Pieces of the Frame

by John McPhee

  Kramer is in a glassed-in booth at one corner of the court, commenting on the action for the BBC. For an American to be engaged to broadcast to the English, extraordinary credentials, of one kind or another, are required. Just after the Second World War, Kramer first displayed his. Upwards of fifty American players now come to Wimbledon annually, but Kramer, in 1946, was one of three to cross the ocean. “Now it’s a sort of funsy, ‘insy’ thing to do,” he has said. “But in my time, if you didn’t think you had a top-notch chance, you didn’t come over. To make big money out of tennis, you had to have the Wimbledon title as part of your credits. I sold my car, a 1941 Chevrolet, so I could afford to bring my wife, Gloria, with me.” That was long before the era of the Perry-Lacoste-Adidas bazaar, and Kramer, at Wimbledon, wore his own clothes—shorts that he bought at Simpson’s and T-shirts that had been issued to him during the war, when he was a sailor in the United States Coast Guard. Now, as he watches the players before him and predicts in his expert way how one or the other will come slowly unstuck, he looks past them across the court and up behind the Royal Box into an entire segment of the stadium that was gone when he first played here. At some point between 1939 and 1945, a bomb hit the All-England tennis club, and with just a little more wind drift it would have landed in the center of the Centre Court. Instead, it hit the roof over the North East Entrance Hall. Kramer remembers looking up from the base line, ready to serve, into a background of avalanched rubble and twisted girders against the sky. He slept in the Rembrandt, which he remembers as “an old hotel in South Kensington,” and he ate steak that he had brought with him from the United States, thirty pounds or so of whole tenderloins. Needless to say, there was no Rolls-Royce flying Wimbledon colors to pick him up at the Rembrandt. Kramer went to Wimbledon, with nearly everyone else, on the underground—Gloucester Road, Earl’s Court, Fulham Broadway, Parsons Green, Putney Bridge, East Putney, Southfields, Wimbledon. He lost the first time over. A year later, he returned with his friend Tom Brown, and together they hit their way down opposite sides of the draw and into the Wimbledon final. A few hours before the match, Kramer took what remained of his current supply of filet mignon, cut it in half, and shared it with Tom Brown. Kramer was twenty-five and his game had come to full size—the Big Game, as it was called, the serve, the rush, the jugular volley. When Kramer proved what he could do, at Wimbledon, he changed for all foreseeable time the patterns of the game. He destroyed Brown in forty-seven minutes, still the fastest final in Wimbledon’s history, and then—slender, crewcut, big in the ears—he was led to the Royal Box for a word or two with the King and Queen. The Queen said to him, “Whatever happened to that redheaded young man?” And Kramer told her that Donald Budge was alive and doing O.K. The King handed Kramer the Wimbledon trophy. “Did the court play well?” the King asked him. “Yes, it did, sir,” Kramer answered. It was a tennis player’s question. In 1926, the King himself had competed in this same tournament and had played in the Centre Court. A faraway smile rests on Kramer’s face as he remembers all this. “Me in my T-shirt,” he says, with a slight shake of his head.

  Frew McMillan, on Court 2, wears a golfer’s billowing white visored cap, and he looks very much like a golfer in his style of play, for he swings with both hands and when he completes a stroke, his arms follow the racquet across one shoulder and his eyes seem to be squinting down a fairway. Court 2 has grandstands on either side and they are packed with people. McMillan is a low-handicap tennis player who can dig some incredible ground strokes out of the rough. A ball comes up on his right side and he drives it whistling down the line, with a fading hook on the end. The ball comes back on his left side, and, still with both hands, overlapping grip, he hits a cross-court controlled-slice return for a winner. The gallery applauds voluminously. McMillan volleys with two hands. The only strokes he hits with one hand are the serve and the overhead. He has an excellent chip shot and a lofty topspin wedge. He putts well. He is a lithe, dark, attractive, quiet South African. In the South African Open, he played Laver in the final. Before Laver had quite figured out what sort of a match it was, McMillan had him down one set to nought. Then Laver got out his mashie and that was the end of McMillan in the South African Open. When McMillan arrived in London and saw the Wimbledon draw, he felt, in his words, a cruel blow, because his name and Laver’s were in the same pocket of the draw, and almost inevitably they would play in the third round. “But maybe I have a better chance against him earlier than later,” he finally decided. “You feel you have a chance. You have to—even if it is a hundred to one.” Now the grandstands are jammed in Court 2, and, high above, the railing is crowded on the Tea Room roof, for McMillan, after losing the first set, has broken Laver and leads him 5—3 in the second.

