, dressed in pure white, tapping croquet balls with deadly skill across textured grasses smooth as broadloom. A uniformed band, with folding chairs and music stands, plays “Bow, Bow, Ye Lower Middle Classes” while tea is served beneath the trees—a strawberry tart, sandwiches, petits fours, fruitcake, and a not-so-bitter macaroon. Arthur Ashe, eating his tea, drinking the atmosphere, says, “This is my idea of England.” On a slope a short distance away, Graham Stillwell, Ashe’s first-round opponent, sits with his wife and his five-year-old daughter, Tiffany. This is the second straight year that Ashe has drawn Stillwell in the first round at Wimbledon, and last year Stillwell had Ashe down and almost out—twice Stillwell was serving for the match—before Ashe won the fifth set, 12-10. Reporters from the Daily Mirror and the Daily Sketch now come up to Ashe and ask him if he has been contacted by certain people who plan to demonstrate against the South African players at Wimbledon. “Why should they contact me?” Ashe says. “I’m not a South African.” Mrs. Stillwell rises from the sloping lawn and stretches her arms. “My God! She’s pregnant again,” Ashe observes. Jean Borotra, now seventy-two, is hitting beautiful ground strokes with Gardnar Mulloy. Borotra wears long white trousers. Two basset hounds walk by, leashed to a man in a shirt of broad pink and white stripes. The band is playing the music of Albéniz. The lady tennis players drift about, dressed, for some reason, in multicolored Victorian gowns. Laver, in dark slacks and a sport shirt of motley dark colors, stands near the clubhouse, watching it all with his arms folded. He seems uncomfortable. He looks incongruous—small, undynamic, unprepossessing, vulnerable—but every eye at Hurlingham, sooner or later in the afternoon, watches him in contemplation. He stands out no more than a single blade of grass, but no one fails to see him, least of all Seewagen, who stands at the edge of the party like a figure emerging from a haunted forest. He wears an old worn-out pair of lightweight sneakers, of the type that tennis players do not use and sailors do, and a baggy gray sweater with the sleeves shoved far up his thin brown arms. Veins stand out on the backs of his hands and across his forearms. He grins a little, but his eyes are sober. His look is profoundly philosophical. Gene Scott informs him that players scheduled for the Centre Court are entitled to a special fifteen minutes of practice on an outside court beforehand. “Good, I’ll take McManus,” Seewagen says. McManus, from Berkeley and ranked tenth in the United States, is left-handed. He is also short and redheaded. He has the same build Laver has, much the same nose and similar freckles as well. Players practicing with McManus easily fantasize that they are hitting with the Rocket himself, and thus they inflate their confidence. McManus is the favorite dummy of everyone who has to play against Laver. Ashe speaks quietly to Seewagen and tells him not to worry. “You’ll never play better,” Ashe says. “You’ll get in there, in the Centre Court, and you’ll get inspired, and then when the crowd roars for your first great shot, you’ll want to run into the locker room and call it a day.”
“I hope i
t isn’t a wood shot,” says Seewagen, looking straight ahead.
Game to Laver. He leads, one game to love, first set. Laver and Seewagen change ends of the court. Laver went out to the Pontevecchio last night, on the Old Brompton Road. He ate lasagna and a steak filet with tomato sauce. He drank Australian beer. Then he went home and whittled a bit before retiring. At Chesham House, in Victoria, Seewagen fell asleep in his bed reading Psycho Cybernetics, by Maxwell Maltz. After one game, Seewagen has decided that Laver is even better than he thought he was. Laver is, for one thing, the fastest of all tennis players. He moves through more square yards per second than anyone else, covering ground like a sonic boom. In his tennis clothes, he is not unprepossessing. His legs are powerfully muscled. His left forearm looks as if it could bring down a tree. He is a great shotmaker, in part because he moves so well. He has every shot from everywhere. He can hurt his opponent from any position. He has extraordinary racquet-handling ability because his wrist is both strong and flexible. He can come over his backhand or slice it. He hits big shots, flick shots, spin shots, and rifle shots on the dead run. He lobs well. He serves well. His forehand is the best in tennis. He has one weakness. According to Gonzales, that is, Laver has one weakness—his bouncing overhead. The bouncing overhead is the shot a tennis player hits when a bad lob bounces at his feet and he cannon-balls his helpless opponent. Gonzales is saying that Laver has no weaknesses at all. Seewagen walks to the base line, visibly nervous, and prepares to serve. He is not pathetic. There is something tingling about a seven-hundred-to-one shot who merely shows up at the gate. In the end, at the net, Laver, shaking hands, will say to him gently, “You looked nervous. It’s very difficult playing in here the first time over.” Seewagen begins with a double fault. Love-fifteen. Now, however, a deep atavistic athleticism rises in him and defeats his nerves. He serves, rushes, and punches two volleys past Laver, following them with an unplayable serve. Forty-fifteen. Serve, rush, volley—game to Mr. Seewagen. Games are one all, first set.
“His topspin is disguised,” Seewagen notes, and he prepares, with a touch of unexpected confidence, for Laver’s next service assault. Game to Mr. Laver. He leads, two games to one, first set. Seewagen now rises again, all the way to forty—fifteen, from which level he is shoved back to deuce. Tossing up the ball, he cracks a serve past Laver that Laver can barely touch, let alone return. Advantage Seewagen. The source of all this power is not apparent, but it is coming from somewhere. He lifts the ball. He blasts. Service ace. Right through the corner. The crowd roars. It is Seewagen’s first great shot. He looks at the scoreboard—two all—and it gives him what he will describe later as a charge. (“At that moment, I should have walked off.” ) 6—2, 6—0, 6—2.
Hewitt, in anger, hits one into the grandstand and it goes straight toward an elderly lady. She makes a stabbing catch with one hand and flips the ball to a ball boy. There is nothing lightweight about this English crowd. Ted Heath, Margaret, Anne, Charles, Lady Churchill, and the odd duke or baron might turn up—diverting attention to the Royal Box—but withal one gets the impression that there is a high percentage of people here who particularly know where they are and what they are looking at. They queue for hours for standing room in the Centre Court. They miss nothing and they are polite. The crowd at Forest Hills likes dramaturgy and emotion—players thanking God after chalk-line shots or falling to their knees in total despair—and the crowd in the Foro Italico throws cushions. But the British do not actually approve of that sort of thing, and when one of the rogue tennis players exhibits conduct they do not like, they cry, “Shame!”
“You bloody fools!” Hewitt shouts at them.
Hewitt has the temper of a grenade. He hits another ball in anger. This time it goes over the roof and out of sight. “Shame, Hewitt, shame!”
Rain falls. Umbrellas bloom. Mike Gibson’s mustache is drooping from the wet, but he says, “Play on. It’s not much.” All matches continue. The umbrellas are black, red, green, yellow, orange, pink, paisley, and transparent. It is cold at Wimbledon. It often is—shirt sleeves one day, two pullovers and a mack the next. Now the players are leaving water tracks on the courts, and Gibson at last suspends play. Groundsmen take down the nets and cover the lawns with canvas. The standees do not give up their places, in the cold rain. The groundsmen go in under the grandstand to the Groundsmen’s Bar, where they drink lager and offer one another cigarettes. “Will you have a smoke, Jack, or would you rather have the money?” The sun comes out for exactly three minutes. Then more rain falls. Half an hour later, play resumes.
Dell is supposed to be on Court 14, playing mixed doubles, but he is still in a phone booth talking to the office of Guntrip the bookie. Dell bets heavily on his own players—a hundred pounds here, two hundred there—and even more heavily against Laver. Dell is a talented gambler and he views the odds as attractive. Besides, Dell and Laver are the same age, and Dell can remember beating Laver when they were boys. Shrewd and realistic, Dell reasons that anyone who ever lost to Donald Dell cannot be invincible. In the end, he repeats his name to the clerk at Guntrip’s, to be sure the clerk has it right. “Dell,” he says. “D as in David, E as in Edward, L as in loser, L as in loser.”
The field of women players is so thin that even some of the women themselves are complaining. Chubby little girls with orange ribbons in their hair hit parabolic ground strokes back and forth and seem incongruous on courts adjacent to an Emerson, a Lutz, or a Pasarell, whose ground strokes sound like gunfire. Billie Jean King slaps a serve into the net and cries out, “That stinks!” Billie Jean is trimmer, lighter, more feminine than she was in earlier years, and somehow less convincing as a challenger to Margaret Court. Yet everyone else seems far below these two. Miss Goolagong is still a few years away. “Have you seen the abo, Jack?” says Robert Twynam, head groundsman, to his assistant, John Yardley. The interesting new players are the ones the groundsmen find interesting. They go to watch Miss Goolagong and they notice that her forehand has a tendency to go up and then keep going up. When it starts coming down, they predict, she will be ready for anybody, for her general game is smooth and quite strong and unflinchingly Australian. Australians never give up, and this one is an aborigine, a striking figure with orange-brown hair and orange-brown skin, in a Teddy Tinling dress and Adidas shoes, with a Dunlop in her hand. Margaret Court is breaking everything but the cool reserve of Helga Niessen, the Berlin model. Between points, Miss Niessen stands with her feet crossed at the ankles. The ankles are observed by a Chinese medical student who is working the tournament with the ground staff. “Look at those ankles. Look at those legs,” he says. “She is a woman.” He diverts his attention to Margaret Court, who is five feet eight, has big strong hands, and, most notably, the ripple-muscled legs of a runner. “Look at those legs,” says the Chinese medical student. “The lady is a man.”