  “I got the feeling during the match that I had more of a chance beating him on the court than thinking about it beforehand. You realize the chap isn’t infallible. It’s almost as if I detected a chip in his armor.”

  Laver has netted many shots and has hit countless others wide or deep. He cannot find the lines. He is preoccupied with his serves, which are not under control. He spins one in too close to the center of the service box. McMillan blasts it back. Advantage McMillan. Laver lifts the ball to serve again. Fault. He serves again. Double fault. Game and set to McMillan, 6—3.

  When this sort of thing happens, Laver’s opponent seldom lives to tell the tale. One consistent pattern in all the compiled scores in his long record is that when someone takes a set from him, the score of the next set is 6—0, Laver, or something very near it. Affronted, he strikes twice as hard. “He has the physical strength to hit his way through nervousness,” McMillan says. “That’s why I believe he’s a great player.”

  Laver breaks McMillan in the opening game of the third set. He breaks him again in the third game. His volleys hit the corners. His drives hit the lines. McMillan’s most powerful blasts come back at him faster than they left his racquet. McMillan hits a perfect drop shot. Laver is on it like the light. He snaps it unreachably down the line. Advantage Laver. McMillan hits one deep to Laver’s backhand corner, and Laver, diving as he hits it, falls. McMillan sends the ball to the opposite corner. Laver gets up and sprints down the base line. He not only gets to the ball—with a running forehand rifle shot, he puts it away. It is not long before he is shaking McMillan’s hand at the net. “Well played,” McMillan says to him (6—2, 3—6, 6—0, 6—2). “Yes, I thought I played pretty well,” Laver tells him. And they make their way together through the milling crowd. McMillan will frequently say what a gentle and modest man he finds Laver to be. “It may be why he is what he is,” McMillan suggests. “You can see it in his eyes.”

  B. M. L. de Roy van Zuydewijn is a loser in the Veterans’ Event—gentlemen’s doubles. So is the seventy-two-year-old Borotra. Riggs and Drobny, on Court 5, persevere. Over the years, Riggs and Drobny have eaten well. Each is twice the shadow of his former self. The Hungarians Bujtor and Stolpa are concentrating on Riggs as the weaker of the two.

  Game to Seewagen and Miss Overton, the honey-blond Miss Overton. They lead Dell and Miss Johnson five games to four, second set. Dell is not exactly crumbling under the strain. These peripheral matches are fairly informal. Players talk to one another or to their friends on the side lines, catching up on the news. Seewagen and Miss Overton appear to be playing more than tennis. Dell is tired—up half the night making deals and arguing with Kramer, up early in the morning to do business over breakfast with bewildered Europeans, who find him in his hotel room in a Turkish-towel robe, stringy-haired and wan, a deceptive glaze in his eyes, offering them contracts written on flypaper.

  The Russians enter the Centre Court to play mixed doubles. Princess Anne is in the Royal Box. The Russians hesitate, and look at each other in their ceramic way, and then they grin, they shrug, and they turn toward the Royal Box and bend their heads. The people applaud.

  Nastase is Nijinsky—leaping, flying, hitting jump-shot overheads, sweeping forehands down the line. Tiriac
is in deep disgrace. Together they have proved their point. They have outlasted most of the seeded pairs in the gentlemen’s doubles. But now they are faltering against Rosewall and Stolle, largely because Tiriac is playing badly. Stolle hits an overhead. Tiriac tries to intercept it near the ground. He smothers it into the court. Nastase, behind him, could have put the ball away after it had bounced. Tiriac covers his face with one hand and rubs his eyes. He slinks back to the base line like someone caught red-handed. But now he redeems himself. The four players close in for a twelve-shot volley, while the ball never touches the ground. It is Tiriac who hits number twelve, picking it off at the hip and firing it back through Stolle.

  Lutz crashes, and the injury appears to be serious. Playing doubles in the Centre Court with his partner, Smith, he chases an angled overhead, and he crashes into the low wall at the front of the grandstand. He makes no effort to get up. He quivers. He is unconscious. “Get a doctor, please,” says the umpire. A nurse, in a white cap and a gray uniform that nearly reaches her ankles, hurries across the lawn. The crowd roars with laughter. There is something wondrous in the English sense of humor that surfaces in the presence of accidents, particularly if they appear to be fatal. The laughter revives Lutz. He comes to, gets up, returns to the court, shakes his head a few times, resumes play, and drives a put-away into the corner after an eight-shot ricochet volley. Lutz is tough. He was a high school football player in California and he once promised himself that he would quit tennis and concentrate on football unless he should happen to win the national junior championship. He won, and gave up football. Additional medical aid comes from outside the stadium. Another nurse has appeared. She hovers on the edge of play. When she sees an opportunity, she hurries up to. Smith and gives him an aspirin.