Hoad, in the Centre Court, is moving so slowly that a serve bounces toward him and hits him in the chest. The server is El Shafei, the chocolate-eyed Egyptian. Hoad is in here because all Britain wants to see him on television. Stiffened by time and injury, he loses two sets before his cartilage begins to bend. In the third set, his power comes, and he breaks the Egyptian. The Egyptian is a heavy-framed man, like Hoad, and in the fourth set, they pound each other, drive for drive—wild bulls of the tennis court. Hoad thinks he is getting bad calls and enormous anger is rising within him. The score is three all. Shafei is serving, at deuce. He lifts the ball and blows one past Hoad for a service ace. Hoad looks toward the net-cord judge with expanding disbelief. He looks toward Shafei, who has not moved from the position from which he hit the serve—indicating to Hoad that Shafei expected to hit a second one. Slowly, Hoad walks forward, toward the officials, toward Shafei, toward the center of the court. The crowd is silent. Hoad speaks. A microphone in Scotland could pick up what he says. “That god-damned ball was a let!” The net-cord judge is impassive. The umpire says, “May I remind you that play is continuous.” Hoad replies, repeats, “That god-d
amned ball was a let!” He turns to the Egyptian. Unstirring silence is still the response of the crowd, for one does not throw hammers back at Thor. “The serve was a let. You know that. Did you hear it hit the tape?” Hoad asks, and Shafei says, “No.” Hoad lifts his right arm, extends it full length, and points steadily at the Egyptian’s eyes. “You lie!” he says slowly, delivering each syllable to the roof. A gulf of quiet follows, and Hoad does not lower his arm. He draws a breath slowly, then says again, even more slowly, “You lie.” Only Garrick could have played that one. It must have stirred bones in the Abbey, and deep in the churchyards of Wimbledon, for duels of great moment here have reached levels more serious than sport. This is where Canning fought Castlereagh, where Pitt fought Tierney, where Lord Winchelsea fought the Duke of Wellington. Ceawlin of the West Saxons fought Ethelbert of Kent here, when the terrain was known as Wibbas dune—home of the Saxon, Wibba (Wibbas dune, Wipandune, Wilbaldowne, Wymblyton). Hoad returns to the base line, and when the Egyptian serves again, Hoad breaks him into pieces. Game and fourth set to Hoad. Sets are two all. In his effort, though, Hoad has given up the last of his power. Time has defeated him. Twice the champion, he has failed his comeback. His energy drains away in the fifth set—his last, in all likelihood, at Wimbledon.
Ralston, at the umpire’s chair, pries the cap off a vial of Biostrath and sucks out the essences of the ninety medicinal herbs. Dennis has no contract with Biostrath. He is not drinking the stuff for money. He is drinking it for his life. Beside him stands his opponent, John Newcombe, the second-best forehand, the second-best volley, the second-best tennis player in the world. Dennis follows the elixir with a Pepsi-Cola, also without benefit of a contract. The score is 4-5, first set. Ralston and Newcombe return to the base lines, and Ralston tosses up a ball to serve. The crowd is chattering, gurgling like a mountain stream. Prince Charles has just come in and is settling into his seat. “Quiet, please,” says the umpire, and the stream subsides. Ralston serves, wins—six all. Seven all. Eight all. Nine all. Ten all. There is a lot of grinning back and forth across the net. Newcombe drives a backhand down the line. Ralston leaps, intercepts it, and drops the ball into Newcombe’s court for a winner. Newcombe looks at Ralston. Ralston grins. Newcombe smiles back. It is an attractive match, between two complete professionals. Newcombe passes Ralston with a forehand down the line. “Yep,” says Ralston. Ralston finds a winner in a drop shot overhead. “Good shot,” calls Newcombe. Eleven all. When they shout, it is at themselves. Newcombe moves to the net behind a fragile approach shot, runs back under a humiliatingly good lob, and drives an off-balance forehand into the net. “John!” he calls out. “Idiotic!” Ralston tosses a ball up to serve, but catches it instead of hitting it. He is having a problem with the sun, and he pauses to apologize to Newcombe for the inconvenience the delay might be causing him. Small wonder they can’t beat each other. Grace of this kind has not always been a characteristic of Ralston—of Newcombe, yes, but Ralston grew up tightly strung in California, and in his youth his tantrums were a matter of national report. He is twenty-seven now and has changed. Quiet, serious, introspective, coach of the U.S. Davis Cup Team, he has become a professional beyond the imagination of most people who only knew him long ago. He plans his matches almost on a drawing board. Last night, he spent hours studying a chart he has made of every shot Newcombe has hit in this tournament. 13—12. Dennis opens another Biostrath and another Pepsi-Cola. He knows what the odds have become. The winner of this set, since it has gone so far, will in all likelihood be the winner of the match. Ralston has been a finalist at Wimbledon. But he has never won a major international tournament. In such tournaments, curiously enough, he has played Newcombe ten times and has won seven, but never for the biggest prize. Newcombe has a faculty for going all the way. Ralston, meanwhile, has pointed his life toward doing so at least once, and, who knows, he tells himself, this could be the time. He toes the line and tosses up the ball. He catches it, and tosses it up again. The serve is bad. The return is a winner. Love-fifteen. He has more trouble with the sun. Love-thirty. Catastrophe is falling from nowhere. Love—forty. Serve, return, volley. Fifteen—forty. He serves. Fault. He serves again. Double fault. Game and first set to Newcombe, 14-12. Ralston looks up, over the trigger of a thousand old explosions, and he forces a smile. 14-12, 9—7, 6—2. When it is over, the ball boys carry out seven empty bottles of Pepsi-Cola and four empty vials of the ninety medicinal herbs.