  If Lutz had broken three ribs, he would not have mentioned it as long as he continued to play, and in this respect he is like the Australians. There is an Australian code on the matter of injuries, and it is one of the things that gives the Australians a stature that is not widely shared by the hypochondriac Americans and the broken-wing set from mainland Europe. The Australian code is that you do not talk about injuries, you hide them. If you are injured, you stay out, and if you play, you are not injured. The Australians feel contempt for players who put their best injury forward. An Australian will say of such a man, “I have never beaten him when he was healthy.” Laver developed a bad wrist a year or so ago, at Wimbledon, and he and his wife got into a telephone kiosk so that she could tape the wrist in secrecy. If he had taped it himself, no one would ever have known the story. His wife would rather praise him than waltz with the Australian code. His wife is an American.

  “Bad luck, Roger.” This is what Roger Taylor’s friends are saying to him, because he has to play Laver, in the fourth round, in the Centre Court tomorrow. The champion always plays in one of the two stadiums or on the Number Two Court, the only places that can take in all the people who want to see him. “Don’t worry, though, Roger. It’s no disgrace if Rocket is the man who puts you out. You’ve got nothing to lose.”

  “I’ve got everything to lose,” Taylor tells them. “To lose at Wimbledon is to lose. This is what competition is all about. You’ve got to think you have a chance. You might hope for twenty-five let cords or something, but you always think there’s a chance you’ll get through.”

  “Bad luck, Roger.”

  Roger takes a deep hot bath, goes home to his two-bedroom flat on Putney Hill, and continues to work himself up, talking to his mother, his father, and his wife, over a glass of beer.

  “That’s enough beer, Roger.”

  “I don’t live like a monk. I want to loosen up.” He eats a slice of fried liver and opens another beer. “All my chances will hinge on how well I serve. I’ll have to serve well to him, to keep him a little off balance on his returns. If I can’t do that, I’ll be in dire trouble. If you hit the ball a million miles an hour, he hits it back harder. You can’t beat a player like that with sheer speed—unless he’s looking the other way. I plan to float back as many service returns as I can. The idea is not to let it get on top of you that you’re going to play these people. There’s a tendency to sort of lie down and roll over.”

  Games are three all, first set. Taylor feels weak from tension. Laver is at ease. “We’d played often enough,” Laver will say later. “I knew his game—left-handed, slice serve, better forehand than backhand, a good lob. He’s very strong. He moves well for a big man. There was no special excitement. My heart wasn’t pounding quite as hard as it sometimes does.”

  Taylor floats back a service return, according to plan. Laver reaches high, hits a semi-overhead volley, and the ball lands in the exact corner of the court. It bounces into the stadium wall. The crowd roars for him, but he is also hitting bad shots. There is a lack of finish on his game. He wins the first set, 6—4.

  “My concentration lapsed continually. I was aware of too many things—the troublesome wind, the court being dry and powdery. I magnified the conditions. I played scratchy in the first set. I felt I’d get better in the next set.”

  A break point rises against Laver in the first game of the second set. He lifts the ball to serve. He hits it into the net. “Fault.” He spins the next one—into the net. “Double fault.” “Oh, just throw it up and hit it,” he says aloud to himself, thumping his fist into the strings of his racquet.

  “When you lose your rhythm, serving, it’s because of lack of concentration. I found myself thinking too much where the ball should be going. You don’t think about your serve, you think about your first volley. If you think about getting your serve in, you make errors. I didn’t know where my volleys were going. I missed easy smashes.”

  Taylor is floating back his returns. He is keeping Laver off balance. With his ground strokes, he is hitting through the wind. There is an explosion of applause for him when he wins the second set, 6—4. No one imagines that he will do more, but it is enough that Taylor, like McMillan, has won a set from Laver—and more than enough that he is English.

  “Roger was playing some good tennis. When I played fairly well, he played better.”

  First game, third set—love—forty—Laver serving. There is chatter in the crowd, the sound of the mountain stream. “Quiet, please!” Laver hits his way back to thirty-forty. He serves, rushes, and punches a volley down the line—out. Game and another service break to Taylor. Five times, Laver has hit his running rifle—shot forehand into the net. He has repeatedly double-faulted. His dinks fall short. His volleys jump the base line. Taylor, meanwhile, is hitting with touch and power. He is digging for everything. Laver is not covering the court. Both feet off the ground, Laver tries a desperation shot from the hip, and he nets it. Advantage Taylor. Taylor serves—a near ace, unplayable. Game and third set to Taylor, 6—2. He leads two sets to one. Unbelievable. Now the time has certainly come for Laver to react, as he so often does, with vengeance.